Mel Brooks’ ‘Dracula: Dead and Loving It’ Was an Invaluable Resource for Robert Eggers While Writing ‘Nosferatu’
One of the most anticipated horror movies of the year is Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu, the star-studded remake of F.W. Wurnau’s classic 1922 silent film — and, to a lesser extent, several episodes of SpongeBob SquarePants.
Eggers is known for making acclaimed movies like The Witch, The Northman and Massive Phallic Object Island (aka The Lighthouse). According to the director, his cinematic inspirations for Nosferatu included classics like The Innocents and Ingmar Bergman’s Cries and Whispers. More surprisingly, he also watched a cinematic work made by the Oscar-winner who directed Spaceballs.
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Eggers recently told IndieWire that, during the writing of Nosferatu, he watched Mel Brooks’ final directorial effort: 1995’s Dracula: Dead and Loving It.
Ostensibly a parody of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Francis Ford Coppola’s swing-for-the-fences take on the iconic novel, Brooks’ film also poked fun at more than 60 years of Dracula movie lore. Much of Dead and Loving It is patterned off of the 1931, Bela Lugosi-starring Dracula film, which Brooks claimed gave him nightmares as a child.
While Dracula: Dead and Loving It wasn’t well received at the time (the inevitable comparisons to Brooks’ classic Young Frankenstein certainly didn’t help), it proved to be an invaluable resource for Eggers, because the parody spotlighted all the vampire movie clichés he was desperate to avoid. He literally changed his script after watching a movie in which Leslie Nielsen does the tango.
“There are a lot of scenes that were deliberately rewritten after watching the Mel Brooks movie, and considering, ‘Wow, that totally doesn’t make sense,'” Eggers recalled.
For example, in Eggers’ film, vampires get staked, not in the heart, but in the navel, “because you’re just trying to stake them into the ground so they don’t move,” he explained. “That’s not too much about killing them.”
He’s right. As we’ve mentioned before, the whole “stake to the heart” part of vampire mythology was just a big misunderstanding. And, the standout sequence of Brooks’ movie did involve a prolonged fatal staking. Specifically, Jonathan Harker is tasked with putting a stop to the vampiric Lucy, with a pointy wooden stick. He ends up getting positively drenched in an Ocean Spray-esque torrent of blood.
It’s easy to see why anyone who watched this movie would assume that staking vampires in the heart was totally played out.
Audience members from early screenings that featured Q&As with Eggers noted that he specifically shouted out Brooks’ film. One person on Reddit described how Eggers claimed that Dracula: Dead and Loving It actually helped him to overcome writer’s block for one scene.
This strategy of watching a parody movie before you take a crack at an earnest version of a similar story isn’t a bad idea. Hell, they should just go ahead and make it illegal to direct a music biopic ever again without first watching Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story.