Reuters
Cast member Lily-Rose Depp attends the UK premiere of "Nosferatu" at Leicester Square in London, Britain [Source: Reuters]
Filmmaker Robert Eggers brings a classic folklore vampire back to the screen in “Nosferatu”, a gothic horror film centred on the trajectory of its female heroine, played by Lily-Rose Depp.
Written and directed by Eggers, the movie is a reimagining of the 1922 silent film “Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror”, which in turn was inspired by Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel “Dracula”.
“Nosferatu” is set in a fictional Baltic city in the 1830s and follows young bride Ellen Hutter (Depp), who has been haunted by horrifying visions since childhood.
As her estate agent husband Thomas (Nicholas Hoult) prepares to set out on a business trip to Transylvania, Ellen’s condition deteriorates.
Thomas is promised that his meeting with the elusive client Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgard) will be richly reimbursed, allowing the young couple to start building their life together. Instead, the encounter triggers a terrifying chain of events.
“There was just so much for me to dive into,” Depp said at the film’s premiere in London on Wednesday. “To me it was about really depicting the emotional battle that she’s going through, the internal battle that’s going on within her, and to give a voice to this woman that at the time kind of wouldn’t have had one. That was very special.”
Eggers, 41, whose credits include “The Lighthouse” and “The Northman”, said he had wanted to make the movie since seeing the original film at the age of nine.
“I just wanted to make a great sweeping gothic romance that was also legitimately a scary horror movie,” he said, adding that the vampire he set out to depict was “the vampire from folklore that hundreds of years ago people actually thought was real”.
