No matter where you find an interview with writer-filmmaker Robert Eggers, you’ll probably hear the story of how and when he came across the picture of Max Shreck as Count Orlok that changed his life. This picture — the one with Orlok’s pointed ears, teeth, and claws towering above the onlooker — is an image of a man transformed into one of cinema’s greatest icons. Unlike the comedic genius of Chaplin and Keaton that drove audiences hysterical throughout the 1920s, Shreck’s image is a cloak of terrifying mystery by comparison. Our curiosity begins to explode at first glance because we desire to apply reason to inexplicable evil. For Eggers, this catalyst eventually drew him to the arts as a production designer and director of theater productions in New York. Including a professional iteration of the “Nosferatu” play he directed in high school, which laid the groundwork for his eventual career in filmmaking.
From the first sight of Count Orlok, through high school, into theater, and now feature filmmaking, Eggers’ vision of “Nosferatu” is a part of his storytelling D.N.A., and we’ll finally get our chance to see it this Christmas. Before then, the production had stalled, been recast, and potentially shelved as Eggers worked from 2015-2022 on “The Witch,” “The Lighthouse,” and “The Northman.” Despite his passion project continuously hitting roadblocks, Eggers has had his chance to show us what he’s capable of by flexing his muscles elsewhere. Now, he’s become one of the most exciting and potentially brilliant filmmakers of our time. His films have evolved, shifted shapes, and approached conflict across separate periods uniquely attributed to the time they’re set in. From the puritanical worldview of 1630s New England, a lighthouse wickie’s descent into madness in the 1890s, and the tale of Scandinavian legend Amleth on a warpath to avenge his father, Eggers navigates history with a compass guiding him toward the past.
Eggers exclaims he has no interest in telling modern works, which you can see in his reverence for historically accurate production design across his filmography. This only makes up so much of a film’s attributes, but you can see the theatrical tendencies of his early career married to a medium that requires a camera to format his stories. Eggers approaches the relationship between the respective arts with confidence because he is aware that the early days of storytelling were often an oral passage between people before the silver screen ever came to be. His camera also appears to believe this, as it rarely engages in the standard practices we see today. Instead, Eggers communicates fear, phobias, pride, lust, and avengement through classical storytelling devices, including hyper-detailed sets constructed for his actors to live in. This theatrical approach to staging allows the actors and crew to tell the story without the camera drawing too much attention to itself, and as a reward, his films are more immersive.
For example, “The Witch” sees a family ostracized from their village, and they find their next home isolated in the woods. On their way out, they rest by a campfire overnight, where Eggers situates the family in the background with a fire illuminating the closeness of the family. They’re huddled together, comforted by each other despite the circumstances, but the towering woods shadow them with uncertainty. This moment succinctly oppresses the family before the rest of the story tears them apart as Thomasin (Anya Taylor-Joy) is eventually purged from her family in an attempt to cleanse the evil that has befallen their unit. After the evil has been exercised, Eggers stages a shot of Thomasin walking toward the wicked dancing of hysterical witches in the woods in contrast to the image of the family huddled together. It’s a moment of acceptance – an attempt to live deliciously – and she, too, comes over with maniacal laughter in joining the coven as their newest member. The shot construction is aligned by the 1.66:1 aspect ratio and the use of spherical lenses that properly establishes the width of the family while simultaneously lengthening the height of the trees. Eggers is articulating his language through these deliberations. Now, the still, observational camera he’s employed is given more life and flavor through the Old English dialogue twisting out of the mouths of his characters.
Choosing not to mar his films with modern tongue and technique is an aspect of his practices that distinguishes him from his peers. Today, you’ll find a handful of filmmakers using their films to imply their perception of the film’s events by letting the camera and characters play into the language we often deploy in conversation with one another. This four-dimensional awareness prioritizes a meta-textual relationship between the audience and the screen, which typically eliminates a state of immersion that great cinematic works provide. Eggers refrains from those indulgent practices by articulating a language true to the horror within his stories. There’s little (if any) room to employ a perspective through a modern lens because the drama is staged through Eggers’ mindfulness of the setting. The camera shouldn’t be asked to do too much for a story that doesn’t require it, and if the story isn’t eager to pass judgment in service of the audience, then the camera shouldn’t be either. He understands that cinematic language is an elevated expression of his characters, and the linguistics of culture is the foundational piece in Eggers’s style that helps him recreate worlds to accent the terrifyingly precise details.
Eggers accomplishes this by priding himself on drawing from a collection of poets, artists, and literature to create the language in each of his films. From Herman Melville to Sarah Orne Jewett and Samuel Coleridge, Eggers is motivated by the insights of past theologians and artistic movements to understand how language has evolved over the years. Eggers even goes as far as to adopt Orne Jewett’s approach to writing her stories in dialect. This approach in his screenwriting practice uses a uniquely defined syntax within each time period to articulate a clearer picture of time and place for the audience. If Eggers were to approach his stories with a more modern manner of speaking, he would remove the words from the honesty required for the audience to believe what they’re seeing and hearing. Perhaps it isn’t necessary for Eggers to have this approach, but it is one of the key factors in separating himself as a storyteller keyed in on the visible and verbal details of the past. This transportive cinematic fluency operates as an interaction with organisms stemming from unique cultures and languages to reshape their perception of the world.
Eggers can pass his knowledge on to the audience because he uses the grassroots of language to discern a hierarchical standard through cinematic structure. In all of his movies, we can clearly distinguish what the protagonist is controlled by. He expresses this through compositions that test the knits of Puritanism, the domineering roles of a work-based relationship, and the most feral senses of fatalism clawing their way into the souls of all men. For a character like Tom (Dafoe) in “The Lighthouse,” he bellows with a command that will eventually cause Winslow (Patterson) to turn the tables on Tom by adopting the very language that submitted Winslow into a squawking gull for most of the film. As viewers, we not only hear the evolution of Winslow’s dialogue but also see how he will explode beyond the boxy (1.19:1) aspect ratio. The end of Winslow’s story isn’t so kind as he falls prey to the bewitched form of physical enlightenment that empowers Tom into a hysterical state of controlled madness. Still, Eggers appropriately navigates the nautical English of these two wickies that grumble with the essence of washed ashore seamen. Much like “The Witch,” it may be difficult to decipher their dialogue without the assistance of subtitles, but the dialect is a verbal sparring match that invites us to see Eggers’s world as the characters do.
Going back to “The Witch,” you can hear how the three moods and two tenses of Old English give larger-than-life qualities to the fear that has materialized in their life since they departed the village. As a religious unit, the family works in harmony with each other to make a deeper connection with God, but when the youngest child is snatched by the witch in the woods, their faith is tested. We’ve already gone over how the visual language bears on the family, but their dialect is what continues to antagonize each other to a point where the pressure completely shatters their faith in one another. In a key scene, Mercy, one-half of the young twins, is certain a witch stole their baby sibling, and Thomasin plays into Mercy’s fear by pretending to speak as if she were starving for flesh, just like the witch. Mercy runs off exclaiming she’s been bewitched by Thomasin, and that night, over dinner, their mother scolds Thomasin under the assumption she stole her father’s silver wine cup. Eggers cleverly sequences his story to show us how the story’s second catalyst gives the family room to project their fear onto an individual because they desire to apply reason – whether fair or not – to an inexplicable evil. In this case, the family speaks to Thomasin in a manner that essentially scapegoats her for letting the child be stolen right from under her nose.
This is how Eggers can reach a point where the story justifies Thomasin’s brutal retaliation toward her mother at the end. In being demonized by her own flesh and blood, the emergence of Black Phillip reaches out to her at her most vulnerable by speaking in a supportive, albeit wicked, tongue. The words slither out of Black Phillip’s mind as he transfers his thoughts to a young girl punished by a worldview that has reconstructed fear around her presence. This is how sharp Eggers is in navigating the constructs of period-specific language. He shows us how language can destroy and rebuild character by passing a story through emotionally guided belief systems that eventually transforms into the most violent form of reinforcing the state of his worlds. His work on “The Northman” makes this point as clear as the rest of them, but no moment succinctly shows us how the language of men and beasts really is no different than Black Phillip transfiguring himself from beast to man.
“The Northman” is certainly Eggers’ most accessible film to date. Considering that he is adapting a story that has seen multiple incarnations throughout cinema’s history, the film was always going to carry an air of familiarity with it. Still, Eggers adapts the tale of Amleth by installing it with all the components we’ve come to love about his previous works. Here, the language is more theatrical in a Shakespearean sense, but the cinematic language is also noticeably traditional by modern standards. The key is that the film has a scent of theater in the novelized structure, the inherited scope of the story, and the fact that Eggers still finds a way to use the Norse language to inform the fatal qualities of rites and rituals in the 10th century.
At a young age, Amleth is exposed to taking psychedelics with his father as a rite of passage for “the dogs that wish to become men.” Amleth and his father crawl on all fours, snap, snarl, and growl like crazed animals hungry for blood and flesh before his father chants, “Should I fall by the enemy’s sword, you must avenge me or forever live in shame!” Amleth swears by this, and the following morning, his father is cut down by his brother Fjolnir. So begins Amleth’s journey to live and die by the pledge he made to his father the night before, and his growth from dog to man soon sets the stage for Amleth to transition from man to bear-wolf as a fully developed Viking. As an adult draped in a wolf pelt, Amleth howls and screams into the night like a man possessed by the spirit of becoming greater than a mere mortal man. These rituals are necessary for Eggers to lay the groundwork for articulating the language of Norsemen as a dialect that hungers for lust and violence in a generational crusade for conquering the human spirit with rituals of spiritual and physical transcendence.
Eggers appears to make it clear enough that the cultural aspects of language provokes the psychological tension between the metaphysical properties of transformation. In “The Lighthouse” there is a noted point about treating seagulls with care, and we end up seeing what comes of Winslow after he whacked a gull to death. In “The Northman,” we see how Norse rituals reconfigure boys to be baptized by flames on a trajectory toward death by molten lava as men. “The Witch” is deliberately focused on spirituality in a world that must have the devil in it if the characters believe there is a God that can save them. Eggers seems to believe the anchors of language can reshape the perception the mind has over the self when confronted with terrible, horrifying objections that challenge what the characters thought they knew about their reality. Between Thomasin, Winslow, and Amleth, each of them succumbs to their fears, and as viewers, we can easily comprehend that each character undergoes a transformation as we become fluent in their language.
Now, they say it is difficult to confirm if fluency in multiple languages can genuinely determine how we think about ourselves in relation to space and time, but it is a theory that can hold water due to our innate, universal fluency in cinema as a form of language. By attributing his films with period-specific language, Eggers makes it easier for the audience to fall into the folds of his stories as we take in the tales through the visual and verbal language before us. It isn’t just about the audible marks and definitions of a period piece to make it believable, but when he goes far enough to obtain the period-appropriate candles, we experience the story through the associated lumens of the period. When it comes to Eggers’ films, we experience his stories on two wavelengths, and his strengths as a storyteller are bolstered. On the one hand, we experience it cinematically, and on the other, it is being told to us in a natural tongue that bespells the viewer with the transfixing elements of language that sounds nothing like our day before and after watching his films. It has become cheap to say his films register like campfire tales told under the drapery of the night sky, but there is an air of quality to his stories that infects the mind with folklore and ancient myths that could change depending on who tells the story.
Robert Eggers’s films exist in a strange place between the past and the present. In telling stories that predate the cinematic movement, Eggers’ hyper-focus on the rules of language and details of the past are avenues for him to explore the oral passages that were shared with him as he grew up in New England. He expands on the foundation of his craft by filtering his stories through meticulously planned shoots that best express how dialect can tune our ears and open our minds to thinking about stories differently than we previously thought possible. With plenty of contemporary horror movies that draw on current social issues and political climates, Eggers’s films are administering a perspective that feels entirely alien to most films in the genre. This is not just in the production design but also in how his stories are defined by the characters through which the story is told. Eggers’s style reveals that he is just as much a linguist as he is a filmmaker. And really, I’d contend that most filmmakers are linguists in some capacity, as they must be capable enough to guide us through the rules of their stories by teaching us how to communicate with the film so it may make enough emotional sense to thrill us.
The difference between Eggers and his peers is that his style derives from a place of believing we can learn an entirely new language that displaces our sense of self to understand better where stories started and how they’ve sustained across generations. Each entry into his filmography thus far explores how horror is uniquely manifested in the objects, creatures, or remarkably specific light that reveals a deeper, starker truth about desire. Whether it’s the desire to be enlightened, tracing the threads of fate to their final destination, or attempting to reason with a worldview that has vilified women, I imagine Eggers will take an evolutionary step forward on these ideas with “Nosferatu.” In taking to the mountain ranges of Transcarpathia, we’ll have our chance to see what Eggers has had in store for us with his vision of a tale that has burrowed into his mind since he first laid eyes on Max Shreck’s wicked transformation into Count Orlok. How will he guide us toward the looming shadows of an icon that has been around since the earliest years of cinema? Which temptations and desires will he reveal through the language and grammar of 1830s Germany? What will we have to say about Robert Eggers next after this chapter in his story? I guess that depends on who is telling it.
Have you seen “Nosferatu” yet? If so, what did you think of it? What do you think of the rest of Robert Eggers’s filmography and his work as a storyteller? Please let us know in the comments below or on Next Best Picture’s X account, and be sure to check out Next Best Picture’s latest Oscar predictions here.
You can follow Roman and hear more of his thoughts on the Oscars & Film on X @ArbisiRoman
