In established himself as one of the most exciting filmmakers working today, writer/director Robert Eggers has also demonstrated an acute devotion to realistic period details – from the dialects of the characters to elements of production design. This in mind, it’s not altogether shocking to learn that the production of his latest movie, a remake of Nosferatu, employed hordes of real rats… but it is still amazing to hear the number of rodents that were present on set.
Nosferatu isn’t set to hit theaters until the end of December, but a special screening of the film was hosted in Los Angeles late last week, and it was followed by a special Q&A with Robert Eggers and Guillermo del Toro. The latter directly asked how many rats were used in the making of the new horror film, and Eggers wowed the crowd with not only his answer but with some unexpected insider info about the experience:
There's 5,000 real rats. So basically, if there's rats in the foreground, they're real, and they thin out and become CG rats in the background. And they were well-trained – like when the rats like run off of the ship, they were on buzzers. And the rats that were on Emma Corrin... I didn't know that rats are incontinent. And so the smell is insane.
I can’t personally say that I knew about the lack of bladder control in rats, and I can only imagine the stench created by 5,000 of them.
Those familiar with the original Nosferatu from 1922 will understand why rats were a major presence in the production of the remake. When the titular villain a.k.a. Count Orlok (horrifically portrayed by Bill Skarsgård in the Robert Eggers movie) arrives in Germany to unleash blood-sucking terror, the ship that brings him also delivers rats that are encased in Orlok’s dirt-filled coffins and start the spread of what seems to be a deadly plague. That’s the ship to which Eggers refers in the quote… but I won’t further expound upon the scene with rats and Emma Corrin this far out from release.
You can get very brief previews of the rat action in the Nosferatu trailer, which includes shots of rodent-infested streets and an unidentifiable individual warding a mischief of the scrabbling creatures with a torch:
Starring Nicholas Hoult, Lily-Rose Depp, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Willem Dafoe, Ralph Ineson and Simon McBurney in addition to the aforementioned Bill Skarsgård and Emma Corrin, Nosferatu will be unleashing its special vampiric terror in just a little over a month – the film set to arrive in theaters on Christmas Day, December 25. Early reactions to the movie following its early screening have been very positive, so get excited and mark your calendars.
