‘Nosferatu’ Director Robert Eggers Reveals His Unlikely Influence And Why He Abandoned A Frankenstein Script: “It Definitely Sucked”
Opinion of Robert Eggers’s Nosferatu is split if you really go looking, but overall, his avant-garde Christmas movie is amazing audiences enough to scare up a decent tally over the holiday season.
Though Eggers digs up tradition with a remake of a silent classic, he tried to be distinct by avoiding the usual vampire cliches. To do that, he watched an unexpected selection and took notes.
After watching Dracula: Dead And Loving It, Eggers realized his script needed a little more polish. “There are a lot of scenes that were deliberately rewritten after watching the Mel Brooks movie, and considering, ‘Wow, that totally doesn’t make sense,’” he told IndieWire.
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One example is the stake through the heart, a most misunderstood piece of mythology Nosferatu corrects. Eggers explained stakes were used to keep vampires from rising, but weren’t fatal to night stalkers. “That’s not too much about killing them.”
Most vampiric thrillers ignore this to perpetuate the familiar trope. Brooks took things a step further when one staking caused a tidal wave of blood that soaked an ersatz vampire slayer.
As Eggers alluded to, Dracula: Dead And Loving It was a 1995 parody directed by the comedic mind behind SpaceBalls and Young Frankenstein, Mel Brooks, that starred Leslie Nielsen as a send-up of the Count. Though it has its fans, the film came, went, is barely remembered, and was the last movie Brooks ever directed.
Had he watched Young Frankenstein, Eggers might have had a different spark of inspiration. As it turns out, he tried his hand at adapting Mary Shelley’s mythos more directly than he did Bram Stoker. However, he couldn’t crack the script. “Sometimes you know you’ve got a dud,” he said to The outlet Curzon.
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“But when my son was born, I had an unconscious urge, I’m sure because of that, but as I started writing, I was like, ‘Oh yeah, this is why.’ But as I started to try to do Frankenstein, which after two weeks, I was like, ‘There’s no way I can do this, it’s impossible.’ It definitely sucked, I’ll tell you that,” he said.
There won’t be any shortage of Frankenstein content in the year to come between Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Bride and Guillermo Del Toro’s take on the novel. Eggers is eagerly anticipating the latter. “I’m super, super excited for Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein,” he said.
That film comes out on Netflix later this year.
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