Robert Eggers confirms that Lily-Rose Depp's Nosferatu spasms were 100% practical
Nosferatu really takes its vampiric possession scenes to the next level. Like, really. The film's star, Lily-Rose Depp, spends a good portion of the film shaking so violently you may try to phone up an exorcist from the comfort of your seat, far away on the other side of the screen. Adding to the horror, Depp didn't need her body to be possessed by CGI to sell that loss of control. "The main thing that I am looking for in possession scenes is to keep it within reality," director Robert Eggers recently told Vanity Fair. "One of the marvelous things about Lily-Rose Depp’s performance is her wild physicality—people think it’s CG-manipulated or sped-up wire work, but it’s all her."
"When I go and see a possession horror movie, I just know that there’s all kinds of VFX involved. There’s no way you could ever, ever, ever actually do that," Eggers continued. You may think the same while watching his latest epic—you may want to think it at least—but the director wanted his audience to sit with the question of "could this happen to me or my wife, or my sister, or my son?"
To achieve the effect, he previously told Deadline that he brought in a choreographer who specializes in Japanese butoh, which translates to "dance of utter darkness." (He had worked with the same choreographer, Marie-Gabrielle Rotie, on The Witch.) "[I]t’s fascinating… If you watch videos of it, you’ll see these people with the most blank stare—it really feels as though they are not there anymore. There is room for something else to come into them," Depp told Vanity Fair of the style in a profile from November.
According to Eggers, the team knew they only had about three or four takes to capture the film's climactic confrontation between Depp's character and her husband (played by Nicholas Hoult) "because it was so physically exhausting for her. Also with the screaming and everything, she was going to destroy her voice." It was also a "very vulnerable" place for Depp to go. "I was trying to make myself be there as little as possible and let whatever I was trying to summon overtake me completely," she said in her profile. "It’s a destabilizing place to be emotionally. That brings up a lot. It was definitely very physically and emotionally draining… It was important for me to care for myself." It may be important for you to do the same after watching it.