Where Was 'Nosferatu' Filmed?

07.01.2025 - 23:45 / cntraveler.com

To create the dreadful world of Nosferatu, production designer Craig Lathrop designed and built some 60 sets in Prague, many of them based on real places in Germany and Transylvania. Lathrop, a longtime collaborator of writer and director Robert Eggers, spent nine months in Prague between preparing and filming. During this time, he took a few trips around the Baltic Coast and to Romania, to scout haunted castles (not to be confused with Germany's beautiful castles) for the home of vampire Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgård). After Lathrop and Eggers saw numerous sites, they settled on Romania's Corvin Castle for the exterior and Pernštejn Castle in the Czech Republic for the courtyard. Everything else was constructed.

“Most of what you see on screen, I built,” Lathrop says. “We built the interiors of the castle. We built all of the streets of the city. I built the monastery chapel with all of the frescos. The only interior we didn’t build was the hospital.”

The film, a retelling of 1922 silent German Expressionist Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror, centers on the supernatural connection between undead Count Orlok and a haunted young woman named Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp). After Ellen marries Thomas (Nicholas Hoult), a real estate agent in the fictional German town of Wisborg, Orlok lures Thomas to Transylvania to help him move there himself. His arrival unleashes a plague on the peaceful seaside enclave, a cover for horrors untold. Here Lathrop discusses the inspirations behind Nosferatu’s sets and the historical research that went into it.

The dark and winding road approaching Count Orlok's castle in Nosferatu is actually a set, while the castle exterior is that of Romania's Corvin Castle.

Why was Corvin Castle right for Count Orlok’s home?

The first images I saw of Corvin Castle, a few years ago, looked fantastic because it was falling apart. It was decaying. But after those photos were taken, they did a huge renovation and it was beautiful. We liked the look of it better than Bran Castle. There is also thought that maybe it was Corvin Castle that Bram Stoker had seen images of [for inspiration].

Was it important for the castle to feel inherently unnerving?

Yes, and that’s why we ended up building it. We saw a lot of beautiful castles, but they were all beautiful in the wrong way. They were cleaned up and spit-shined and ready for tourists to walk through. Or they were complete ruins with no ceiling and half the walls coming down. There wasn’t anything that had this great decay and this crumbling feeling of Orlok’s castle. This is a count who has been in his sarcophagus for the last couple 100 years. Orlok himself is decaying and looks deceased. I wanted his environment to reflect that.

Orlok's sarcophagus