Max Schreck’s vampire in F.W. Murnau’s 1922 “Nosferatu” is one of the most iconic actor transformations and horror movie creatures in cinema history. It’s an image that captivated director Robert Eggers as a kid and led to his life-long obsession with the silent classic. And so naturally, one of the biggest questions surrounding the director’s remake would be how he and prosthetic makeup effects designer David White would transform actor Bill Skarsgård (an actor already well known for his Pennywise transformation in “It”) into the infamous Count Orlok.
It’s a curiosity that Focus Features’ marketing team latched onto with trailers that create anticipation of what lurks in the shadows and behind the elongated fingers reaching across the screen. It’s an approach that built off what Eggers and cinematographer Jarin Blaschke do in the film‘s first half, as Skarsgård’s Orlok is kept largely obscured in darkness when Thomas Hutter (Nicholas Hoult) visits his dreary castle, leaving the nervous lawyer and audiences straining to make out any facial details behind the gruff, echo-y voice in the dim candlelight.
“My instinct is to not show the monster,” said Eggers when he was a guest on IndieWire’s Filmmaker Toolkit podcast, explaining why he kept the character in the shadows. “When you do get a good glimpse of him, when Hutter throws open the lid of the sarcophagus, it’s hopefully effective because it’s brief.”
A full week after the film’s opening and its successful $40 million holiday release, the internet is still uncharacteristically void of images of Skarsgård’s mustachioed vampire. And although Focus won’t be releasing any images until mid-January — so we aren’t able to show you their work — Eggers and White took IndieWire behind the scenes of their creation with insight into its inspiration and process, and why their Orlok has a mustache and shares little resemblance to Schreck’s original.
The Anti-Edward Cullen
Eggers was not interested in the modern movie and pop culture idea of the brooding, suave, sexy vampire.
“In a post-Edward Cullen [Robert Pattinson’s character in the ‘Twilight’ movies] world, vampires are not scary,“ said Eggers. “And so, in order to make a vampire scary again, I went back to the folklore, which was written by and about people who actually believed that vampires existed. So clearly there must be something good there.”
As with all of Eggers’ projects, the starting point for “Nosferatu” was research, tapping into the folklore of vampires embodying disease and death, and the history of the times and societies that breathed life into these powerful myths.
“The early Baltic Slavic folk vampires are nasty, rotting, festering, maggot-ridden corpses — which I found exciting — more looking like how we think about zombies in cinema,” said Eggers. “So the question quickly arose, ‘What would a dead Transylvanian nobleman actually look like?’”
When White came on the job, Eggers had a wealth of visual references of noblemen, as well as folk art to ground the first steps of the collaboration. Wrote White, who conducted his interview over email, “The mustache was a part of the accuracy that Robert brings to his projects, the reference of Nobility of that time dictated this was the way to go. His mustache certainly gives him an air of grandeur and sophistication.”
Rotting Flesh and the Skeleton Underneath
Eggers wanted the audience almost to smell the rotting flesh when the sarcophagus is flipped open. White explained this went far beyond creating the look of decay that comes with exhuming a corpse.
“Orlok sleeps in a rat-infested sarcophagus full of dank earth which sparks the imagination,” said White. “Robert wanted to introduced the idea of decay to the back of Orlok’s head, I expanded on this idea by having the hole underside of his body rotten and decaying. I also introduced the idea of blood pooling coloration to the head and body, which increases the illusion of his deathly, sallow and waxen-like skin.”
Getting the skin color and texture right was a huge part of White’s challenge, but finding the balance between skin and bones was the real key, as the audience (especially later in the film) gets a real sense of the skeleton underneath Orlok’s emaciated corpse.
“I did a lot of research and found these amazing illustrations from around the early 1500s when they depicted skeletons as living creatures,” wrote White. “They had bone and muscle and were strangely perceived as alive, like anatomical studies of living creatures. This was the basis of the look for Orlok’s body.”
White explained that he and Eggers decided they didn’t want Skarsgård to wear a body suit to become Orlok, which was made possible by the actor’s prep work. “We were very lucky that Bill was on a special diet at the time which meant he was incredibly lean with minimal fat,” wrote White. “This meant we could sculpt the body, bone and muscles, and break them down into sections, and cast and mold them individually. This meant that, on full body prosthetic days, Bill had around 60 individual prosthetics applied by a team of six, including his full head and face.”
[Editor’s Note: Spoiler Warning. The following section is about the end of the movie. Skip down to “Max Schreck & the Fingers” to avoid spoilers.]
The full detail of this extensive work would be on display in the film’s ending — the camera circling an undressed Orlok on top of Ellen Hutter (Lily-Rose Depp) as the rising sun starts streaming in the bedroom window. While Eggers marvels at White’s work, the film’s ending forced him into a situation that made him uncomfortable.
“I think the biggest challenge of [the end] for me was just that my instinct is to not show the monster,” said Eggers. “I knew we were going to have to shine a bright light on the monster in a bunch of makeup, and it was very intimidating. We did a whole lot of camera tests, I still don’t know if I’m happy with it, but it was an interesting challenge.”
According to Eggers, one of the hardest things to get right was capturing how Orlok’s body would transform after having spent the evening feasting on Ellen.
“I wanted him to be more discolored with Ellen’s blood,” said Eggers. “Her blood would have seeped under his skin and would be causing sort of like bruising under on his face, which we have a little bit of, but we found that when we did that in bright light, it looked fake, so we actually had to dial it down to make it look more convincing.”
Max Schreck & the Fingers
It is likely that Eggers has spent more time thinking about the 1922 Count Orlok than Shreck and Murnau combined. While on the podcast, Eggers talked about studying the origins of the script, its inspirations, and Albin Grau — the practicing Occultist who was the 1922 film’s production designer and producer. As much as Eggers reverses the film, his conception of Orlok and the world of 1838 coastal Baltic Germany, in which his film is set, meant his vampire would look quite different.
“I mean what is Schreck [in ‘Nosferatu’]? He’s not really human, he’s kind of a creature. And while Bill’s vampire very much is human, he’s also very much a dead human, which makes him also a bit of a creature,” said Eggers. “Of course, all these things that I do to change it and make it my own, I am trying to be respectful of the Murnau film, so the fingernails and the shape of the skull, for example, are a nod to Max Schreck’s iconic design.”
Getting the fingers right was a process for White, who first experimented with animatronics and creating 12-inch fingers, which ended up being too long. “The fingers had to be thin and long as possible but still believable, but also practical so Bill could use them to write with, hold and open things,” wrote White. The key would be to make the fingers expressive, which would, in part, come from enabling Skarsgård’s physical performance. Ultimately, White added thin balls that extended the actor’s fingers by only an inch with long nails on each digit.
Wrote White, “These were very important because Bill would have to shadow play with them, giving a creeping sense of elegance and dexterity and an introduction to the real Orlok. I had finger extensions made to fit perfectly over his own fingertips, Bill would tap the extended fingertips upon the desk, he was testing to see how much sensitivity he had, we found the more rigid the fingertip material was, the more he could sense the vibration through them, giving him much more dexterity. He would practice using them, and the nails were all custom-made, gnarly and split and shaped to fit into the sculpted cuticles perfectly.”
Skarsgård & Orlok’s Elongated Face
After initial discussions with Eggers, White began exploring the character by working with a head cast of Skarsgård. Wrote White, “I usually go into this process the same way, aiming for a minimal amount of prosthetics and see what happens.” White said the actor’s strong bone structure and expressive eyes are a prosthetic makeup designer’s dream. “He also is incredibly sensitive to working with prosthetics, he understands how to use them as if it were a costume or prop, maximizing the impact of the final creation.”
White would elongate the top of Skarsgård’s head by an inch to help give a sense of length and elegance to his look while also adding a strong jawline and chin.
“Bill’s skin is very youthful, and I began to add to his chin, his nose, and forehead,” wrote White. “But it didn’t feel enough to transform him into this character so, knowing Bill’s great performance skills and familiarity with prosthetics, I took a leap of faith and completely created a new look accentuating and also complementing his own features. This was then shared with my key sculptor Colin Jackman and together we worked towards the final sculpt.”
Despite Skarsgård’s willingness and ability to transform as an actor, Eggers said Jackson and White’s sculpt made the actor question if he could do it.
“Bill was intimidated the first time he saw the sculpt. He said, ‘Look, Rob, this guy didn’t look anything like me, even when he was alive,’” said Eggers. “But then I saw, because he is so good at this, when we did the first makeup fitting and the makeup was still not quite right, I could see him playing around with the mirror and finding, ‘OK, I can start to see something here.’”
White said Skarsgård is incredibly sensitive to the interplay of performance and makeup. This would be important with Eggers’ radically new spin on the classic vampire bite.
“Robert wanted Orlok’s teeth to look real and nasty, broken, decayed and jagged,” wrote White. “In the script, there was a reference to trying to establish the cause of death of the ship’s captain, and it was undetermined as to what kind of bites were peppered across his body. Robert wanted them to resemble a large rat bite but of a size more human-like. So this is why Orlok’s teeth are so horrible and misshaped.”
To listen to Robert Eggers’ interview, subscribe to the Toolkit podcast on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast platform.
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