Production designer Craig Lathrop is the first to admit that Robert Eggers‘ “Nosferatu” was made at just the right time, following their collaborations on “The Witch” (2015), “The Lighthouse (2019), and “The Northman” (2022). Earlier stabs at the director’s passion project would not have been as fully realized. Eggers first needed to work his way up to the vampire remake as his ultimate expression of historical drama meets supernatural horror.
“Doing ‘Nosferatu‘ now was absolutely the right thing to do,” Lathrop told IndieWire. “We were able to grow as a team, grow as individual artists, deal with the larger scale of ‘The Northman.’ We were leading up to this even if we didn’t know it.”
Lathrop embraced Eggers’ vision of “Nosferatu” by leaning more into the mythic folklore of vampires and giving Ellen (Lilly-Rose Depp) a lot more agency in her battle with vampire Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgård). Once again, the production designer’s task was to be historically accurate to ground the supernatural. He built around 60 sets at Barrandov Studios in Prague, principally the fictitious 1838 German town of Wisborg on the Baltic coast and Orlok’s 16th-century Transylvanian castle (exteriors of Corvin Castle and the courtyard of Pernštejn Castle were also used).
“It’s very important to try to make sure that we create a holistic, real world for these characters to be living in, so that these supernatural elements or horrific elements kind of hit harder,” Lathrop said. “Because I had such a long lead-up, I really felt I knew this world when we started to draw it and build it, and there was a detail that I had down.”
He thoroughly researched the rich architectural history of Hanseatic towns: the brick Gothic buildings and the Biedermeier period of middle-class growth and simpler, more utilitarian design. “It was a rejection of the aristocracy, of the Napoleonic Wars,” he added. “This fits perfect: You’ve got this old world with Orlok and this new world with the Biedermeier style that was all the rage.”
Lathrop made the home interiors a reflection of the characters’ disparate levels of wealth. Ellen and her husband, Thomas (Nicholas Hoult), have a modest flat but aspire to the grandeur of their best friends, Friedrich (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and Anna (Emma Corrin). “And then being able to build all of the streets so that I can control that palette and control the individual buildings was important,” Lathrop continued. “None of those buildings are plumb or square. And you’ll see in the old town where buildings are sagging.
“The main thing is it doesn’t feel crisp and new and like a set. That’s what my driving obsession was,” said Lathrop. “It was to make sure that it could go from being this bustling, exciting town, when we first see Thomas running through the streets, to the same buildings boarded up and this very different place during the plague, where it, hopefully, is a little bit frightening. So you want to be able to hit both those emotional beats with the same buildings.”
The buildings were made of red brick, which Lathrop toned down, and had stepped gable roofs. Stone, meanwhile, was reserved for streets. And then at night, the red goes dark with the use of teal filters.
The oddest set is Ellen’s room at the opening of the film, when Orlok takes demonic possession of her. Unlike the others, this one is strangely misshapen, so when she gets out of her cubbyhole bed, and we see the curtains with the shadow of Orlok, the camera comes around far enough away so that you can see her in profile.
“To do that, as the camera pulls out and starts to come around and make that sort of C shape and turn 180 degrees, all of those walls are moving at the same time, including the bed and the decorations that were attached to it,” Lathrop explains. “They’re all sliding out of the way, as it’s coming along.”
Constructing Orlok’s castle, with its crypt, tower room, hallways, corridors, and great hall, brought out the 13-year-old in Lathrop. He needed to build the interiors because every available castle in the Czech Republic and Romania was either in ruins or too beautifully restored.
“We needed disrepair, decay, you needed to feel diseased almost,” he said. “So that’s what we were building. It needed to feel like Orlok has gone in his sarcophagus a hundred years ago, and he’s decided not to come out again until Ellen awakens him.”
Although the castle is purposely sparse, there are historically accurate details hiding in the gloom, including painted tile floors that undulate. However, the creepiest is the fireplace sculpture that moves its heads and stares at Thomas when Orlok takes him close to the fire. “We did animatronics by hand,” said Lathrop. “It’s funny to see who notices it and who doesn’t.”
There was a tricky set in the castle, too. For the spiral staircase Thomas climbs with Orlok upon his arrival, the angle had to be just right. “You come around the corner and, all of a sudden, Orlok’s not there and you don’t know where he’s gone,” added Lathrop. “And [the camera] comes up and then it pushes through into the great hall, and then he appears again. That whole sequence was more about geometry. Trying to make sure that everything lined up just perfectly.”
