Nosferatu’s Resurrection Was a Long Time Coming

How so?

An example is that early vampires of the Balkan and Slavic religions often did not drink blood. They will strangle their victims or commit adultery with their victims. If they drank blood, it was often from the chest. It was this story of passion and love. It seemed like, well, well, apparently it seems like a pretty poetic motif.

But then I also wondered where that folklore came from. People suffer from sleep paralysis, where they have waking nightmares of these vampiric visions. They have this pressure on their chest. So it’s also kind of grounded in reality, although piercing the sternum with a vampire’s teeth is ridiculous. So it was fun to explore those kinds of things that would keep it kind of fresh, but also feel like it could blend into this world.

Was most of this film done with practical effects?

I mean there’s a lot of CG effects in the movie, but you try to do all these big crazy things that are usually done practically with CG. That way you can use CG to fix things and stretch things, and you’re less aware of the subtleties of the hand because you’re not finding what looks fake, because things that would normally be fake are real.

I ask because, working at WIRED, I Think about AI With a lot of filmmaking, there’s a lot of talk about “AI can do this, AI can do that”, but I look at your films and I don’t think AI can do that. What do you think about these things?

Guillermo del Toro’s statement that AI’s greatest achievement is “Semi-mandatory screensaver” Fair enough. AI, I think, is best used to inspire people to do more human things. So that’s all I have to say about that.

I know we’re running out of time, but I have to ask: What monsters are you going to face next?

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

I mean, I want to see a Robert Eggers Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie.

Maybe I should drop that joke, because it will probably be everywhere.

I mean, you already have SpongeBob has been in a lot of press recently.