Nosferatu’s Cinematographer Makes Darkness Visible

In Nosferatu, filmmaker Robert Eggers brings a classic tale of obsession to life. When Thomas Hutter (Nicholas Hoult) is sent to Romania to close a real estate deal with the ancient Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgård), he unknowingly sets off a wave of terror that affects everyone around him, especially his wife (Lily-Rose Depp). Nosferatu is a haunting epic of visual beauty and visceral horror with a cast that includes Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Emma Corrin, and Willem Dafoe.

Cinematographer Jarin Blaschke has worked with Eggers on all of his features. In 2020, he was nominated for an Academy Award® in cinematography for The Lighthouse. For Nosferatu, he crafted a visual language that transforms the black of night into a vehicle of poetic sentiment and potential terror. The Hollywood Reporter writes, “Blaschke’s camerawork is spellbinding—fluid, graceful, and maleficent in its command of chiaroscuro lighting, threatening shadows, and the dense soup of darkness.”

We spoke with Blaschke about his long journey in bringing Eggers’ vision to the screen.

Nosferatu is only in theaters November 25, so get tickets now!

When did you start thinking about Nosferatu?

We started talking about it in 2015 after The Witch came out.

Did the story change much?

From what I remember of the first draft of the script, I don't think the film we made is all that different, at least in terms of content. But if we had made it in 2015, it probably would have looked a lot different because our technique has evolved since then.

What did you hope to bring out cinematically in the film?

For me, the most important thing was to realize Rob's vision, otherwise, there's not much point remaking it. If the film was too homage-y to Murnau’s original, it would not feel like we had anything new to say. Even if it's the same story with most of the same characters—although Rob gave some of the characters like Ellen more emphasis—we didn't want our film to look like the other films. When Rob told me that it needed it to feel romantic, that gave me the direction that I needed.

What was your biggest challenge?

Probably our biggest challenge was having so many of the interior scenes shot with the lights off. Rob seems to give me a challenge like this in every film. In The Witch, we had children shut up in a goat’s shed. In The Lighthouse, we had to shoot the actors under the table with the lights out. In The Northman, the main character is in a shed again with no lights and no fire. In this movie, there's page after page of dialogue where people are in spaces with no lights. This pushed me to test the limits of moonlight and to shoot scenes with no lights that looked real.

What kind of locations did you have?

We didn't pick that many locations. We had some of the exteriors but we built most of the sets in a soundstage. With big locations like Orlok’s castle, there isn’t much we can do. We just put the camera wherever it fit and got the shot.

In the castle, you have to create the sense of different times of the day.

On the stage, we tried to make the different lighting as believable as possible, letting you feel that daylight was coming in, even though it was not. To get the right look of sunset and sunrise, I did a lot of research into the actual relative size of the sun and the ratios that would play inside the room at different times of the day. It was a lot of fun making sunrises and sunsets from scratch on the stage.

In so many of the night scenes, you gave the darkness a sense of real beauty.

What you see with your eye doesn’t look the same when you try to capture it on film. You have to expose the film at a certain ratio for it to react in a certain way but that is not the same way you react to it in real life. In the moonlit scenes, for example, there is very little color information. I had to observe how my own brain and eyes saw things in a low-light situation. At that level, humans don't really see color. It is just your rods and not your cones working. I used a filter to eliminate all yellow and red light as well as most of the green. What was left was mostly blue, which made everything look a certain way. In shooting, I’m just trying to recreate the same wavelengths that your eyes would see under those conditions.

How did you collaborate with the costume designer and production designer to craft a palette that would work in low light?

In the dark, you really have to compress the tones that you are photographing, which means everything on the set would need to be within the range of tones that can be seen at night. Sometimes Linda [Muir, the costume designer] would have to create a very expensive garment that would look great in daylight and enhance the low light conditions at night. Linda would make black coats as off-black as she could or put something that shines in a blouse so that it would stand out when it is backlit or illuminated by fire, anything to keep the costumes from looking like a black mess on screen. Likewise, a white nightgown could not be too white because it would stick out too much in a night scene. Everything had to be gradations of light and dark.

Were there certain colors that you avoided?

Rob was very particular about not seeing red in the movie except for blood. When you did see blood, he wanted it to connect. In one of the houses that Craig [Lathrop, the production designer] created, we had to make sure that none of the brown furniture had too much red or would look too red in different lighting conditions.

Can you talk a little about the framing?

Rob likes very symmetrical compositions. He has a very keen sense of classical composition. Indeed, his style was very compatible with the aesthetic and worldview of the people in the movie. We referenced some of the art of the period—like the paintings of Casper David Friedrich. When I thought about a Romantic aesthetic, I thought more about American contemporaries like Frederic Church. But they were all strands of the same movement.

What about camera movement?

For the most part, it was controlled or static. But in the castle, the camera tends to lead the character. It would appear that the camera was with the character, but then it would veer off and show us something else before returning to the character. It would create the sense of an omniscient camera. The character would appear in the frame when you wouldn't expect him to. We would do these kinds of things to give the photography a kind of off feeling.

It feels like much of the camera work reflects the sensibility of the early 19th century.

Yes. It is removed and formal with lots of profile shots. It often feels mannered in the way that people are brought into the frame—all of which can feel a little stifling but I think it really works in this film.

What is it like to work with Eggers?

I've been working with him for over 17 years and he still surprises me. He can take the tritest idea and make it original. He recently sent me a script that when he told me about it, I sort of shrugged my shoulders. Sure enough, when I read the script, it knocked my socks off. There are always these challenges about how we are going to make this movie different from the other films and that is really exciting.

What do you hope audiences take away?

This is a story that people have seen many times, so the movie isn’t so much about the “what” as the “how.” I am hoping people can experience the journey.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.