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Remaking F.W. Murnau’s 1922 silent vampire film “Nosferatu” was a dream for Robert Eggers — a passion project that found the director recruiting his frequent collaborators after “The Witch” put them all on the industry map a decade ago. Production designer Craig Lathrop didn’t have a script at the time of that initial conversation, but ideas inspired by that romantic and gothic era began to percolate.
The industry veteran thought the movie would come together before Eggers’ filmmaking family began “The Lighthouse” in 2018 or after “The Northman” finished in 2020. The director’s third outing turned out to be the charm, and Lathrop began work on designing and constructing 60 sets in and around the production’s base in Prague. Surprisingly, the biggest challenge wasn’t creating the imposing castle of the terrifying Count Orlok. It was building a seaside German town circa 1838.
“I wanted every building to have a personality of its own, so there’s nothing cookie-cutter about it,” Lathrop says. “We made sure that none of those buildings were square or plumb. They sort of sag where they want just to make it feel like it’s real and has some age and it’s been there for a while.”
“I wanted every building to have a personality of its own, so there’s nothing cookie-cutter about it. We made sure that none of those buildings were square or plumb. They sort of sag where they want just to make it feel like it’s real and has some age and it’s been there for a while.”
— Production Designer Craig Lathrop
Finding physical locations turned out to be effectively impossible. Many of the towns in which the story is set have been destroyed and rebuilt many times over hundreds of years. There were individual buildings here or there but never a complete streetscape that worked.
“Even then, it was spit-shined, and you would need to do so much to sort of bring it down to the level that we needed,” Lathrop says. The town would need to be “both a bustling, exciting port city when we first see it, and then board it up, strip away some of the set that had some color, and maybe add some snow and have it be a bit more of a frightening and ominous town after the plague sets in,” he adds.
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Securing a real castle for Orlok’s Transylvania home also was tricky. They were all too tourist-ready. The production ended up using the exterior of Corvins’ Castle in Romania, with the interiors built on soundstages. And yet, those fantastical sets were relatively easy compared to the difficulties of re-creating a North Sea beach on the coast of a Czech Republic lake. The location worked for everyone but Lathrop.
“Almost everybody else was satisfied, but I wasn’t. I wanted these dunes really bad,” Lathrop reveals. “It’s probably the one set where we wanted to have a bit of the F.W. Murnau film. We had a nice beach but didn’t have the dunes. Luckily, there was a sandpit that wasn’t too far from the lake. I brought in seven or eight giant dumpsters filled with sand, and we sculpted the dunes and the green. We had grasses and all of that, and we had a nice big bit of beach in front of it to do some of the action.”
“Nosferatu” drew inspiration from gothic and romantic aesthetics. (Focus Features)
Then Mother Nature stepped in. The weekend before the shoot, rains had soaked the area. Unbeknownst to the production, local authorities released water from the nearby dam, raising the water level in the lake by 3 ½ feet. The beach was virtually gone. If Lathrop hadn’t built the dunes, there would have been no set to shoot on at all.
“My dunes were holding back the water so that we had enough room,” Lathrop recalls. “What you don’t see is there were planks on the other side [of the scene] so the actors could walk and not be stepping in the water. When we got there on the day, at first it was like, ‘Oh, my God, this is a disaster.’ But they decided to go ahead and shoot it. And I think it turned out really well.”
One aspect of “Nosferatu” that is now part of pop culture history is Orlok’s imposing sarcophagus. The vampire’s coffin was immortalized not only in a popcorn bucket but also in life-size re-creations placed in theaters across the country. Lathrop says his initial inspiration for the design came from the coffin of a 15th century Polish duke.
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“I can’t remember who it was, but it was beautiful, and it’s very similar to mine,” Lathrop says. “Obviously, all the icons, all the symbolism are mine. I changed quite a bit, but the general shape and the idea of it came from that.”
Orlok also speaks the ancient Dacian language. That inspired Lathrop to reference one of his favorite architectural creations, the Roman Arch of Trajan. The carving around the column depicts the Romans defeating the Dacians.
“I was looking at that, trying to find great examples of Dacian dragons, which are these dragons with a wolf head,” Lathrop says. “And if you notice the feet [of the coffin], those are Dacian dragons. And there are wolves all over the coffin, which seemed appropriate considering Orlok’s friends in the castle are wolves. And then there was a lot of other symbolism, and we created a crest for him. I mean, every step of that, of course, I was showing it to Rob, but in general he was loving it.”
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