Robert Eggers has been fascinated and haunted by Nosferatu since childhood

Robert Eggers was nine when he first saw F.W. Murnau's 1922 silent film Nosferatu. The VHS copy his family owned, made from a bad 16 millimeter print, was so degraded that it took on a haunting quality of its own.

"It felt sort of authentic," the director tells Q's Tom Power in an interview. "It felt like it was unearthed from the past and that there was something real about Max Schreck's vampire and about the atmosphere of the film."

Ever since then, the shadowy form of Count Orlok has never truly left Eggers. In high school, he even played the character in a stage adaptation of Nosferatu that he and a friend directed. The play was later remounted more professionally under the invitation of local theatre impresario Edward Langlois.

"It cemented the fact that I wanted to be a director," Eggers says. "Nosferatu has been a major part of who I am, I suppose, as someone who's trying to make creative work."

Now, Eggers has released his highly anticipated remake of the classic film, which stars Lily-Rose Depp, Nicholas Hoult, Willem Dafoe and Bill Skarsgård. Like the original film, which is an unauthorized adaptation of Bram Stoker's 1897 novel Dracula, Eggers chose to retell the story as a kind of psychosexual gothic fairy tale.

I have the opportunity for the story to be, potentially, more emotionally and psychologically complex, instead of an adventure story about a real estate agent.- Source

"I actually think it's that fairy tale that's within the Stoker novel that has been more influential than the Stoker novel as a whole," he tells Power. "There's very few filmic versions that attempt to do a straight adaptation of the novel because it is, in some ways, kind of clunky."

What separates Eggers's version from prior adaptations of Nosferatu and Dracula is that his remake focuses on the female protagonist, Ellen Hutter (Depp), who's plagued by horrific visions of an evil force that's infatuated with her.

"Obviously, yes, I'm obsessed with Nosferatu, passionate about it, dorky about it, but why do it again?" Eggers says. "If the female protagonist is the central protagonist, I have the opportunity for the story to be, potentially, more emotionally and psychologically complex, instead of an adventure story about a real estate agent."

Eggers, who's known for his meticulous attention to historical accuracy, wanted to show how Ellen is as much a victim of 19th century society as she is of the vampire that haunts her.

"Ellen is a somnambulist or a sleepwalker," he says. "In the 19th century that meant to people, including many doctors, that you had an insight into another realm…. She's called melancholic. She's called hysteric. Then she's pulled to this darkness and the only person — in big quotes — that she can connect with is a demon lover, is a vampire, you know? So that was all very exciting to explore."

The full interview with Robert Eggers is available on our YouTube channel and on our podcast, Q with Tom Power. Listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

Interview with Robert Eggers produced by Mitch Pollock.