Robert Eggers is back this weekend with brand new Viking epic The Northman (read our review), a bloody tale of revenge armed with what Eggers refers to in the latest issue of Fangoria Magazine (#15) as “horror beats.” Eggers, of course, got his start with The Witch, a true horror movie that helped usher in a whole new wave of “arthouse” style horror cinema.
So what horror movies spoke to a young Robert Eggers while he was growing up? Bloody Disgusting’s Boo Crew Podcast sat down with Eggers this week to talk classic horror.
“The horror movies that were popular in the 80s were just too scary for me,” Eggers admits. “I watched a little bit of Friday the 13th, and I just about… fucking died. Universal horror movies and Hammer horror movies… Corman, Vincent Price, Amicus… that kind of stuff… spoke to me. Because I could deal with it. I could see Peter Cushing with a severed arm in a bubbling tank and think that was pretty cool. And a little bit creepy. But I didn’t have to go to the fucking emergency room. So that was the stuff I really loved.”
Eggers adds, “And then of course, much talked about, but Nosferatu was something that I saw pretty young that really changed my life.”
Robert Eggers is such a big fan of Nosferatu, in fact, that he’s been trying to get his own remake off the ground for many years. What’s the latest on all that? He tells the Boo Crew, “I’m just starting to think that [F.W.] Murnau doesn’t want me to make it. It feels like that.”
Eggers continues, “It just feels like it’s so hard, and I don’t know why. And I think [Werner] Herzog had the right… because of German history and German cinema history, to make it. And maybe the ghosts of Murnau and Albin Grau are telling me… stop barking up that tree. I don’t know. That doesn’t mean that that’s true. I’m just wondering.”
You can listen to The Boo Crew’s full chat with Robert Eggers below.
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