Nosferatu sees Bill Skarsgård transform into a terrifying ancient vampire in the new horror movie, and it seems like there are some small details that help make him so scary.
Speaking to GamesRadar+, Lily-Rose Depp, who plays Ellen Hutter in Robert Eggers’ reimaging of Nosferatu, shared how terrifying the prosthetics are up close. Her character becomes Count Orlok’s obsession, and the pair have plenty of chilling scenes.
“He’s nowhere to be found,” Depp says of Skarsgård’s transformation into the vampire. “But it’s cool. It was interesting we did a Q&A a couple weeks ago, and Bill’s prosthetics makeup artist was there, and I thought it was really cool to hear him talk about [it] and I remember him saying something about how the layers of prosthetics around Bill’s eyes were very thin in order to make him feel human in that place.”
Depp explains the decision behind this, and it’s a suitably frightening one. “Rob [Eggers] has spoken about how he wanted him to feel like a real Transylvanian nobleman that had died and then been unearthed,” she adds. “And I think that’s what makes him so scary, is that he doesn’t feel like a made-up scary monster. He feels like a dead person in a way, which is, I think, part of what makes him so freaky, as well as, of course, Bill’s amazing performance.”
There are plenty more hidden details in the look as well, including some nods back to Max Schreck’s iconic original look in the 1922 original, Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror. “I think the nods are the physical,” Skarsgård’s tells us. “What we didn’t want with him was the kind of very Max Schreckian posture. But it was also like, ‘Well, what’s our version of that?’ I think the way he moves, the shots of him approaching the camera, there’s definitely similarities to that and Max Schreck’s version of it. So there’s a little nods here and there.
“Same thing goes for the look and the prosthetics, the pointy ears. David White [prosthetics artist] came up with that, which was brilliant, is that his ears are rotting away and that’s the reason why they’re shaped in a similar way as Schreck’s.”
Nosferatu is released in US theaters on Christmas Day and UK cinemas on New Year’s Day. Read our Nosferatu review here. For more scares, check out our guides to upcoming horror movies and the best horror movies of all time.