In F. W. Murnau’s original 1922 film Nosferatu, Max Schreck was so terrifying as Count Orlok that an urban legend grew suggesting he was in fact a real monster. While Schreck’s passing in 1936 put paid to any far-fetched claims of immortality, it’s a testament to the enduring nature of his performance that audiences would question whether he was supernatural. For Robert Eggers’ 2024 remake of the same name, he cast an actor whose career might have once sparked similar rumours: Swedish actor Bill Skarsgård has played a variety of roles in his 24-year career, but the ones that have earned the most attention tend to be those with a connection to the dark side. Just what is it that makes this good-looking, publicly mild-mannered star so great at playing the stuff of nightmares?
The most literal example of Skarsgård’s affinity for the monstrous is his role in Andy Muschietti adaption of Stephen King’s It. In both 2017’s Part One and 2019’s Part Two, Skarsgård played Pennywise The Dancing Clown (one of the most common forms the titular shapeshifting alien monster takes). Like Count Orlok, Pennywise had famously been played before, by Tim Curry in the 1990 TV miniseries. Where Curry took the form of a contemporary circus clown with some snarky gags and a gravelly carnival barker type voice, Skarsgård goes in a different direction to his predecessor, adopting a childlike voice and demeanour which only adds to the sinister intentions lying beneath. His makeup and costume come from another era, becoming part of the overall performative nature of the character, who opts for elaborate scares to terrorise the children of Derry.
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This modern take feels more supernatural than Curry, partly due to advancements in computer effects, but also due to some innate qualities within Skarsgård. Pennywise’s unsettling smile came from a childhood game Skarsgård would play with his brothers where he would pretend to be a monster. Likewise, Muschietti was planning to digitally give the character a wall-eyed appearance, only for his star to mention that he can move his eyes in that way naturally. It is as if Skarsgård had prepared all his life to play this embodiment of childhood fears. “There’s like all these different things that I’ve been meaning to put into a character,” he told Entertainment Tonight, “then [Pennywise] appeared and I put all these things together to make as much of a weird, disturbing performance as possible”.
The success of Muschietti’s It led the actor to take on another hallowed role, this time as Eric in Rupert Sanders’ vision of The Crow (2024). The film stood in the shadow of Alex Proyas’ 1994 adaptation, starring the late Brandon Lee which became a cult classic. Skarsgård is once again a supernatural being brought back to earth, although this time he’s terrorising murderous drug lords rather than innocent children. After he and his lover (FKA Twigs) are murdered, he is resurrected to “put the wrong things right”, although his presence is more monstrous than Lee’s florid performance. In the film’s third act, he emerges as a demon of vengeance with black tattoo ink running over his eyes like warpaint, tilting his head unnervingly as he considers the best way to dispatch his prey. Immune to gunfire, walks relentlessly towards his attackers, jerking awkwardly as the bullets hit him. Far from being an avenging angel, he has become an instrument of death.
This state of being is succinctly described during a face-off with Marion (Laura Birn), the right-hand woman of the man who killed him. Looking at Eric, she described the slow fall of evildoing – “you’re swallowed up, and the only direction you can go is down”. Coated in the blood of others, he gives a bitter nod of recognition, before Marion describes him as having “the look of someone who hates everything inside of him”. While his crusade is one propelled by love, to truly become the demon his enemies fear, he drains himself of the goodness that his relationship gave him. To save his lover’s soul, he became a monster.
This brings us to Count Orlok – a character who does not share Eric’s noble intentions for bloodshed. His image has been kept from the film’s promotional material, shown mainly in shadow or through close-ups of his clawed hand reaching out. Therefore, when we meet him, the shock is the same as that of Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp), the woman whom Orlok calls “my affliction”. Through Eggers’ lens, Skarsgård becomes a mixture of the erotic and animalistic. The Count begins to embody the darker side of our natures, feeding on our darkest secrets in a way that would make him a terror to the buttoned-down sensibilities of the mid-19th Century, when the film is set. Visually, that sinister glare that made Pennywise so unsettling peers from beneath his extensive prosthetics, while his deep accented voice appears like an echo from the beyond. Far from the caped suaveness of Bela Lugosi’s Dracula, or the glittery angst of Twilight’s Edward Cullen, Skarsgård contorts his very being into the original source of vampiric fear, that of being consumed by darkness.
After having terrified cinema audiences as Count Orlok, Skarsgård will be returning to the role of Pennywise in the TV spin-off IT: Welcome To Derry. It seems his association with creatures of the night shows no sign of stopping, and the actor himself has admitted it is a “mutual kind of attraction”. “I think those characters are drawn to me as much as I’m drawn to them,” he told Vanity Fair. “The fact that they’re drawn towards me is a bunch of different reasons, everything from the way you look, you have a sensibility, there’s a darkness about you, or there’s an intensity.” Max Schreck moved away from the role that gave him infamy, with Orlok being the only horror role of his career. His successor, however, seems born to haunt our screens.
