Mel Brooks inspired a generation of filmmakers and their hits, but one you might not have anticipated was Robert Eggers. That’s right, the man behind The Witch and The Lighthouse was directly influenced by one terrible Brooks comedy.
We know that Robert Eggers does a lot of research for his films, and certainly Nosferatu was no different. And since it had been brewing in his head and was even planned to be his second film, he had a lot of time to do so on Nosferatu. But oddly enough, one of the movies he included in his rotation of Nosferatu exploration was Mel Brooks’ 1995 spoof Dracula: Dead and Loving It, widely considered one of the comedy genius’ worst. “There are a lot of scenes that were deliberately rewritten after watching the Mel Brooks movie, and considering, ‘Wow, that totally doesn’t make sense.’” But we really know he’s talking about the entirety of Dracula: Dead and Loving It…
Outside of that flop, Robert Eggers was digging back even to his youth when he first became fascinated by myths and staples surrounding vampires. “Vampire cinema is so prolific that we have all these tropes and rules that we think we know that have been established, and Anne Rice refined them further. [While] trying to understand the origins of the vampire myth and understanding folk vampires, I had to forget everything that I had learned. I read [Bram Stoker’s] ‘Dracula’ at least five times as a young person, and then realized that I had infused it with things from vampire movies that aren’t in the book, [that] I thought were there.”
However, Robert Eggers is anticipating that his version not only of the vampire film but the Nosferatu story – first brought to screen more than a century ago and most notably redone by Werner Herzog – is one that is truly original despite its influences. In short, don’t expect to see Count Orlok sinking his teeth into any necks or stakes going through the heart. Instead, we’ll be seeing blood being sucked from the chest and stakes in the naval.
Nosferatu opens on December 25th.
Will you be seeing Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu on opening weekend?