Nosferatu's Robert Eggers wanted to counter "sympathetic" vampires like Edward Cullen
The director heavily researched Transylvanian folklore when coming up with his version of Count Orlok.
Vampires have been an important part of horror cinema for about as long as the genre has existed, and over the years numerous depictions of the creatures have appeared on the big screen: from Count Dracula himself to Edward Cullen.
The latest new film to prominently feature one of the nocturnal bloodsuckers is Robert Eggers' Nosferatu, an adaptation of the iconic 1922 silent film which was itself based on Bram Stoker's seminal novel Dracula.
And although this new take on the classic tale has several things in common with the earlier version, one aspect in which it differs is the design of the vampire itself – with Bill Skarsgård's Count Orlok resembling something that harkens back to what Eggers calls the folk version of vampires.
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"As the cinematic vampire has evolved, he's become more and more and more sympathetic," the director explained during an exclusive interview with RadioTimes.com.
"You know, first sort of sad and isolated, and then an anti-hero, and finally, climaxing with like Edward Cullen kind of stuff where he's not threatening. And so, how do you make a vampire scary again? And I said, well, I guess I'm gonna have to find out what vampires were like when people actually believed that they were real."
He continued: "That led me to be researching folk vampires, which is what Orlok is based on my version."
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- Nosferatu review: This creepy, compelling take on the vampire myth is a thing of beauty
For his part, Skarsgård said that it helped him that this new version of the character had some clear differentiations from the very recognisable iterations played by the likes of Max Shreck and Klaus Kinski.
"I would never want to study the previous performances of a character, because the purpose of doing a new character is that it's you, and you don't want to even subconsciously steal from other versions of it," he explained.
"But Robert's approach to it was so different, so it was a very clear separation from different iterations of it. And very much the heavily researched folkloric version of this vampire – undead sorcerer, if you will – that's helpful, because then my research tools was diving into the sort of Transylvanian historical folklore of these beings."
Nosferatu is released in UK cinemas on New Year's Day 2025.
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Authors
Patrick Cremona is the Senior Film Writer at Radio Times, and looks after all the latest film releases both in cinemas and on streaming. He has been with the website since October 2019, and in that time has interviewed a host of big name stars and reviewed a diverse range of movies.
