PRODUCTION NOSFERATU
R obert Eggers’ Nosferatu is a retelling of the 1922 German expressionist film Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror . A harrowing gothic horror tale of obsession, the film tells the story of Ellen Hutter and the vampire infatuated with her, playing out in the fictional German town of Wisborg in 1838. Nosferatu was hauntingly captured by DOP Jarin Blaschke. The two met in 2007: “Robert first reached out to me to shoot a short film,” begins Blaschke. “I received an earnest, polite email, calling me Mr Blaschke, even though I was essentially a homeless 29-year-old crashing on my friend’s couch. We met up in Brooklyn; he had a waxed moustache, I wore some tattered, thrift-store clothes. I had been working for an antiquarian book dealer for years because I wasn’t really making it in film, just building up my reel one 35mm short
film at a time. He was a waiter and doing street theatre, but artistically we had a lot in common.” Blaschke went on to shoot Eggers’ feature debut, The Witch , followed by The Lighthouse and The Northman . Eggers had originally planned to tackle Nosferatu after completing The Witch , but it didn’t get made then because the studio wasn’t fully aligned with Eggers creatively. “We first looked at making this movie in around 2016,” adds Blaschke. “But when you sit with it for longer, for years on end, the best ideas have more time to present themselves. “You know the original exists and you know you’re not going to surpass it in what it’s already done. Rob’s film had to be distinct and have its own path,” admits Blaschke. “As far as tone goes, Robert was interested in how the inhabitants of the film see things,
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