What do they all have in common? Each gets a film by Robert Eggers.

I have no particular desire to make movies about such creatures, and I'm ambivalent about horror. Still, if I could have any director's filmography, it would be his.

Eggers draws his stories from mythology and folklore, brings their historical context to life through meticulous research and design, orchestrates immersive and revolutionary camerawork, and unleashes characters caught between primal desires and ancient fears, played by actors with reckless abandon.

That's what I want to do.

People like to contrast 'visual directors', the ones who focus on the camera, light, colours and effects, with 'performance directors', the ones who devote themselves to the actors. The best are both, and Eggers is among them, but you can be a very successful director while only mastering one.

Reality in Eggers' movies exists only in the minds of the characters. What they believe and feel, they see - and so do we. This means there's no clear division between the psychological and the supernatural. Masterful visuals, archaic language (here’s to the best last words in cinema, via The Witch: 'Corruption, thou art my father'), and extreme performances combine to create a mythic, historic reality.

When we experience any good story, the protagonist becomes our avatar in the drama; we beam ourselves onto the screen and feel the emotions in sync with the characters. This leap of empathy goes further in an Eggers film because his characters come from bygone eras and hold very different beliefs to our own (a fact barely noticed by 99% of other period films). Eggers recognises that 'It’s impossible to completely divorce myself from my contemporary lens, but I try, as much as it’s humanly possible.'1

For The Northman, 'I’ve worked with the finest historians and archaeologists in the field of Viking studies to endeavor to make the most historically accurate Viking movie that’s ever been made'.2

For Nosferatu: 'I went back to folklore that was written by people who believed vampires actually existed'.3

The result is a film that feels less like a film and more like a vision of the past... and the past is dark.

The repression and terror felt by a self-hating Puritan. The isolation and powerlessless felt by a constricted lighthouse keeper. The primal, spiritual elation felt by a Valhalla-bent Viking. The sexual desire felt by a vampire-haunted maiden. Such things are, to us in 2025, not unthinkable but unfeelable in the everyday sense. We lack the necessary cultural awareness - until we're immersed in a film by Robert Eggers. The cinematography of his long-term collaborator Jarin Blaschke dissolves the sense of screen by 'inhabiting' a given scene rather than 'covering' it, gliding around the characters in precise and extended shots. Thus we're allowed to step outside of our modern world and return to a darker, more mysterious time.

Eggers is clearly a fan of Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell: to him, myths aren't weird tales our ancestors invented to pass the time. They're stories which express our most fundamental nature, and they remain eternally relevant: 'Like, I get why Aztecs practiced human sacrifice—that’s just not a big leap for me personally,' said Eggers. 'Having a religious system where the gods are multifaceted and you’re also having to, like, embrace darkness and death probably makes more sense than how we’re living.'4

And he's so far been very successful at making these stories seem relevant to contemporary audiences. That's why you get critics saying stuff like:

his continuing effort to level the playing field between now and then by shooting period folklore with such historic fidelity that we experience it in the present tense.5

Eggers recreated, with obsessive accuracy, the world of the medievals in order to lower us into a myth that feels primordial and strange, as if it’s tapping into something in the back of our minds that we’ve always known but half forgotten.6

The result is a film that feels not so much shot and edited as dropped from the sky by ravens and beaten into shape in a smithy.7

everything here feels whittled from stone, woven from flesh, grown from the ground up, and then destroyed in a frenzy of bruising, exactingly choreographed warfare. By the time Björk shows up ... as a hollow-eyed mystic, you feel genuinely transported to another dimension.8

Obsessed with detail, Eggers excels at not just evoking some setting from the past but drawing the audience, with a kind of uncanniness, into the head space of his characters.9

I'm grateful that Eggers is proving this kind of thing is possible. But there are some differences, beyond genre, between his work and what I'm concocting.

As well as period films, I want to make films set in the present - unlike Eggers, who has declared: ‘The idea of having to photograph a car makes me ill ... And the idea of photographing a cellphone is just death. And to make a contemporary story you have to photograph a cellphone - it’s just how life is - so no.’10 In each film, he wants to go back to a time when mystery reigned unchallenged by technology.

I want to explore the clash between mythology and modernity, the causes and consequences of having mythic beliefs right now. It's one thing to believe in vampires when you live in 19th century Transylvania; those who believe they coexist with A.I. and fusion reactors are in some ways more interesting. My 2021 short Imbas is about a writer who goes on a road trip to Scotland to become a druid. Two years later I made Eva Revisited, which contains no overt fantasy but uncovers a hypnotherapist's personal mythology, the reality she crafts for herself by recreating the past.

I don't carry a firm set of rules from project to project; to me each requires its own. Eggers, on the other hand, refuses to shoot anything handheld. He and Blaschke also avoid making cuts (so that a scene is often covered in a single shot), the reasoning being that 'the more shots you have, the less each one means'. This is far from necessarily true: montage is all about juxtaposition (two different shots combine to create a third meaning), and its effect can be cumulative. There's a real fad for one-take or one-shot scenes and films at the moment, but the edit - the compression and expansion of time and space - is just as central to filmmaking as the picture.

In an Eggers movie, the actors are expected to conform to the camera. Willem Dafoe said that in rehearsals for The Lighthouse, 'We didn’t really rehearse the scenes ... What we rehearsed was that he would tell us where the camera would be.'11 In The Northman, Alexander Skarsgard struggled initially 'because you feel like: well, there’s no space for me to explore my character. I'm a robot', but he soon found freedom within those constraints: 'You play around with it, and small details will then open up, like a flood of inspiration, and suddenly you’re in it.'12

Hmm, here I am trying to differentiate myself from the man, but most of the time I put the camera down before I get the actors moving. I’m less interested in following the actors as an observer… To me, the camera is more of a portal.

Nosferatu only just came out, but I'm already raring for Robert Egger’ freshly-announced fifth film: Werwulf.