Shooting on KODAK 35mm film, DP Jarin Blaschke conjured-up images to-die-for in Robert Eggers' spellbinding gothic horror 'Nosferatu'
Willem Dafoe stars as Professor Albin Eberhart von Franz in director Robert Eggers' NOSFERATU, a Focus Features release. Photo by Aidan Monaghan. © 2024 FOCUS FEATURES LLC.
Captured on KODAK 35mm color negative film by cinematographer Jarin Blaschke, director Robert Eggers' gothic horror, Nosferatu, is as much a feast for the eyes as it is a test of the nerves.
The film reimagines FW Murnau's legendary, silent German Expressionist vampire film, Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror (1922, DPs Fritz Arno Wagner & Günther Krampf), itself an adaptation of Bram Stoker's groundbreaking 1897 novel Dracula.
Set in the 1830s, real-estate agent Thomas Hutter ventures to the remote mountain home of a prospective client, the mysterious Count Orlok, unaware of the horror that awaits him there – for the reclusive Count is a bloodthirsty vampire, much-feared by the local villagers. Orlok traps Hutter inside his castle and begins a plague of terror over Hutter's hometown of Wisborg, where Hutter's new bride, Ellen, becomes haunted by horrific visions and an increasing sense of dread, as she encounters evil forces far beyond anyone's control.
A carriage approaches Orlok's castle in director Robert Eggers' NOSFERATU, a Focus Features release. Photo courtesy of Focus Features. © 2024 FOCUS FEATURES LLC
Nosferatu features an ensemble cast including Bill Skarsgård as Count Orlok, Nicholas Hoult and Lily-Rose Depp as Thomas and Ellen Hutter, with Willem Dafoe playing Professor Albin Eberhart Von Franz, an expert in the occult and mysticism. Ralph Ineson features as Dr. Wilhelm Sievers who tries to treat Ellen using conventional medicines.
The film received widespread acclaim for its faithfulness to the source material, as well as Eggers' direction, the performances, score, production and costume design, plus Blaschke's brooding cinematography, which variously switches between pale and pastel colors, shadowy firelight and eerily luminescent moonlight, with unsettling camerawork. As one critic declared, Blaschke's cinematography is reason enough to watch the film.
Nosferatu represents Blaschke's fourth feature collaboration with Eggers, following their work together on the director's movie debut, the mid-17th-century, supernatural horror, The Witch (2015), shot digitally. This was followed by the B&W psychological horror The Lighthouse (2019), and the Viking vengeance film The Northman (2022), both of which were shot on KODAK film.
(l-r) Director Robert Eggers, actor Emma Corrin, DP Jarin Blaschke and actors Lily-Rose Depp and Aaron Taylor-Johnson on the set of their film NOSFERATU, a Focus Features release. Photo by Aidan Monaghan. © 2024 FOCUS FEATURES LLC.
Blaschke was Oscar and BAFTA-nominated for his work on The Lighthouse, and won the prestigious ASC Spotlight award for that film. He has already won multiple awards for his work on Nosferatu, including the Outstanding Achievement In Cinematography from the National Board of Review. Nosferatu is widely-tipped for further accolades during the 2025 awards season.
A cinematography graduate of the School of Visual Arts, Blaschke first met Eggers in Manhattan after receiving an email from the then would-be director regarding a short film entitled The Tell-Tale Heart (2008), based on a short story by American writer Edgar Allen Poe.
"After film school I shot a variety of student shorts on 16mm, then 35mm film," Blaschke recalls. "I became confident in lighting and exposing for film, and as the projects got bigger, I was eventually doing things like shooting 35mm Anamorphic, lighting city blocks and process trailer work. It was a strange era of big-budget student films.
"I managed to build a reel and my local agent posted it online. Rob, who was working as a waiter at the time, sent me his script, and asked if I’d take a look. It was unlike anything I had ever read before, already dripping with dense detail – not just images, but sounds and smells too. We had a good long meeting and hit it off from the start.
"Originally, Rob was going to go with someone more experienced than me, but as they were not available, he had been advised to hire someone who was young and hungry, and that literally was me. I have a deceptively exotic name and I'm told that that was what led him to watch my reel among all those on the website. It worked out, and that was the start of what has proven to be a great relationship."
Lily-Rose Depp stars as Ellen Hutter in director Robert Eggers' NOSFERATU, a Focus Features release. Photo by Aidan Monaghan. © 2024 FOCUS FEATURES LLC.
Development on Nosferatu began in 2015, after the success of The Witch at the Sundance Film Festival with a best directing award, with Eggers revealing the vampiric tale to be his ultimate passion project.
"Although Rob's early script went through a couple of iterations, it remained pretty similar to his original draft," says Blashcke.
For forethought about the production, Blaschke says he re-read Stoker's Dracula and also made a point of re-watching Murnau's Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror. He also reveals that 19th-century Romanticism played a part in his deliberations with Eggers about the looks of the film, and the critical decision as to whether to shoot it in B&W or color.
"After filming The Lighthouse, Rob and I realized that we both simply loved shooting in B&W. But the Romantic Movement was quite embedded in Central European culture at-large when Nosferatu takes place. Rob is always interested in telling stories from the point-of-view of contemporary culture in his films, and that became the key to unlock what this movie should look like, which meant it was going to be in color."
Blaschke reveals that artworks from European painters, such as Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog (1818) by Caspar David Friedrich featured in the look book. The DP also remarks that these kinds of artworks helped to inspire Nosferatu's 1.66:1 aspect ratio.
(l-r) Ralph Ineson stars as Dr. Wilhelm Sievers, Willem Dafoe as Professor Albin Eberhart von Franz, Aaron Taylor-Johnson as Friedrich Harding and Emma Corrin as Anna Harding in director Robert Eggers' NOSFERATU, a Focus Features release. Photo by Aidan Monaghan. © 2024 FOCUS FEATURES LLC.
"What was interesting to me is that those Friedrich landscapes are not wide. They're either a bit boxy, or even vertical. We could have shot Nosferatu in 1.33:1, like Murnau's film, but 1.66:1 just felt right, as it would accommodate a little bit of scope for our vistas and support our ensemble, where we often wanted to have several people in the same frame. But 1.66:1 is still boxy enough to feel timeless, and that's how we arrived at the aspect ratio for the film.
Principal photography on Nosferatu began in the Czech Republic in February 2023 and concluded some 65 shooting days later at the end of May. Filming took place at over 60 sets built at Barrandov Studios in Prague, along with physical locations which included the 14th-century Rožmitál Pod Castle in Rožmitál Pod Třemšínem, plus Pernštejn Castle and Prague's Invalidovna complex, a Baroque building registered as a national landmark. Some additional exteriors were captured at Corvin Castle in Romania.
For the shoot, Blaschke went with ARRICAM ST cameras fitted with a set of vintage Baltar lenses originally designed in the 1930s. These were supplemented by an additional set of Ultra-High-Speed Panavision optics that could open up to T0.9, specially engineered to resemble the visual vocabulary of the Baltars by Dan Sasaki at Panavision in Woodland Hills, LA. The DP reports that 27mm, 35mm and 40mm were the only focal lengths used for the film.
Lily-Rose Depp stars as Ellen Hutter and Emma Corrin as Anna Harding in director Robert Eggers' NOSFERATU, a Focus Features release. Photo by Aidan Monaghan. © 2024 FOCUS FEATURES LLC.
"I originally fell in love with the Baltars during production on The Lighthouse. Although we shot that film in B&W on [EASTMAN] DOUBLE-X 5222 35mm film, I remember the way they made the image glow, their softness, resistance to flaring and the cool pastel colors they delivered when I looked through the eyepiece," says Blashcke. "The Baltars are single-coated, whereas with lenses that have additional coatings, the image starts looking a little harder, a little crunchier. Here, I just wanted a softer look without excessive texture – like a subtle painter’s sfumato.
"Additionally, the Baltars let in a lot of blue light. This was helpful for our moonlit scenes, which were very dominantly exposed on the blue layer of the film. Dan engineered the Ultra-High-Speed lenses to bring them into the same visual realm as the Baltars, as I really wanted to shoot in real fire or candlelight, and knew we would need the fastest lenses possible for that, as well as the fastest filmstock."
Blaschke went with KODAK VISION3 500T Color Negative Film 5219 for the entire shoot. Along with its speed for the movie's dark/night scenes, shooting on one filmstock also provided a continuity of look and texture across the many varied day/night interior/exteriors. Film processing was done at Filmové Laboratoře Zlín in the Czech Republic, with 4K scans made at UPP in Prague.
"Right now, I like a dense negative to separate the shadows and guarantee a proper black," says Blashcke. "To that end, I rated the 500T 5219 at 320ASA and also pushed every scene by half a stop. With a plus-1 push, the imagery looked a little too brittle for my liking, and I found it was defeating the smooth tonality we were going for."
Discussing the topic of shooting on film versus digital, Blaschke remarks, "When I’m asked why we shoot on film, I immediately think, 'Why not shoot on film?' My own subjective response is that the color, contrast and texture you get with analog film is just more pictorial, easier on the eyes – it's simply a pleasure to look at.
Nicholas Hoult stars as Thomas Hutter and Aaron Taylor-Johnson as Friedrich Harding in director Robert Eggers' NOSFERATU, a Focus Features release. Photo courtesy of Focus Features. © 2024 FOCUS FEATURES LLC
"And from the point of view of the cinematographer and their crew, film forces a little bit more focus and craft on set. I light using a light meter and knowing the difference between 3.5-stops versus 3-stops underexposed, because things like that really matter. And that definitely mattered when we were shooting moonlight interiors and exteriors, where it would have been death if we’d have veered off by half a stop."
Among the movie's many nighttime scenes, one of the best examples of what has sent critics into rhapsodies, comes when Hutter finds himself at a crossroads in a dense forest as a driverless carriage approaches. Depicted in spooky, cyan-tinged monochrome using the 500T 5219, it's the moment he leaves everyday life behind and journeys into the supernatural world of Count Orlok.
Having scouted half a dozen locations over several months to find the perfect location for the scene, Blaschke eventually discovered a forest crossroads that offered straight paths, access between the trees for overhead balloon lighting and the concealment of 120-foot lifts, plus enough distance for HMI backlight in both directions, so as to create the foreboding ambience of Hutter's anticipation and dread.
"When you examine how moonlight illuminates things, there is very little color information," Blaschke explains. "My aim was to try to recreate the same wavelengths that our eyes see under those low-light conditions when only the rod cells in our eyes are working. So I used a filter to eliminate all the yellow and red light, along with most of the green. What was left was a pretty much a B&W image made out of only blue-cyan densities that were desaturated to near monochrome in the grade. I think the crossroads is my best night exterior so far."
Cast and crew members on the set of Robert Eggers's film NOSFERATU, a Focus Features release. Photo by Aidan Monaghan. © 2024 FOCUS FEATURES LLC.
In addition to moonlight being a key source of light in Nosferatu, Blaschke also used real candle and firelight in combination with traditional lighting instruments for the movie's other dramatic moments.
"For example, the first time we meet Orlok in the dark confines of his castle, I tried to light using just the light from the fire and candles to accentuate the creepiness of the moment," he says. "Fill light was always used for the actor, but at something like 3.5 stops under for Thomas and 4 stops under for Orlok. The exception was when the firelight came in at a frontal angle – then I would build contrast and break it up with shadows. For firelight fill, I would typically bounce a small gelled Tungsten unit into some unbleached muslin, judging the color temperature by eye as opposed to a color meter."
Along with its color palettes, Nosferatu is also noteworthy for its camerawork. When it came to framing and moving the camera, Blaschke says, "Rob has a keen sense for classical framing using symmetrical compositions, and the camera was either controlled in linear moves or static.
"However, during our collaborations, the shots we create have gotten more complex, and some of our longer takes require a lot of work to decide the blocking and how the camera movements would hit storytelling beats.
"To convey Thomas' delirium within Count Orlok's castle, we mashed up Orlok's point of view with Thomas' point of view and the camera almost telling him where to go. Thomas follows the camera rather than the other way around. The shots were classically composed, the camera almost always level. The angles are arguably ordinary, but the visual surprises lie in the 'when' and 'how' of the camera movement.
Director Robert Eggers on the set of his film NOSFERATU, a Focus Features release. Photo by Aidan Monaghan. © 2024 FOCUS FEATURES LLC.
"At other times we might drift, raise or pan the camera before settling into a static shot, as if Orlok himself had possessive-control of our minds. Shooting this way, with characters appearing and disappearing from the frame when we least expect them to, or levitating above the unsuspecting world below, gave the photography a kind of 'off' feeling, as if there was something else controlling our gaze."
While Blascke likes to operate simple shots, on this production he delegated the responsibility to A-camera operator Jan Cabalka.
"Many of our shots were pretty complicated. So I preferred to watch what was happening on a monitor from the camera's video tap, and to have a certain distance to watch the shots in the context of the movie. This meant I could make sure the camera movement, framing, pacing and timing brought the right tension, rather than having to think about the physical mechanics of operating the camera myself."
One might imagine that shooting such an intense horror might have been the stuff of nightmares after wrapping each day, but looking back at his time spent on Nosferatu, Blaschke says that was far from the case.
"On this production the cast and crew were like a theatre troop, and the closeness and camaraderie made it an enjoyable experience," he says. "I've worked with Rob for almost 20 years now, and he always tries to create an accurate and real idea of what it would have been like to have lived at a particular time, which oddly helps make original films.
"This is a story that people have seen many times, so this film is about the 'how' rather than the 'what.' Hopefully the film delivers the magical effect of transporting you somewhere else. I hope people will enjoy the journey."