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We cover stories from all around the world on this show.
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Hi. The History Channel original podcast.
History this week, winter 1476.
I'm Sally Helm. It was probably late December, but it could have been early January.
The date is a bit of a mystery.
And so is the person that we're talking about.
A man whose headless body has just been found lying in a marsh.
When he was alive, Vlad III was described as an ashen -faced man with sunken eyes and a pointed chin.
He was the prince of an area called Wallachia in modern -day Romania.
In Vlad's time, it's a borderland sitting on the edge of the Ottoman Empire.
It's long been a war -torn place.
No stranger to violence or to the ravages of plague and disease.
But Prince Vlad III has brought his own particular brand of cruelty.
Even in his childhood, it's said that the young Vlad liked to stand at his bedroom window and watch as criminals were led to their executions.
He spends his teenage years in exile, a prisoner of the Ottomans.
And when he returns to the throne in Wallachia, he seems determined to exact vengeance.
His older brother had been brutally murdered by nobles.
Vlad rounds up those same nobles and others and has them impaled.
That means a stake is driven horizontally through their chests, or sometimes up through their bodies vertically.
I'll let you imagine the details.
But Vlad has such a taste for this particular brand of punishment that people start calling him Vlad the Impaler.
He also has another name, one that he inherited from his father, Dracula.
Dracula doesn't just punish his enemies.
He seems to be a fan of torture in general.
A poem from the time reads, it was his pleasure and gave him courage to watch human blood flow.
And it was his custom to wash his hands in it as it was brought to the table.
So when it becomes clear that Dracula's days are numbered, there were probably a lot of people who were secretly happy.
Winter, 1476. At this point, Dracula has had a rough couple of years.
His younger brother betrayed him, but he's now fought his way back to the throne.
He's still in peril, though.
He has enemies everywhere.
And less than two months after he becomes prince again, Dracula's mangled, headless body is found by some monks laid out in that marsh.
There are a lot of stories about what exactly happened.
Dracula might have been killed in a battle with the Ottomans, who have long been his enemy.
Or he might have been stabbed by an Ottoman assassin and then beheaded.
It's said that his head does indeed make it back to Constantinople, where it's displayed on a stake.
The Impaler now impaled.
But of course, Dracula's death is not the end of his story.
Over the following centuries, he sticks around in European folklore, popping up time after time, typically as the villain.
His story mingles with stories of blood -sucking demons that have been around for centuries.
And by the 1800s, in Europe, vampire stories are really taking hold.
You know, undead beings that suck the blood of the living that can be warded off by garlic and killed with a stake through the heart.
In 1897, the writer Bram Stoker releases the book that becomes the king of the genre, Dracula.
It tells the story of an undead nobleman from Transylvania, who travels to England to terrorize a seaside town and hunt a particular woman.
Transylvania is pretty close to Wallachia, and many people believe that Stoker was drawing not just from ancient folklore, but also from the legend of the real Dracula, Vlad the Impaler.
And Stoker has clearly tapped into something powerful, a monster story with a twisted romance underneath.
His novel famously gets remade in 1922 as a movie by the German director, F .W.
Murnell. The movie is called Nosferatu.
In the movie, Count Dracula is replaced by Count Orlock, but nevertheless, it's so close to Bram Stoker's story that a judge actually rules it a copyright violation and says that all copies of the movie should be destroyed.
But much like the vampire at its center, the film doesn't die.
It becomes a cinematic touchstone, helps define the idea of a horror movie.
And there is now a new installment in that genre from a person who is known for mixing the supernatural with rigorous historical realism.
The director, Robert Eggers, whose new remake of Nosferatu brings us into the minds of people in 1800s Germany, confronting a baffling plague with a supernatural origin.
I don't write something with a message, I try to write something just thinking through the lens of the characters in the period in which they live in, and then something will emerge.
Today, a conversation with Robert Eggers about taking on a story with centuries -old roots.
How and why did he make a blood -sucking monster feel like a historical figure?
And where do vampires fit into our lives today?
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Robert Eggers, welcome to the show.
Pleasure to be here.
So I wanna start by thinking with you a little bit about kinda the history of vampires and vampire stories, which I imagine is something you thought a lot about as you were researching this film.
And I mean, we have Vlad the Impaler, who is a real person who has said to have inspired Dracula.
We have, of course, Dracula, Bram Stoker's novel from 1897.
We have the 1922 Nosferatu.
We have your new film.
Why do you think that vampire stories have had such a hold on people for so long?
For the beginning, it's been an interesting and compelling combination of sex and death.
But the first famous Anglo literary vampire is Lord Riven from Polidori's The Vampire, who's based on Byron.
But that's the first time that a vampire is a pale, seductive aristocrat.
And I think that that becomes the template for every vampire afterward that's in popular literature and cinema.
But in fact, 100 years earlier, when we've got the first sort of German language accounts of the folk vampires that were presumably considered a reality on the Eastern frontiers of the Habsburg empire, those revenants were putrid, bloated corpses like covered in maggots.
And that's where this mythology comes from.
And I think that the shadow of those folk vampires always kind of exists in the more pop culture vampires, but often doesn't get explored.
I know that sometimes monster stories are kind of helpful for society.
It's like they help us process the evil around us.
They help us process the bad things that happen to us.
Do you feel like vampires have kind of served a purpose like that in history?
I think the popular image of the vampire that people have enjoyed the most seems to be like a relatable outsider.
But I think in folklore, they served a very different purpose.
I mean, like witches, they were also scapegoats if there was a plague in the town or perhaps a family member that caused emotional trauma and they seemed to come back even after death to haunt their family.
And thus they needed to be destroyed after death.
Interesting, yeah. So sort of to blame for plagues and to kind of deal with the fact that sometimes someone is dead, but their terrible influence lives on over us.
Tell me a little bit if you would, can you just describe your Nosferatu, this mysterious Count Orlok, who, again, as I know, he's based on sort of these folk vampires that you're talking about.
So yeah, tell me a little bit about him.
You know, if a folk vampire is a kind of living corpse that looks more like how we would think of a zombie as far as how cinema has portrayed them.
So more corpse, less sort of pale aristocrat, as you're saying.
Yeah, you know, what does a dead Transylvanian nobleman look like?
What's the question that I ask myself?
And that is what Bill Skarsgard looks like, you know?
I actually, I read you say, one of my ways into the movie was thinking like, what does it mean or what would it really be like to be an undead Count living in the Carpathian Mountains?
And I love that sentence because I feel like the word undead just rings so loudly that most people are like, well, how do you get to realism from there?
And I guess I do want to ask you about that.
Like, why do you feel like it's important to take a supernatural story like this and put it as you do in like a pretty realistic historical context?
I mean, partially, I just enjoy it.
But I also think that it's easier for the audience to become invested in the story and the characters.
If the physical world of the period, the material world is articulated with as much detail as possible, but also the interior world of the characters who think differently than we do.
That helps us understand all the characters, but also it makes us perhaps more easily believe in the vampire as a supernatural thing if it feels rounded.
Okay, so let's talk about some exteriors and then some interiors then.
In terms of the visual exterior world, can you get a little specific with me?
Like, how did you make this count be of his time?
Like, what details are real and what were you drawing from?
You know, Linda Muir, the costume designer, and I studied lots of portraits of Transylvanian nobility.
We decided to place him as being alive in the 16th century.
And so the ruling class was Hungarian.
So even if his ethnicity may have been something different, he's dressed in this Hungarian finery.
He wears a cloak with incredibly long sleeves that's draped over the shoulder and the sleeves are never intended for your arms to go in.
They reach almost down to the floor.
It's just like a power move to have a really long sleeve.
Yeah, to show how rich you were.
Like, I can just let this fabric go.
Yeah, exactly. And he wears some really interesting shoes that are actually mules with a thick silk stocking and the heels are shaped like a horseshoe, but then they're like three inches tall, weird.
But that's in the research, you know?
How cool is that? Well, like, high heels were the Hungarian nobility thing.
Well, because they were weirdly, they were mules that you would wear as riding shoes.
And so you wore high heels to catch the stirrup.
That's why cowboy movements have high heels.
Okay, so there's the clothes.
What else? I know he speaks a dead language, right?
Yes, he does like his magical incantations in ancient Dacian, which is the language that the ancestors of the ethnic Romanians would have spoken.
And I worked with Florin Lazarescu, who is a Romanian novelist and poet and playwright and screenwriter and folklore expert.
And he like, you know, turned my spooky poetry into his interpretation of ancient Dacian.
How about the castle?
I know you actually went to Transylvania to see it.
Do you remember when you first like caught sight of it?
Yeah, I mean, going to Transylvania for the first time about eight or nine years ago was really spectacular.
And it was much more of a time machine than it is now.
There's way more cars on the road now.
The first time that I went, there was a lot more horse carts and donkey carts.
And it felt like very magical.
We built a Transylvanian village in the film.
We built that in the Czech Republic.
But we visited lots of vernacular architecture museums, in order to study the buildings to build it.
But we also visited Hunedora Castle, which is my belief that that was Stoker's inspiration for Castle Dracula and not Brand Castle, which was actually Dracula's castle.
And it is an incredible looking castle.
Was it like love at first sight for you with that castle?
There's an amazing shot of it in the movie.
I just wonder what it was like when you first thought.
No, I mean, it's so, it looks like how you would want a fairy tale castle to look.
I mean, sort of sad fact is that actually the spires when it was built in the middle ages were much shorter and the castle fell into disrepair.
So when Stoker saw an engraving of it, like all those massive spires weren't on there.
He saw this kind of crumbling thing that still had a lot of personality.
But then like a Victorian architect decided to make it even more fairy tale.
And when he redid the roof on the castle, made the spires extra tall.
So it gives it like what you would want a Gothic castle to look like.
And then the interior of the castle that we built on a soundstage in Prague, but it was based on Hunedora Castle, although in a state of immense disrepair because actually they've been restoring their interior and it looks quite nice in there now.
I guess the details are so amazing.
Are there any other sort of like your favorite historical detail in the film that people wouldn't, would just like glide right by you if you didn't know about it?
I mean, I don't think people glide right by this, but I think it's so drilled into us that vampires like, you know, drink blood from the throat.
But, you know, very often folk vampires don't even drink blood.
You know, some of folk vampires suffocate you to death.
There is a lot of folk vampires who would come back and fornicate with their widows and would kill their widows by like having sex with them too much.
And if folk vampires do drink blood, very often they would drink it from the chest and they would be drinking the victim's heart blood.
And because this horror story is also a tale of love and obsession, a gothic romantic story, there is certain poetical imagery in drinking the blood from the heart.
But I also think that how this arose in the folklore is from old hag syndrome from sleep paralysis where you have a waking dream and feel immense pressure on your chest.
The vampires in the movie, it's true, you're right.
They're like sucking and gulping from the heart.
Did that strike you as you encountered it in the historical detail?
You were like, oh, that, we have to do it that way?
Yes. When we come back, how Robert Eggers put himself in the minds of everyday people facing this vampire and how his Nosferatu fits into this long line of Dracula -inspired tales.
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The plot of Nosferatu is similar to the plot of Bram Stoker's Dracula.
In the movie, a German lawyer travels to Transylvania to meet a nobleman who wants to buy a house in the lawyer's hometown.
That nobleman, Count Orlok, is a vampire, AKA Nosferatu, and he travels to the city of Wisburg to stalk that lawyer's wife.
In the process, he brings a plague of rats, disease, and fear to the city.
I asked Robert Eikers how he imagined people in 1838 dealing with a vampire coming to town.
For some of the movie, we're in 1838 Germany, and there's of course a panic as the vampires' curses spreading through the town.
How did you put yourself in the mindset of those people, the 1838 Germans, and how they would have reacted to this supernatural threat?
Well, obviously most of the characters are just aware of a plague.
There was a lot of cholera outbreaks in northern Germany in the 19th century, and so reading about how they dealt with those in Hamburg or whatever was particularly helpful in figuring out how.
And how did they? I mean, what struck you about the cholera literature that you tried to incorporate?
You know, just like the quarantines and the way that they would weep paste the signs in the crosses on the doors, which was also a feature of the More Now film and the panic in the streets.
And obviously also we came out from COVID, things were expressed differently, but it wasn't too, I had some personal experience as well that we've all had.
I want to ask about that actually.
I mean, I know you directed A No Sforachi when you were in high school.
You finished the screenplay like nine years ago, but it's coming out in 2024.
This is when it's being released.
How do you think it speaks to right now, yeah, when it's coming into the world?
I don't know. I mean, I feel like that's not a question that I'm equipped to answer, but other people can probably better than I can.
I think one of the things I like about archetypal stories, fairy tales and myths and folklore is that they always kind of work and they can always be like interpreted and reinterpreted.
You know, you always can see yourself in them and it can work differently in different times of your life.
This is the reason why we still read Hansel and Gretel to our children.
We still go to the theater to see Oedipus and Lear.
These stories always work.
So I don't write something with a message.
I try to write something just thinking about through the lens of the characters in the period in which they live in and then something will emerge.
But perhaps like among many of the reasons that it was good that this movie didn't get green lit 10 years ago is maybe it is a better time now, you know.
Post COVID there, I mean, there is some resonance there for sure.
How would you fit it into that long sequence of vampire stories that we talked about at the beginning?
Where do you think, yeah, how do you think it fits into that list?
How does it relate to the stories that have come before?
You know, it's in conversation with the history of horror movies and the history of vampire movies.
And that is a difficult sort of idea to take on.
Why, because it's just such a storied history or why?
Yeah, I mean, like, you know, Nosferatu kind of invented horror movies, it's certainly not the first horror movie, but its impact is massive.
So, you know, in tackling something like this, you're struggling with your hubris and your lack of self confidence both.
But again, I think like it better for a social critic or a film critic to say how this fits in, but hopefully it inspires young filmmakers to make the next version of Dracula.
All right, Robert Eckers, director of the new Nosferatu that's coming out on Christmas Day.
Thank you for coming onto History This Week.
Thanks so much for having me.
It was a pleasure. Thank you for listening to History This Week, a Back Pocket Studios production in partnership with the History Channel.
To stay updated on all things History This Week, sign up at historythisweekpodcast .com.
And if you have any thoughts or questions, send us an email at historythisweek at history .com.
Special thanks to Robert Eckers, director of Nosferatu, which is in theaters this week.
We also referred to a great book about Vlad the Impaler.
It's called Dracula, Prince of Many Faces.
It's by Radu R. Florescu and Raymond T.
McNally. This episode was produced and sound designed by Ben Dixitin.
History This Week is also produced by me, Sally Helm.
For Back Pocket Studios, our executive producers are Ben Dixitin and David Weisbord.
From the History Channel, our executive producers are Eli Lehrer and Liv Fiddler.
Don't forget to follow, rate, and review History This Week wherever you get your podcasts.
And we'll see you next week.
