Page 97 - Sharp Winter 2025

have authority over these actors that are your age, when you’re in the makeup, only talk to me and don’t talk to them.”
Occasionally, there were times when a little levity was needed, and Bill was able to accommodate that as well, but then immediately could snap back into this incredible darkness.
What makes the Gothic such an uninhibited space for filmmakers?
Gothic romanticism isn’t always successful but even if the movie isn’t great, the atmosphere is always appealing. There’s nowhere I would rather be than in a churchyard with a fog machine and Boris Karloff. For me, there is something all so cozy about it.
Beyond Gothic, horror is a genre where filmmakers get to have the safety to explore emotional extremes.
Do you think that’s why horror is in such a healthy place at the moment, as filmmakers are using the genre to explore these big themes? We aren’t the first two people to discuss the horror renaissance that began a few years before The Witch and Hereditary. It has continued to flourish
and hopefully, nobody gets sick of it anytime too soon.
You were previously working on The Knight, just like you did with Nosferatu, would you be interested in revisiting this project?
I would certainly love to make my medieval knight movie and maybe after [Nosferatu] would be the right time to do it. I don’t know. I have a bunch of scripts in various stages of finished and not finished and we will see. You always have to have a lot of things going on in this industry because you don’t know what is going to work.
When Nosferatu didn’t happen the second time, I was certain it was never going to happen. I was actually trying to make another movie, which no one wanted to make, so all of a sudden, I was like, “Maybe I can make Nosferatu now.” You just never know.
What is your driving creative force when choos- ing your next project. Do you focus on a specific time period or particular folklore?
It depends. The Lighthouse was the vaguest concept and an atmosphere. A lot of times it is the atmosphere that can be connected to the period.
It’s the boring answer but it depends. Any- thing could hook me and then I start amplifying my knowledge as much as I can in the spokes of the wheel.
That’s an interesting way of looking at it because so much can come from that wide-ranging research. For example, in Nosferatu, the idea of the occult isn’t something that’s explored heavily in Bram Stoker’s Dracula or the original Nosferatu but comes across perfectly here. With this movie, one of my guiding principles was, “What were the original filmmaker’s intentions?” I’m not making the same movie as them, but what were they thinking about and what were they inspired by?
Albin Grau, the producer and production designer of Nosferatu, was a practising occultist and I think he believed that psychic vampires were real. He talks about folk vampires in press. That feels sensational, but I would be surprised if he didn’t be- lieve in psychic vampires who could torment people in astral form. What was his thinking as an early 20th-century occultist? What would Von Franz [Van Helsing]’s occult views be like in the 1830s? What are the folk superstitions in Transylvania, and then how do I synthesize them into a cohesive mythos?
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