Development In July 2015, the remake of
Nosferatu (1922) was announced with
Robert Eggers writing and directing. Jay Van Hoy and
Lars Knudsen were slated to produce the film for Studio 8. In November 2016, Eggers expressed surprise that the
Nosferatu remake was his second planned film, saying, "It feels ugly and blasphemous and egomaniacal and disgusting for a filmmaker in my place to do
Nosferatu next. I was really planning on waiting a while, but that's how fate shook out." During an interview with
Den of Geek around the release of
The Lighthouse (2019), Eggers revealed that although he had dedicated a lot of time to bringing the story into the 21st century, he did not know when or if it would happen. He said that he "spent so many years and so much time[...] it would be a real shame if it never happened".
Script had adapted
Nosferatu into a play in high school. Eggers's early fascination with
Nosferatu ignited a passion for filmmaking that would shape his career. He became inspired by both Henrik Galeen's screenplay and Bram Stoker's 1897 novel
Dracula and with high school classmate Ashley Kelly-Tata adapted the story for the stage, performing it at their school. Their production caught the eye of Edouard Langlois, who invited them to transfer it to
New York City's
Edwin Booth Theatre. Eggers stated that "
vampirism and Dracula is the thing that I've been thinking about and looking at for a long time". "I had read
Montague Summers as a teenager, and many other authors of vampire lore, but I think, until I set out to make
Nosferatu, I was still too contaminated by the cinematic tropes. And so, you're infusing things you're reading with cinematic tropes that aren't there. In doing the research to write this script, I needed to be disciplined to forget what I knew. And then, you start looking at the really early vampire accounts, and you're like, 'They're not even drinking blood, they're just strangling people, or suffocating people, or fucking them to death.' And that was really interesting". The character of
Orlok is partially inspired by
Vlad Dracula, the 15th-century
Voivode of Wallachia, after whom the original Dracula was named. Eggers explained that Orlok was given a mustache because "there's no way this guy can't have a mustache". In old Transylvanian culture, all men who could grow a mustache would have a mustache. According to prosthetic makeup effects designer David White, Orlok's physique was partially influenced by
Ötzi, a
natural mummy discovered in 1991 in the
Ötztal Alps: "[Eggers] really wanted the feeling of Orlok having had all life sucked from him, every last drop of blood." Conceptualizing Orlok as an ancient Romanian count, Eggers made the decision to have him speak a reconstructed form of the
Dacian language in the film, while
Romanian and
Romani are spoken by other Transylvanian residents. Eggers also explored the work of French neurologist
Jean-Martin Charcot and his findings on so-called
hysteria and took inspiration from
Andrzej Żuławski's films
Possession (1981),
The Devil (1972) and
The Third Part of the Night (1971).
Casting In August 2017, actress
Anya Taylor-Joy was cast, reteaming with Eggers after
The Witch (2015); she was still attached to the project in 2020, though her specific role had not been announced.
Harry Styles had been cast to star opposite Taylor-Joy, but dropped out of the project in 2021 citing scheduling concerns. Eggers initially considered several talents to play the role of Count Orlok, including
Daniel Day-Lewis and
Mads Mikkelsen. Finally, on September 30, 2022, it was announced that Swedish actor
Bill Skarsgård would star in the role of Count Orlok, whom Eggers had also had in mind for the film adaptation years earlier. However, before he was offered the role of the film's titular vampire, Skarsgård had originally
auditioned for and been offered the role of
Thomas Hutter. After many failed attempts to make the film, Skarsgård's portrayal of
Pennywise in
It (2017) and
It Chapter Two (2019) attracted popularity, aiding the recasting decision. The addition of actress
Lily-Rose Depp, replacing Anya Taylor-Joy, was also announced on September 30, 2022. Casting director Kharmel Cochrane originally texted Depp and apologized to her in advance, dismissing her as a serious contender for the role of Ellen Hutter because she thought Depp couldn't act as she hadn't seen anything that showed her capable of doing that in addition to the
nepotism accusations of her work because of her father
Johnny Depp's influence, but Cochrane changed her mind once Lily-Rose auditioned and proved her wrong. and had been officially cast the following month.
Willem Dafoe joined the cast in January 2023, re-teaming with Eggers after
The Lighthouse and
The Northman (2022); Dafoe had not only previously portrayed
Max Schreck/Count Orlok in
Shadow of the Vampire (2000), but had been slated to play the role again for Eggers.
Emma Corrin would join the cast the following month.
Aaron Taylor-Johnson,
Simon McBurney and
Ralph Ineson were announced as joining cast at the start of production in late February 2023. Romanian
TikTok personality
Bunica Gherghina was cast as the elderly lady at the Transylvanian inn. Additionally, the film features around 5,000 trained
rats.
Filming , located in
Transylvania, is used as Orlok Castle in the film. , one of the filming locations in the
Czech Republic Nosferatu was shot on
35mm film in color by cinematographer
Jarin Blaschke, adopting a desaturated look using special filters.
Principal photography began in the Czech Republic on February 20, 2023, with filming taking place at
Barrandov Studios in
Prague by March. Later that month, the crew was shooting on location at the 14th-century
Rožmitál pod Třemšínem Castle in
Rožmitál pod Třemšínem,
Pernštejn Castle and Prague's
Invalidovna complex, a
Baroque building registered as a national landmark. Some exterior shots were captured in
Corvin Castle in Romania. Filming wrapped on May 19, 2023. To prepare for playing Count Orlok, Skarsgård lost a significant amount of weight and, refusing to have his voice digitally modulated, worked with the Icelandic opera singer
Ásgerður Júníusdóttir to lower his vocal range and character, incorporating
Mongolian throat singing into his lines, and spent up to six hours a day having
prosthetic makeup applied. Skarsgård likened his experience to "conjuring pure evil". The film makes use of several custom-made
props, some of which were kept by the actors after filming. Eggers gifted Depp the prop of Ellen's locket, and Hoult kept and framed Orlok's prosthetic penis worn by Skarsgård in the film. The scene of Hutter's arrival in the Transylvanian village was captured in one shot. The sequence is made up of nonprofessional
Romani actors, musicians and dancers and features an appearance by Czech musician and actor
Jordan Haj. Roughly 30 takes were filmed of what Eggers said was all "very carefully choreographed and rehearsed ahead of time in a warehouse in Prague". The village set was built outside of Prague and was based on the crew's studies of
vernacular architecture museums in Romania and Transylvania. In a November 2024 interview with
The Hollywood Reporter, Eggers stated that the production used practical rain machines, wind tunnels, and vintage lenses to "evoke a tactile feeling of dread" instead of using digital effects.
Post-production VFX supervisor Angela Barson said that the goal of the visual effects team was to digitally match the dark gothic aesthetic across 253 shots, or 90 of the 132 minutes of screentime. She worked closely with production designer Craig Lathrop to work out which sets would be locations, or builds and where VFX would take over and with cinematographer Jarin Blaschke to make sure all the plates were framed, lit and captured to give the best possible final result. This is editor
Louise Ford's fourth feature with Eggers. ==Music==