Robert Eggers

On the weight of less than a handful of features, writer-director Robert Eggers (birthname: Robert Houston Eggers) has become one of the most acclaimed and visionary younger American filmmakers. His roots as a production designer in the theater and short films (starting in 2009) provided him with uniquely diverse training for creating fully realized worlds on the big screen. The result is a small but deeply impressive body of work that requires viewing on the big screen to fully appreciate the breadth of his accomplishments.

A sign of Robert Eggers’ artistic stance is that his biggest influences aren’t in recent movies but in the silent horror tradition of such German expressionists as Robert Weine, Fritz Lang, and F.W. Murnau, whose Nosferatu (1922) inspired a young Eggers to direct and design a high school stage production of the Dracula-themed drama. When Eggers was able to get his independent film off the ground with The Witch (2015), starring a then-unknown Anya Taylor-Joy, it announced to the world a supremely gifted artist and craftsman, able to shrewdly balance the demands of contemporary horror audiences while drawing on a rich cinematic history and, even more so, a dark American history.

Receiving instant acclaim (it won the best picture and director prizes at its world premiere in the 2015 edition of the Sundance Film Festival) and box-office success (costing $4 million, it scored over ten times that in receipts), The Witch might seem to be a tough act to follow. Eggers took his time to make his second feature, starring Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe, The Lighthouse (2019). A bold, kinetic, extremely disturbing saga bearing shades of such 19th-century literary American masters as Edgar Allen Poe and Herman Melville, The Lighthouse was essentially a two-hander for actors Pattinson and Dafoe, pushing their skills to the physical and emotional limits. 

Robert Eggers took less time delivering his third feature, the bigger-budgeted and larger-scaled saga, The Northman (2022), with an all-star cast of Alexander Skarsgård, Taylor-Joy, Nicole Kidman, Dafoe, Ethan Hawke, Claes Bang, and Björk (her first major movie role in 22 years, since Lars von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark (2000).) The Viking hero is based on Amleth, the medieval Scandinavian character who is the basis for Shakespeare’s Danish prince, Hamlet.

Eggers was director/writer/producer of a new version of Nosferatu (2024), inspired in part by F.W. Murnau’s great 1922 silent film version (Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror) and also Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel, Dracula, and starring Nicholas Hoult, Lily-Rose Depp, Bill Skarsgård, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Emma Corrin and Willem Dafoe, and released wide by Focus Features in the US and Universal Pictures outside the US.