The allure emanating from Count Orlok in Nosferatu goes more than decaying skin deep. And this was by design by director Robert Eggers, who discussed his choices to stray away from both the Max Schreck classic Nosferatu look and modern sexy vampires.
“The most appreciated contemporary vampire, Edward Cullen from Twilight, is not scary at all,” Eggers told Gold Derby. “So I wanted to go back to the folklore because the early Balkan and Slavic vampire lore is written by or about people who believed that vampires existed and were terrified of them. So clearly, there must be something scary there. And these early folk vampires looked like rotten corpses—more like how we think of zombies in current cinema. So that was exciting theory.”
The last person who played a hot rotten corpse, ironically enough, also plays the other love interest of Nosferatu‘s Ellen Hutter—remember Nicholas Hoult in Warm Bodies? Here, he’s just Thomas Hutter: regular man cuckolded by the power of centuries-old rotting rizz.
What can we say? That mustache Bill Skarsgård really does it for us defenders of the Transylvanian Tom Selleck, who completely transformed past our expectations of what a vampire should look and sound like. In that same interview, Eggers continued, “The facial hair, not everybody’s a fan of. But it is, in my opinion, essential … if you look at pictures of Transylvanian noblemen, if you can find one without a mustache or a beard, let me know. I suppose he could have had a beard, just as likely. But, you know, Dracula in the novel has a mustache. Vlad the Impaler had a mustache. It’s a very common Eastern European facial hair style. So it felt to me that it helped him fit into that world and be a part of it more than anything.” It’s the historical accuracy, truly.
The movie is total gothic horror edging to its inevitable succumbing to one overly dramatic dead Transylvanian nobleman—who has a penchant to make life hell for everyone around the object of his affection if he doesn’t get his way. Skarsgård shared with Esquire that the performance “took its toll” and that “it was like conjuring pure evil. It took a while for me to shake off the demon that had been conjured inside of me.”
Thank the horror gods, Bill was a freak and did the work to make himself one of the best character actors on screen, proving vampires can still be sickeningly seductive without the glittery chest or luscious golden locks of his brother Alexander, who played vampire Eric in True Blood.
“It’s playing with a sexual fetish about the power of the monster and what that appeal has to you,” Bill Skarsgård said of his take on Orlok. “Hopefully you’ll get a little bit attracted by it and disgusted by your attraction at the same time.” And on Anne Rice, I swear he and Eggers did it. Gross, swamp rat-feasting Lestat (both of them) looks like a cute chibi character in comparison to Skarsgård. He even sounds hypnotically powerful. Seriously, the sorcery? Bill outdoes Ralph Ineson’s tenor intonations in a movie Ralph Ineson is in with a deep operatic voice that rattles the loins. How else can you explain the somatic trances Lily-Rose Depp performed as Ellen?
Orlok is an appetite indeed. It’s okay, if you squint hard enough Skarsgård’s eyes permeate through the disheveled side-swoop on his infectious scabbing face. We get why Ellen bounced to death on it, the gorgeously grotesque mutually assured destruction of beauty and the beast. A tale as old as time indeed.
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