Nosferatu director on resurrecting the vampire film that 'invented horror movies'
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Robert Eggers has said that making his new film Nosferatu was a dream come true. The writer and director at the helm of the project - starring Lily-Rose Depp and Bill Skarsgard - is looking to resurrect the infamous vampire for new audiences. "I've been sort of obsessed with Nosferatu: A Symphony Of Horror since I was nine years old", he told Sky News, adding the film "kind of invented horror movies".
"There's no way that you're not going to be revisiting some things, but hopefully you do it in a more unexpected way.". He added: "Even those girls that come from The Shining and that Freddy Kruger Shadow comes from Nosferatu.". Spawned from an attempt to avoid copyright infringement from Bram Stoker's Dracula, the Transylvanian vampire briefly made its way on screen in 1922 in Nosferatu: A Symphony Of Horror.
Changing the name from Dracula to Count Orlok, the mystical figure and the story around him clearly resembled that created by the Irish author - albeit with a couple of the vampire's characteristics altered. In the F W Murnau film, Nosferatu's bite location is different to that associated with Dracula. The film also, most notably, introduced the concept that vampires die when exposed to daylight.
Stoker's estate, helmed by his widow Florence Balcombe, took legal action against the silent film and in July 1925, a court in Germany ruled that all copies of Nosferatu: A Symphony Of Horror were to be destroyed for copyright infringement. Luckily, some reminiscences survived, and the film has served as the reference point and inspiration for a vast number of thrillers and horror movies since.
