Vampires have become such a popular myth that cinema has used them to the point of perverting the original imagery. Far away are the wooden stakes, the silver bullets, the coffins and the garlic to keep them away. Much further away is one of the best approaches to the vampire myth, the one made by FW Murnau in the German expressionist classic of 1922, Nosferatu. Despite being one of the most important and influential films in the history of cinema, its legacy seems forgotten in a present where vampires have even become sexy teenage phenomena, protagonists of romantic novels such as Twilightwhere the vampire was handsome, mysterious… and brilliant!
For director Robert Eggers, author of films such as The witch either The lighthouseand one of the greatest exponents of the new horror film boom of recent years, the vampire had to be scary again, and that is why he decided that he wanted to resurrect the one who, for him, gave rise to everything, the Nosferatu of Murnau with whom he has been “obsessed since he was nine years old.”
Eggers believes that all of these versions have occurred because “the versatility of vampires is incredible.” “You can create Blade, Edward Cullen… but I am a traditionalist and I like traditional folklore. Plus, Nosferatu in many ways invented horror cinema, so if I was going to make a remake, it had to be terrifying. To make a vampire scary again, you had to go back to the source. It had to be a corpse, a demonic being, not a brilliant being,” he says, laughing and referring to one of the most criticized aspects of Twilight.
He estimates that he has perhaps seen the original “about 100 times,” many of them “in the cinema and with a live soundtrack.” “One day, if I wake up in the middle of the night and I can’t fall asleep, I put it on in the background,” he says as a curiosity that makes clear his obsession with the film. This can be seen in the respect that his film exudes, where every shot and every technical aspect is taken care of down to the detail and where even some sequences (those shadows that go up the hallway) seem like direct tributes to Murnau.
Where does that obsession come from? He doesn’t know, and he jokes that the small group of journalists who interview him should ask his therapist. He does know that what got him hooked when he was a child was “Max Schreck’s acting and makeup design.” He watched the film on a VHS “made from a weathered 16 millimeter print, and you couldn’t see the fake bald head or the theatrical makeup that you can see in the new restorations.” He values “the atmosphere of the film, so memorable and evocative, as well as the simplicity and immediacy of the narrative.”
That’s why he believes “people still talk about this movie.” “You can see his influence in the Dracula from Tod Browning and other horror films and even in films by filmmakers who may have never seen it because it is simply a powerful film,” he analyzes.
A toxic relationship
Perhaps the most notable change in Robert Eggers’ version is that the protagonist is clearly the possessed woman, an incredible Lily-Rose Depp who drinks from Isabelle Adjani of Possession by Zulawski in a physical and unleashed performance. By giving the fundamental point of view of the story to the woman, the film becomes a portrait of an obsessive, toxic and physical relationship, underlining a sexual subtext that was not so present in the original. “I thought it was very beautiful how in the original the character of Ellen emerged as the protagonist in the second half of the film, but in my version it is her story from the beginning. When you see the film many times you realize that it is a simple fairy tale,” Eggers begins.
Thus, he realized that “there is a kind of relationship between her and the demon that I was able to explore much more and take it as a more traditional lovers story where he returns to destroy her. That is very powerful. It is a love triangle where she has this loving relationship with her husband, but her passion is with this demon, with whom the relationship is obviously toxic, horrible and disturbing.” Something that has emerged on its own and that he rejects that he created to “make a film with a message.”
Although he Nosferatu by Murnau is the main source material, Eggers proves to be very knowledgeable on the subject and lists authors such as Paul Barber and Jan Louis Perkowski, who he believes made the “most useful books on vampires”. He also investigated Emily Gerard and “various sources from the 18th century, some very famous, such as Camus, and others more specialized and obscure.” He worked with an expert in Transylvanian folklore.
“They taught me that there is an act of unlearning when you return to these sources, because especially vampire films have an omnipresent imaginary that they invented. In fact, one interesting thing is that Murnau always takes credit for creating the vampire who can’t survive sunlight, but actually very often in folklore, it’s not sunlight, but rather the vampire must return. to his grave before the first rooster crow. So that’s something that was there before Nosferatu”.
The film looks and feels conceived for the big screen, but would Robert Eggers have agreed to make it if it had been with a platform avoiding the theater and the collective experience?: “What a good question… I am very grateful and I am lucky not to have had than to see myself in that situation in which I had to make my film for a platform, because I like the cinematographic experience and I make films for the big screen but I don’t know what would have happened… maybe there is a longer story, with a smaller scale, that made sense as a television series, but not I have still found it.”
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