Director Robert Eggers acknowledged that many young people – whether millennials or members of Gen Z – may not recognize the vampire Nosferatu from the 1922 film, but from a children’s cartoon. On the red carpet at his Los Angeles premiere Nosferatu remake, the director was asked by The Hollywood Reporter if he knew the iconic character appeared on the animated show Spongebob square pants.
He said he knew Nosferatu was on the children’s show. The vampire famously appeared in the season 2 episode, “Graveyard Shift”, in which Spongebob works at night for the first time and is frightened by eerie occurrences at the Krusty Krab, including the flickering of the lights. It turns out that the vampire is the culprit.
While that may have been many young people’s introduction to the character, Eggers said on the red carpet that he learned about Nosferatu through a show called Muppet babies, which he said would play “little snippets of Lon Chaney’s Ghost of the Opera and early versions of Cyrano de Bergerac.” Eggers continued: “That weird cartoon gave me the opportunity to see a lot of the movies I watched when I was a little older, with memories of Muppet babies. So thank you SpongeBob.”
The vampire appeared several times in the series and the show even introduced a younger version, Kidferatu.
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One of the film’s stars, Nicholas Hoult, was also asked about the character’s appearance in Spongebob square pants. Less familiar with the reference, he added that he appreciated that it had introduced new viewers. “I’ll have to go back and watch more SpongeBob,he said. “Hopefully this will be a reintroduction of it in a different way.”
The remake features Bill Skarsgård in the titular role, Lily-Rose Depp as Ellen Hutter, Hoult as Thomas Hutter, Willem Dafoe as Prof. Albin Eberhart von Franz, Emma Corin as Anna Harding and Aaron Taylor-Johnson as Friedrich Harding.
