Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic I am walking along the banks of the Thames by the Tower of London, where I am due to meet Robert Eggers. It is late November, unrelentingly cold and grey. I am early, and he texts me to say that he is too and is just grabbing a snack. I wait for several minutes then I see him, a dark silhouette emerging from the crimson backdrop of Pret A Manger. He is wearing the Brooklynite armour of black Salomon trainers, a black Arc’teryx jacket, black cap and black trousers. I am struck by his pretty eyes and silver skull ring. Eggers, 41, grew up in New Hampshire and moved from New York to London a year and a half ago. He first visited the Tower, aged 17, on a family holiday. “There’s more history here,” he says, explaining the move. “More lions and unicorns.” As we enter, he suggests we wander around rather than visit the top attractions. “I don’t think we are going to do much talking if we go to see the Crown Jewels.”We are here to discuss Nosferatu, Eggers’ adaptation of FW Murnau’s 1922 silent film of the same name. The original is based on Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula (1897) and follows Thomas Hutter, an estate agent from the German town of Wisborg, sent to Transylvania to meet Count Orlok, who plans to buy an abandoned house opposite Hutter’s. Orlok (played in the 1922 film by Max Schreck) is, of course, a vampire, and becomes obsessed with Hutter’s beautiful young wife, Ellen. Sleepwalking and hysterical, Ellen finds herself possessed by the Count, who sails to Wisborg to find her, bringing a plague with him. While it may seem simplistic to modern eyes, Murnau’s film was a pioneer of the horror genre. “You feel like a bit of an asshole, having only made a few films, taking on such an important title,” Eggers admits.His Nosferatu combines the epic scale and budget of his 2022 Hamlet-inspired Viking saga The Northman with the psychological claustrophobia of earlier films The Witch (2015) and The Lighthouse (2019). The director has found a cult following for his dark, meticulously researched historical fictions, which bring an art house sensibility to a mainstream audience. Unlike the original, Eggers’ Nosferatu is anchored in the psychology of Ellen (played by Lily-Rose Depp). In the opening scenes, she moans ecstatically, levitating in her nightgown towards an open window, and we see the shadowy hand of the monster cast over her, a recurring motif in both Nosferatus. “A visual representation of her hypnotism,” says Eggers, chewing on a protein bar. (“I’m literally always hungry,” he explains.) The eeriness continues as Hutter (Nicholas Hoult) makes his journey to Orlok’s castle.Played by Bill Skarsgård, with tarantula-esque hands, reptilian skin and golf-ball eyes, Eggers’ Orlok is no heart-throb, though his relationship with Ellen is unmistakably erotic. “The vampire as a hero who is not even scary kind of climaxed with [Twilight’s] Edward Cullen,” says Eggers. “Dracula in the book is a more demonic, masculine asshole.”Shot in colour but desaturated to appear black and white, the film is palpably gothic. It maintains “a constant state of dread”, Eggers says, by ending each scene with a new problem, and “never turning off that fog machine, ever.” The director, who is in general pensive, has a dry sense of humour that catches me off guard.We walk along a wooden gangway. Just beyond the Tower’s cobbled buildings lie the glass monoliths of the City of London. The incongruity is starkly beautiful, but Eggers seems unfazed. “I’ve been in so many spiral staircases at this point,” he jokes, as we step into our first tower. Produced by Harry Potter’s Chris Columbus, at times Nosferatu has the undeniable feel of Hogwarts, with its dungeons, forests and battlements, sweepingly shot with camera dollies. Exterior shots of Hunedoara Castle in Romania and Pernštejn Castle in Czechia were used for Orlok’s castle, while the interiors were purpose-built. “You could never fit a crane up one of these,” Eggers notes, gesturing up the narrow staircase we are climbing. In a departure for the director, whose horror movies tend to be more intellectual than truly terrifying, Nosferatu also contains numerous jumpscares. “It’s not something I’ve attempted to do before, but because this movie invented horror films, I am in conversation with cinema history whether I want to be or not.”He first came across Murnau’s film aged nine, after seeing a picture of Max Schreck’s Nosferatu in a library book. “I thought it was the coolest thing I’d ever seen,” he recalls. His mother helped him mail order a VHS. “It was made from a 16mm print, and the degraded quality made it feel like something unearthed from the past. In restored versions you can see Max Schreck’s bald cap and the grease paint of his eyebrows. But here, he felt like a real vampire.” Aged 17, Eggers staged an amateur theatre production of the film, which set him on course to become a director after it was spotted by a local theatre producer. After making The Witch, he wrote a vampire movie script, but for 10 years struggled to get it made. “It’s not a phrase I’d want to say, but it’s been a lifetime in the making.” Right on cue, one of the Tower’s ravens starts to crow. “Handsome guy,” Eggers notes.We sit down in a courtyard with sloping medieval buildings that we agree could be Wisborg. Knowing Eggers’ distaste for anachronism, I wonder whether he saw the vampire as a modern metaphor for a parasitic elite, perhaps, or for hyperconsumerism? “No,” is his short answer. The original script, written before the Covid-19 pandemic, included face coverings, “but I removed them because I didn’t want to make a point about it.” His hope is that, in its historicity, this new Nosferatu will find its timelessness. “Once you start to make interpretations and bend it to deliberately say something contemporary, it’s hard for it to have a life beyond that,” he says.A couple of years ago, Eggers came to the Tower of London — which, from the 1200s to 1835, housed a zoo of exotic animals — after the actor Ralph Ineson, who starred in The Witch and now appears in Nosferatu, suggested Eggers meet his friend, the Ravenmaster of the Tower. Watching the original film, I was struck by its menagerie of animals: cats, rats, flies, a hyena, a man-eating plant — non-human beings that have also found their way into Egger’s adaptation. “It’s all about the accumulation of details,” he says. “The oxen that go through the streets of Wisborg tell you this is not a modern city. The stray dogs. I hope it all adds to the atmosphere.” We step into the Bloody Tower and Eggers becomes engrossed in a display about princes Edward and Richard, incarcerated as children by their uncle in a battle for succession. I ask him about the final scene of Nosferatu, where beauty and horror are mixed together, a tangle of corpses and bones. “At the end of his life, [the director] John Huston was asked why he made such dark films,” Eggers replies. “He answered thoughtfully and ruefully that ‘the dark pearl glistens.’ I’m definitely attracted to that glistening pearl.”We exit the Tower via Traitors’ Gate, where prisoners once entered. Eggers tells me that he currently lives in a “very modern house”, but dreams of owning an old townhouse in Spitalfields, inspired by a trip to Dennis Severs’ House, a museum that recreates the home of Huguenot silk weavers, where he saw “unfurled bolts of fabric rotting into each other”. As we say goodbye, a tourist asks Eggers to take a photo of him and the director takes several shots, artful and mysterious. I feel like I’m watching a magician at work. “Nosferatu” is in UK cinemas now Find out about our latest stories first — follow FT Weekend Magazine on X and FT Weekend on Instagram
