Robert Eggers, director of “Nosferatu” and new king of horror | EUROtoday

Qhe evil spirit selected December 25 for the discharge of Nosferatu what does Robert Eggers signal? It takes fairly a spirit of defiance to go on Christmas Day to see this rereading of the traditional by Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau (1922), a movie tailored (with out saying so) from Dracula by Bram Stoker and which was created on the initiative of Albin Grau, decorator and training occultist. Robert Eggers readily admits, he’s fascinated by this predecessor satisfied of the existence of an invisible world who had peppered Murnau’s movie with esoteric symbols. Dressed all in black, his fingers loaded with previous rings and his gaze steely, the filmmaker himself exudes one thing gothic.

His ardour for Nosferatu was born in childhood. First there’s the invention of the sumptuous and terrifying photos of the movie and the disturbing look of Max Schreck, the interpreter of Count Orlok who’s in truth a vampire. Robert Eggers was nonetheless a pre-teen when he made a present out of it… then made a do-it-yourself remake, in black and white, with a couple of bursts of crimson for the blood. Luxury model of this childhood dream, the Nosferatu which is launched right now, plunges into the depths of the darkish legend of vampires and summons a forgotten Slavic language, Dacian, for incantations taken from manuals from the depths of the ages.

The filming in Central Europe was so intense that it instilled in actor Bill Skarsgard – who performs Count Orlok, alias Nosferatu – a horrible concern of getting woke up Lucifer. “I can confirm it to you, Bill spoke to me about it, he had a moment of deep dismay,” Robert Eggers mentioned soberly. He himself confesses to having spent, through the preparation of this movie which he made for ten years, a lot time studying occultism manuals that he “frankly frightened himself” and wished “the close once and for all”, just to make your film with peace of mind. “On the set, I had to be a puppeteer and not a sorcerer who summons spirits,” he explains.

Summon the spirits

The metaphor speaks for this filmmaker who came from the theater (he started as a set designer, just like Albin Grau) whose first breakthrough, The Witch (2015), happened, like The Witches of Salem, in New England, around 1630. This film, authentically terrifying, is not a classic denunciation of the witch hunts carried out by the Puritans, but the story of the initiatory journey of the young Thomasin (Anya Taylor-Joy, then in her first major role) who really becomes a witch, interacts with animals (unforgettable scene where her goat speaks with the voice of the devil) and participates in sabbaths.

By practicing immersive cinema, very impressive aesthetically and extremely meticulous in the historical reconstruction, Robert Eggers, in total harmony with his heroine, appears as a “sorcerer who summons the spirits”… Doesn’t he refuse for essential synthetic images, preferring for example, in a terrifying sequence of Nosferatucover the body of Emma Corrin – who plays a friend of the heroine – with a thousand real rats?

ALSO READ “The Godfather”, “Apocalypse Now”…: from worst to best, we ranked the 24 films by Francis Ford CoppolaHere, as in the films of Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau and Werner Herzog (which Eggers takes little credit for), a young man (played by Nicholas Hoult) is sent to the Carpathians for a dark real estate deal. He is driven by a carriage without a coachman to the home of the horrifying Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgard) who it does not take long to understand is a vampire. Remaining in England, Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp) feels in her body the approach of this demonic creature who has conceived a real obsession for her…

“What Murnau and his screenwriter did and which I deeply admire,” explains Robert Eggers, “is to rid the novel of Bram Stoker [qu’ils adaptaient sans en avoir les droits, NDLR] of his clumsiness to purify the story until only the tale remains. A fairy tale or folk tale. Now, what is extraordinary about tales, archetypes, myths is that they are protean. In each era, they can be interpreted differently, they always have something to tell us. » If some want to make Count Orlok a symbol of fascism, Robert Eggers, who says he is “not very interested in politics”, sees him more as the incarnation of a “toxic lover or a representation of addiction, something something horrible that we can’t live without.

A dark desire at the heart of the film

The relationship between Ellen and Nosferatu is therefore the heart of the film. Where previous versions of the story presented Ellen as a simple victim, the young woman imagined by Robert Eggers feels an unspeakable desire for the vampire. “Sleepwalking, melancholic, she is treated like a hysteric” by those around her. Only the vampire hunter played by Willem Dafoe takes her seriously… while suggesting tying her up to control her possession crises.ALSO READ Bertrand Bonello: “The most beautiful fantasy film is French”

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Kangaroo of the day

Answer

Influenced by pictures of sufferers handled on the finish of the nineteenth century^e century by Dr. Charcot, the filmmaker designed spectacular contortions for these scenes, all carried out by Lily-Rose Depp with out, once more, the slightest particular results. “A choreographer specializing in butō helped us design the postures,” he explains. In Japanese dance, there’s a sacred dimension, it’s about emptying your self to let one thing from elsewhere fill you. This matches what Ellen is experiencing. »

Thus, carried by a perception in “something from elsewhere”, a religion within the supernatural which isn’t solely metaphorical however literal, Robert Eggers succeeds in respiration new energy into photos and archetypes that have been believed to be worn to the bone. And when the shadow of Nosferatu’s slender hand advances throughout Ellen’s pale face, Christmas Day or not, we’re really seized with concern.