Diksha Sundriyal
In ‘Nosferatu,’ Robert Eggers recreates the horror-gothic tale of the vampyre and the havoc he wreaks in getting to a young woman named Ellen Hutter. The 2024 reimagining of the story presents a different version of Count Orlok, who finds a way to get her husband, Thomas, to visit him at his castle in Transylvania. Eventually, however, his destination is where Ellen is: the town of Wisburg. Even when Orlok and Thomas are away, a lot of action happens in Wisburg as Ellen struggles under Orlok’s increasing control. The city goes through a drastic change when the villain eventually sets foot there, which makes it look like a living, breathing organism. It is, however, only as real as its story and characters. SPOILERS AHEAD.
The Fictional Town of Wisburg was Created in Prague
The story of ‘Nosferatu’ is set in Germany, but the central location of Wisburg, which is supposed to be somewhere along the Baltic coast, is entirely fictional. The city was first mentioned in the original ‘Nosferatu’ of 1922, which also employed an intricate combination of sets and real-life architecture to breathe life into the fictional town. For his own version of the story, Eggers took the production team to the Czech Republic, where they built the city to reflect the Germany of the 1830s. Production Designer Craig Lathrop revealed that he and Eggers dived into research to come up with a way to build the city as period-authentic as possible.
Lathrop primarily looked at the architecture of the time, particularly the Hanseatic towns, and scoured through German museums and libraries where he could find records that would help him get a sense of what a city like Wisburg would look like. He also referred to the artist Samuel Prout and his sketches of various parts of the country to feed into his own version of the fictional city. The film’s crew set camp at Barrandov Studios in Prague, where around sixty sets were built to give a complete look to the city. Lathrop made sure that the city looked aged and rugged and could be transformed according to the movement of the story where it appears lively in the beginning but deader following Orlok and his plague’s arrival.
One of Lathrop’s major intentions with the set was for it to be “a holistic, real-world for these characters to be living in so that these supernatural elements or horrific elements kind of hit harder.” Attention to detail was poured into every single red brick and gable roof used for the houses and the stones used to pave the streets. The production designer also wanted the houses to reflect the personalities of their owners, so we see a slight difference in the style of the buildings that the characters inhabit at different points in the story.
The Fictional Grunewald Manor is Brought to Life by a Real Complex
While the elaborate sets offered the filmmakers to craft the entire world according to their imagination, they also relied on real-life locations to film certain scenes. One of the most important locations in the movie is the Grunewald Manor, the decrepit place that Orlok buys as his residence in Wisburg. The filming for the scenes regarding the Manor took place in the Invalidovna complex in Prague.
Built during the 1730s, the complex has survived the tides of time to get an aura that feels perfect for someone like Orlok. It used to be a military hospital for a good part of 200 years and was then turned into a military museum and an archive. The ‘Nosferatu’ team took it over for a while to complete Orlok’s journey as he sets his eyes on Ellen and single-handedly destroys the town and the people of Wisburg.
Read More: Where Was Nosferatu (2024) Filmed?
