There are 5,000 real rats in ‘Nosferatu’
On Thursday night, Focus Features held the first public screening of Robert Eggers’ highly anticipated horror movie “Nosferatu” for guild members and press, followed by a Q&A between the director and Guillermo del Toro, a kindred filmmaking spirit. Deadline reports that they revealed some interesting behind-the-scenes tidbits about making the film, which is a remake of the 1922 silent German Expressionist horror film.
The gnarliest bit of trivia is that “Nosferatu” has a “Willard”-esque number of rats in it. “There’s 5,000 real rats,” Eggers said. “So basically if there’s rats in the foreground, they’re real, and then they thin out and become CG rats in the background. And they were well-trained.” But not potty-trained: “I didn’t know that rats are incontinent, so the smell is insane,” he added.
Count Orlok, the Dracula-inspired vampire at the center of the story, is a bringer of pestilence, so it stands to reason that he has a lot of rats with him. But that’s a lot of pestilence to have on a film set (not that these rats are diseased, I’m sure they were sweet and lovely creatures. No disrespect to “Nosferatu’s” rats).
Bill Skarsgård plays Orlok, and his character design has not yet been publicly revealed. Eggers said the “IT” actor wasn’t sure about the makeup at first. “When Bill first saw the bust [of his character], he was like, ‘This guy didn’t look like me when he was alive.’ And he was pretty intimidated. But as soon as he put it on, I saw the moment when he was inspired by the makeup and knew that he could do something with it.”
Eggers also praised Skarsgård’s co-star Lily-Rose Depp, who plays Orlok’s victim Ellen Hutter, for her hard work in learning to contort her body in terrifying ways. “A lot of people have wondered if some of that stuff is CGI enhanced, but she did all of that stuff physically,” Eggers said. She worked with Marie-Gabrielle Rotie, a movement coach and choreographer in the flexible Japanese dance style Butoh, on her movements.
“Nosferatu” also stars Nicholas Hoult, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Emma Corrin, and Willem Dafoe. It opens in theaters on Dec. 25.