When Robert Eggers announced that his long-gestating ion project, Letterboxd’s most anticipated movies of 2024—and now it’s officially our highest-rated horror film of the year. A reimagining of F. W. Murnau’s 1922 Nosferatu (which is itself a reimagining of Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula), Eggers’ gothic vision ups the ante with more rats, more blood and more emphasis on the classic story’s co-lead, Ellen Hutter (Lily-Rose Depp).

While Bill Skarsgård portrays the vampire Count Orlok, aka the titular Nosferatu, it’s Ellen who acts as the film’s beating heart. Letterboxd are likening her highly athletic performance to that of Isabelle Adjani’s in Possession and in Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979): “Never in my wildest dreams did I think there would be a worthy successor to Isabelle Adjani, but Lily-Rose (to my great surprise and delight), reprises the purest essence of her, and then some,” writes Rachel.  “An emphatic, ‘good for her.’”

In addition to the influence of Andrzej Żuławski’s 1981 psychological horror, we asked Depp and Eggers about the other movies and art forms they looked to for gothic guidance during production, as well as what it was like to collaborate with all those cat and rat actors—watch the video interview above, and read it below.

Possession Obsession

First of all, Depp wants to thank you for your Adjani comparisons. “That’s high praise,” she tells me. “I am a huge Adjani fan. She’s incredible and someone that I always loved as a kid. She’s a French actress, so [that] hits home particularly for me.” Depp says she loves Possession, deeming Adjani’s work “one of the most iconic possession performances of all time.”

Fittingly, Adjani also stars in Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu the Vampyre as Lucy Harker—she and Ellen are essentially the same character with different names. “Of course, I watched her performance as [Lucy] because I couldn’t not see what she did with it, because she’s one of my favorite actresses, and I feel very honored to have portrayed the same character as her,” Depp explains. “I love Herzog’s Nosferatu, but it feels very different than ours. I was very intrigued to see what they all had done with it, all the while knowing that it was going to feel very different.”

“When Lily first read the script, she immediately brought up Possession,” Eggers recalls. “That was one of the things that made me think she was right for the role.” The director then adds, “I love Żuławski—Possession, The Devil and The Third Part of the Night were all influences on this film.”

“You want to watch these things, study them, digest them and then let them come when they do without consciously saying, ‘This is the Cries and Whispers thing,’” Eggers adds. “But I think you can see certain things, like Emma Corrin in bed, that are relatable to Harriet Andersson.” He goes on to explain that “there are things that Lily does that are in that realm, too. When she walks down the hall with the lamp, I mean, that’s so many films.”

Specifically, “it’s also very much a nod to Jack Clayton’s The Innocents, which is probably the biggest cinematic influence on this film, aside from the Murnau film,” Eggers says, suggesting the 1961 psychological horror as another watchlist addition. “One of the joys that I have as a film director is to amplify my knowledge by watching a lot of movies. A media outlet asked me to do a twelve-hour horror film festival, and I chose all black-and-white gothic horror movies, and four of them had the same plot… It needs to be an alchemy and not just constant references.”

Give Your Soul to the Dance

Although Nosferatu is a thoroughly European tale, it’s infused with a tasteful smattering of Japanese influence. “I’m a massive fan of Japanese cinema. With The Witch, I was thinking about Onibaba,” Eggers enthuses, adding that there are potentially similarities between Kuroneko and Nosferatu as well. “There’s a film, 964 Pinocchio, that was influential with some of the sound design, actually.”

But the most prominent Japanese inspiration was the dance theatre of Butoh. “It’s called the ‘Dance of Darkness’, and it’s about emptying yourself and letting something else in,” the director explains. “Żuławski was interested in Butoh and [Jerzy] Grotowski and voodoo in the work that he was doing to get some of those performances. I worked with a Butoh choreographer on The Witch, Denise Fujiwara, on some of the movements that the witches were doing. And Marie-Gabrielle Rotie, whom I worked with on The Northman, I knew was going to be perfect to work with Lily.”

“It was fascinating to watch because it’s very entrancing,” Depp enthuses of Butoh. “It’s an art form that I was really excited to discover because it’s so beautiful and so specific, and it happened to be extremely pertinent to what we were doing. This idea of letting your consciousness slip away as much as humanly possible in order to make room for something else to take over you was perfect for what we were aiming for.”

Cats and Rats

As for the coterie of animals on set—including thousands of rats and plenty of cats—they seem to have mastered the art of Butoh, as their lack of self-consciousness was a trait that Depp ired. “They’re amazingly spontaneous and real,” she says in regard to her experiences collaborating with them. “They’re not thinking about, ‘Should I do this?’ or ‘Am I looking [there]?’, or whatever. There’s a purity there—while they’re probably not the easiest to direct, they’re just hanging out. They’re just existing.”

“Although I do that the cat in the first scene that we worked with, she was a bit unruly,” Eggers recalls. “But by the time we were doing the scene where Willem meets you for the first time, the cat was jumping off the bed perfectly on cue every time.” Depp affirms, “Yeah, she was good. She got it. She was sweet. Nick [Hoult] and I had a little meet-and-greet sesh with the cat beforehand, possibly to see which one took to us the most. I’m a cat person, so I was excited about that.” Cat (and rat and bat) people: you’ll be excited, too.