Interviews
A Macabre Love Triangle: Robert Eggers and Lily-Rose Depp Discuss the Sensuality of ‘Nosferatu’
Bill Skarsgård is playing Nosferatu/Count Orlok in Robert Eggers’ (The Witch, The Lighthouse) new movie Nosferatu, and audiences can see the vampire’s appearance on the big screen on Christmas Day. But there’s a lot more to Count Orlok than a surprising visage.
Releasing in theaters on Christmas, Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu is a gothic tale of obsession between a haunted young woman in 19th-century Germany and the ancient Transylvanian vampire who stalks her, bringing untold horror with him.
Lily-Rose Depp stars as Ellen Hutter, the woman who unwittingly summons the beast and finds herself locked in a dark love triangle that also includes her pure-hearted husband Thomas (Nicholas Hoult).
“What’s really interesting about their dynamic is that it’s not so straightforward as she’s being pursued by this disgusting beast that she wants nothing to do with,” Depp told Bloody Disgusting about Ellen and Orlok’s relationship. “There is a real yearning and connection that goes both ways between the two of them.”
Depp continues, “That was an interesting line to toe because Rob [Eggers] wanted there to be, especially, without giving anything away, a real palpable sensuality in those [late] scenes, which I think makes everything all the more terrifying and complex and fascinating to watch. Because he also represents the darkness within her that she’s trying to come to terms with. Again, without giving anything away, I think indulging in that also represents accepting within herself.”
Eggers dove deep when researching for Nosferatu, pulling from folklore for his central antagonist. In other words, he had a specific vision in mind for Count Orlok. Yet Skarsgård still brought something unexpected to his performance that surprised the director and added depth to the vampire’s connection to Ellen.
Eggers tells us about his Count Orlok, “I mean, I suppose it is in the writing. I was thinking back to [George Gordon] Byron’s poem, that was potentially one of the first or second times that a vampire is mentioned in English language literature, and even there, the vampire, in the Anglo-literary tradition, has some melancholy and some pathos. So I suppose I was thinking about that.
“But I was so obsessed with making him a villain that I sort of forgot about it. And Bill brought that pathos. It was really important because it’s obviously Ellen’s story; she’s the victim of this vampire, and she’s also the hero of the story. But Orlok is just as alone as she is.“
It’s that strange loneliness of both characters that’s at the heart of Nosferatu. I wrote in my review, “Nosferatu isn’t a love story in the conventional sense – this demonic Strigoi isn’t capable of such an emotion – but it does depict one of the most riveting and macabre love triangles in cinema. Thomas and Ellen’s love is pure and wholesome and occasionally even raw, but Ellen remains an irresistible siren to her violent, evil ex-lover. One willing to destroy everything.”
My 5-star review for Bloody Disgusting continues, “It’s a grotesque twist on a love triangle, one that Eggers fearlessly pushes into revolting territory thanks to his eponymous vampire.“
Interviews
‘Rubberhead’ Director Nick Taylor on FX Maverick Steve Johnson, Practical Effects, and Seven-Year Journey
Horror journalist, producer, and podcast host Nick Taylor moves into the director’s seat for his feature debut with illuminating documentary Rubberhead: The Life & Monsters of Steve Johnson.
It chronicles the wild life and career of SFX maverick Steve Johnson, based on the multi-volume book series Rubberhead: Sex, Drugs and Special FX, and those familiar likely already know Rubberhead isn’t your standard horror documentary.
Johnson is responsible for so many memorable movie monsters, having worked on Fright Night, Poltergeist II, An American Werewolf in London, A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master and Night of the Demons, to name a few. He’s also extremely candid in ways that feel atypical in this industry, open about his failures as much as his successes.
“It was a natural progression for sure,” Nick Taylor tells Bloody Disgusting of his transition into filmmaking ahead of Rubberhead‘s world premiere next week at the Fantasia Film Festival on July 23. “I think with my podcast, I got adept at interviewing people and pulling creative lessons out of them, which was the point of my podcast. I wanted this movie to be sort of a creativity pill for artists where if they’re starting a project or feel creatively stuck, they could watch this movie and be inspired and get actual practical creative lessons.”
Taylor’s background in PR and marketing also organically led him down this path.
He charts the course from book promo to documentary director: “But also Bloody Disgusting had a lot to do with this movie because in the very beginning when I first met Steve, I was helping him promote his book and I said, ‘Hey, I got a marketing background and a journalism background. Let me help you promote this book. I’ll just pitch stories from your life to the media, and we’ll see what happens.’ And John Squires wrote an article about Steve making Slimer under the influence of tons and tons of cocaine, and that went fairly viral.”
“For a week, it was story time with Steve,” Taylor continues. “He would tell me a story from his life, and every story was about a major movie, a major director, lots of drugs and alcohol and insanity. I would write them up, and I think John published about three or four of them. So huge shout out to John Squires because that was really great. So yeah, there were definitely a lot of outgrowths of my journalism background that definitely contributed to this movie.”
Rubberhead condenses the multi-book series into a cohesive feature film with a breezy runtime, sparking the obvious question as to how Taylor approached condensing Johnson’s life down to an under 2-hour documentary film.
“That was one of the more difficult parts of all of this, because we had enough for a series or an epically long six-hour fan documentary,” he answers. “But from day one, I did not want to make a fan documentary. I love them. They’re a lot of fun, but I did want the movie to stand on its own two feet as a character-driven portrait of an artist and a time period and a technology, that being practical effects. I did want to be objective. I didn’t want to make this too long. I wanted to make it re-watchable. So I think we just really had to focus on what the narratives were that we wanted to tell. So there were some basically almost cliché archetypical mythic narratives present in Steve’s life. We could have made this way longer, but we wanted to keep it short. But luckily that’s why you have special features.”
Johnson quickly proves to be an engaging subject thanks to his self-effacing wit and frank self-reflections; expect no shortage of stories about how drugs factored into the height of his career or the failures it wrought.
That rare quality was an asset for Rubberhead, Taylor confirms. “He does not shy away from anything about the drugs, the addiction, the bridges burned, the mistakes made, the lessons learned. He just is honest about all of it. He’s had a lot of time for reflection, and he’s done a lot of reflection, so he doesn’t shy away from any of it, which is huge because it’s very refreshing. I don’t think a lot of people are that way, at least in this industry from what I can see. So I think it was hugely beneficial. We wanted to lean into that, and we wanted to make this sort of a gonzo Hunter S. Thompson sort of wild tale through Steve’s overall life.“
Condensing his life into this doc was a slow and steady process for Taylor, too. “It’s been almost seven years. It’s been a labor of love. We’ve been as indie as it gets. We would shoot what we could when we could, and then we would edit when we could. Then after a while it all came together.”
In a way, making Rubberhead brings Taylor’s horror fandom full circle. It turns out that the very film that sparked his interest in the genre and practical effects also comes with an amusing Steve Johnson anecdote.
Taylor explains, “My gateway for sure was Beetlejuice. I saw that at a very young age; I think I was four or five. I felt somebody had shown me, my soul. I get a little emotional thinking about it. There was something about that movie that felt so strange and unusual, but also felt so familiar. It was spooky, but it was fun, and it was lighthearted, and it had humor, but it also had this macabre celebration to it that I just really got into as a kid. I felt somebody had shown me my own soul. And funny story, Steve got fired from Beetlejuice because Tim Burton gave him his hand-drawn designs and Steve’s like, ‘Oh my God, these look like kids did them. This is not what you want. I know what you want. I’m going to redesign these for you.’ And Tim Burton was like, ‘Yeah, no, you’re not.’ So yeah, funny story.”
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