Nosferatu Cinematographer Promises Robert Eggers’ Werwulf Is Unlike Anything Done Before

Cinematographer Jarin Blaschke and director Robert Eggers go way back. They’ve worked on every one of Eggers’ features to date—The Witch, The Lighthouse, The Northman, and Nosferatu—plus several shorts well before those, starting with 2007’s “The Tell-Tale Heart.” Yet while their resources and scale have exponentially increased, culminating in last month’s triumphant Nosferartu remake, their working methods and tastes have not.

“We would just hang out all the time, because we weren’t working,” Blaschke says while speaking with Den of Geek in correlation with the digital home media release of Nosferatu (available now). “There’s like seven years of that really. Just becoming friends and kind of aesthetic snobs together while really connecting.”

It’s paid off with Nosferatu being one of the biggest horror movies of last year, and with Blaschke receiving his second Oscar nomination for cinematography on the picture. Although when we speak with the DP he admits the film’s multiple Oscar nominations in the technical categories are a bit bittersweet since while he and several other longtime collaborators were recognized, Eggers went overlooked again. But perhaps he’ll have another shot soon enough since Eggers has already dated his next film with Focus Features: Werwulf, a reportedly 13th-century set lycanthrope movie due on Christmas Day 2026. And Blaschke and Eggers are currently discussing the look of the movie.

“Yeah, we’re doing it now,” Blaschke says. “I can’t tell you a thing. But it’s something that’s not been done before that I’m aware of, or not done in this way. So [we’re] just going to test it and see if it works.”

While the cinematographer is understandably reticent about sharing too many details on the new period piece werewolf film, he and Eggers have both cultivated a strong cineaste following due to their dedication to historical research and evoking period authenticity, often with visual reference points from the art of a film’s setting. When asked if the two have yet begun looking at 13th century artwork, Blaschke adds: “We’re still figuring it out and I can’t talk about it, [but] the primary candidate has not been done before.”

Whether that “primary candidate” refers to a specific medieval image or tale of werewolfery is being kept close to the chest, but the process mirrors some of the choices made on Nosferatu, or really any of the cinematographer’s previous collaborations with the director. In the case of the vampire film, this was achieved partially by studying oil masterworks by 19th century painters in the romanticism movement like Caspar David Friedrich. But for Blaschke these are always jumping off points.

“When I’m working with Rob, my brain just goes into ‘Rob composition mode.’ So even if it’s a frame that I might find, I’m filtering it through the Rob filter. Which means we tend to shoot things symmetrically, we tend to shoot things graphically, we tend to make things look a little bit two-dimensional, a little bit storybook.”

They also tend to shoot things dark, albeit with more contrasting highlights of white snow or crimson blood in the case of Nosferatu. It’s a demon they’ve chased for four—and soon five—films.

“What DP doesn’t like some patina?” Blaschke smiles. “Everything I do doesn’t need to be dark. The director I connect with the most just [taps into] the dark side of me, and I get to explore that fully. Within that realm our tastes overlap a lot.”

We’ll have more of our conversation with Blaschke about his collaborations with Eggers and how it informed the light and shadow of Nosferatu soon. The film is streaming for rental and purchase on all PVOD sites now.

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