Robert Eggers
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Moby Dick (1956)
Directed by John Huston
influenced The Lighthouse (2019)
Themes Characters Dialogue
At any rate, the phrase serves as an apt summation of the movie he’s in, a maritime nightmare awash in mythological references, Moby Dick paraphrases, and “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” samples.
The Moby Dick parallel is so overt that Pattinson’s character at one point even screams that Dafoe’s must’ve come from that book.
The problem is that there isn’t any restraint in the work they are doing – both have their performances turned all the way to 11. Dafoe, in particular, with his accent and cadence, seems not so much like he’s creating a character from cloth as he is in emulating the kind of character we’ve seen from Treasure Island to Moby Dick – the crusty sea captain, with all the cliches that come with it.
The taciturn Winslow (Pattinson) and sea-salty Wake (Dafoe) don’t have much in common — Wake is like flinty Captain Ahab of “Moby Dick” — but they both have secrets about to be pried loose by the wind and waves.
Tom — hilariously prone to declaiming a mixtape of Shakespeare and outtakes from Moby Dick — sums up his marital history with the refrain, “Thirteen Christmases at sea, little ones at home, she never forgave me.”
The Shining (1980)
Directed by Stanley Kubrick
influenced The Lighthouse (2019), The Witch (2016)
Visuals Themes
It may seem lazy to compare The Lighthouse to Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, but consider: There is a scene in the film where one character picks up an axe and shuffle-runs in pursuit of another.
Other cinematic borrowings from “The Shining” (1981) and “Apocalypse Now” (1979) may raise a brow, but are otherwise unnecessary distractions.
Here, two men alone at a lighthouse flirt with, then surrender to, the most profound case of cabin fever since “The Shining,” which receives several nods as an explicit reference point for “The Lighthouse.”
That's about all you get for plot, yet it's enough for Eggers—who broke through four years ago with gothic horror masterstroke The Witch—to craft a moody, disorienting and utterly bonkers psychodrama about the insanity of isolation, one which bears traces of both The Shining and Ingmar Bergman's hallucinatory Persona .
The director and his co-writer, brother Max Eggers, have constructed a scenario that contains undeniable echoes of genre classics like Repulsion (1965), The Tenant (1976), The Fog (1980), The Shining (1980) and The Thing (1983).
Writer-director Robert Eggers has acknowledged that his first feature was inspired by “The Shining,” and like Stanley Kubrick’s film, “The Witch” is a study in paranoia that creates a deepening mood of unease and dread.
Heading into this movie, I hadn’t looked up Amleth’s story, only to leave the theater thinking to myself how much the story reminded me of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet .
A brutal, blood-soaked Viking epic based on a Scandinavian legend – the same legend that inspired William Shakespeare’s Hamlet – director Robert Eggers’s third film is probably his most punishing.
The Northman is the legend of Amleth, the story that inspired William Shakespeare’s Hamlet , and with a prayer to Odin the film opens on the North Atlantic in 895 AD as the hero as a young boy (Oscar Novak) anticipates the long-awaited arrival of King Aurvandil War-Raven (Ethan Hawke).
The Northman is loosely based on the Scandinavian legend of Amleth, a figure that also inspired William Shakespeare to write Hamlet.
If you know the story of William Shakespeare's Hamlet, you know the broad strokes here, as Hamlet was based on Amleth's tale.
Fear Street: 1666 has no such referents, but its visual aesthetic and tone do match up with other period horror films, like Gareth Evans’ Apostle or Robert Eggers’ The Witch .
If “1994” evoked “Scream,” and “1978” was reminiscent of “Friday the 13th,” “1666” feels kin to “The Witch.”
The cool-toned, grey-flecked palette and stark approach to gore seems borrowed from 2015’s The Witch .
Possibly the most dramatic of the films, “1666” transplants the characters from 1994 into a period set gothic horror setting reminiscent of Robert Eggers groundbreaking film “The Witch.”
The scares of 1666 are the very best of Fear Street thanks to both its creepy setting of a repressive Puritan colony and the way it ditches the slasher format of the previous two films in favor of more supernatural frights, pulling from works like Arthur Miller’s The Crucible or Robert Eggers’ The Witch and incorporating similar themes of patriarchal violence and religious hysteria.
1666 is a slight departure from the horror trend pattern of the last two films, but we’re still in subgenre territory, hitting up contemporary folk horror in the vein of Robert Eggers’ The Witch , colored with a sense of teen angst that’s closer to 1994 ’s Kevin Williamson-adjacent trappings.
Gretel & Hansel (2020)
Directed by Osgood Perkins
influenced by The Witch (2016), The Lighthouse (2019)
Visuals Themes
Much as in The Witch – or in Eggers’ salty horror-comedy The Lighthouse (2019) – it takes a scene or two to modulate one’s ear to the film’s idiosyncratic linguistic style.
Far from the naturalism and historical accuracy of such folk-horrors as Robert Eggers’ The Witch, the production design recalls the offputtingly jagged edges of German expressionism, and the striking costumes owe to the surrealism of Jodorowsky and beyond.
That said, while there is a familiar narrative at play, the film has a good amount of arthouse sensibilities that bring to mind films like The Witch .
The film’s visual palette channels Robert Eggers (The Witch) and Alejandro Jodorowsky (The Holy Mountain).
Here, the filmmaker remixes the iconic fairy tale into a coming-of-age story of female empowerment and societal constraints on gender and sexuality, which makes the comparisons to Eggers‘ The Witch practically inevitable.
Wandering in the autumnal twilight between the hyper-real anachronism of Tarsem Singh ( The Cell , The Fall , Immortals ) and the grimy, hand-hewn period realism of Robert Eggers’ The Witch (2015), Gretel & Hansel is a veritable feast for the senses.
The Crucible (1996)
Directed by Nicholas Hytner
influenced The Witch (2016), The Lighthouse (2019)
Themes
Back in 2015, Robert Eggers delighted critics with the flesh-pecking horror of The Witch , a directorial feature debut which blended the theatrics of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible with shades of M. Night Shyamalan and the more grizzly adaptations of Stephen King.
Rather than either recapitulating the political finger-wagging that usually accompanies depictions of religious hysteria (best exemplified in Arthur Miller’s The Crucible) or simply exploiting witchcraft for its shock value, the film burrows deep into both genuine spiritual horror and the manner in which abject fear divides us (which is a real political lesson for our current divided culture).
At least since Marion L. Starkey’s 1949 study The Devil in Massachusetts (an inspiration for Arthur Miller’s The Crucible), pop culture has taken a more Freudian view of Puritan-era witchcraft sagas, putting the blame on patriarchs whose fear of women’s sexuality becomes rage against female self-expression (or, with Miller, McCarthyist hysteria).
The intention seems to have been to stake out a patch of land adjacent to The Crucible’s superstitious terrain and thereupon cultivate something a little more genre-minded: the closest reference point would be M. Night Shyamalan ’s maligned The Village, albeit without the crackerbarrel twist.
But whereas most fiction surrounding the Witch Trials (most notably Arthur Miller’s The Crucible) focuses on the power of hysteria to convince even the most pragmatic people that such nonsense is true, Eggers chooses to dig deeper, questioning the bedrock of such hysteria.
Just as easily, however, given the film’s self-advertised stabs at historical accuracy, one could read this singular shocker as something even more disturbing: a kind of fright-flick answer to Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, presenting a revisionist national history in which true evil exists and religious hysteria is the proper response to it.
And so, this scion of art-house royalty has much to prove in a starring role that borrows heavily from “Gladiator” and pretty much every Mel Gibson movie (but mostly “Braveheart”).
The overall endeavor is sure to feel reminiscent of other contemporary historical epics that are motivated by vengeance, along the lines of Gladiator , Braveheart , or even 300 .
Though lacking a well-realized emotional register, the film achieves an elemental, opulent vibe that splits the difference between Braveheart and Gladiator, or maybe The Revenant and The Lion King .
This film will resonate with cinephiles, bookworms, and history buffs alike because it draws from some of the best cinematic and literature influences: Hamlet , Beowulf , 300, King Arthur , Braveheart , Macbeth , Game of Thrones , Gladiator , and even The Lion King .
But when brutality isn’t the focus, the film vacillates between the atmosphere and storytelling of “Braveheart,” “Spartacus,” Roger Corman’s tatty peplum pictures “Deathstalker” and “Barbarian Queen,” “Krull,” “Sleepy Hollow,” some of the mythological works of Harryhausen, and the very recent David Lowery release “The Green Knight.”
The Northman is a refreshingly R-rated historical adventure like the days of Braveheart and Gladiator.
Indeed, his inspiration seems to have been Danish director Carl Dreyer’s wartime drama Day of Wrath, with which The Witch (the title appears as “The VVitch” on the credits) shares many themes.
It might be argued that revered director Carl Dreyer was doing something similar in his 1943 classic, Day of Wrath, a tale of alleged witchcraft in a Danish village which Eggers had acknowledged as an influence.
Cinema has always had a grand tradition of dealing with religious hysteria tied to the patriarchal fear of pussy, lest we forget Carl Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc and Day of Wrath, plus virtually anything foisted upon us by Ingmar Bergman.
Conjuring the spirit of such convincing occult dramas as Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Day Of Wrath, Michael Reeves’ Witchfinder General and Piers Haggard’s The Blood On Satan’s Claw, The Witch favours verisimilitude, formal exactitude and insidious dread over cheap shocks.
Possession (1981)
Directed by Andrzej Żuławski
influenced Nosferatu (2024), The Lighthouse (2019)
Visuals
Kubrick’s mad precision certainly came to mind which watching The Lighthouse , but I also thought of Bergman, Tarkovsky, Hitchcock, and Lynch, as well as Andrzej Zulawski’s Possession and Victor Sjöström’s The Phantom Carriage .
Depp, on the other hand, as a woman possessed of an ancient evil, attempts to channel Isabelle Adjani in Possession on multiple occasions, but she just doesn’t have the chops to make her emotional disintegration anything less than hysterical and a big miss for me.
The latest in recent run of young actresses in horror films to channel Isabelle Adjani in Possession (although, ironically, not Adjani's performance in Herzog's Nosferatu), Depp gives an intensely committed, largely physical performance that requires her to contort her body like a gymnast, tear at her clothing, roll her eyes into the back of her head, speak in foreign tongues, and spend long stretches of the film in the throes of being violated by an unseen force.
Depp throws herself into the role, often literally, bringing an alarming physicality that invokes Isabelle Adjani's terrifying performance in Andrzej Żuławski's "Possession," a manic psychosexual film that seems to have greatly influenced what Eggers is going for here.
But not Adjani as Ellen/Mina, but rather the French star's iconic turn in Zulawski's Possession (1981).
It Comes at Night (2017)
Directed by Trey Edward Shults
influenced by The Witch (2016)
Themes Visuals
Like It Follows (2014) and last year’s The Witch, it probably won’t be to every horror fan’s taste—it’s a stylish, masterfully wrenching plunge into dire circumstances that turn human drama into horror and bring out the monstrosities of survival.
Like The Witch , It Comes at Night is an object lesson in how to stylize asceticism.
In its chills-over-scares approach, it’s reminiscent of fellow A24 release The Witch, though it’s even more vague in its storytelling then that already dreamy, atmosphere-heavy film.
The picture is part of the new breed of horror films that has emerged from the shadows in recent years, chilly little burnt offerings like The Babadook, The Witch and It Follows.
It’s an appropriate new entry in the ever-expanding roster of producer and distributor A24, which also handled horror breakout “The Witch,” another effective dose of minimalist horror told in the confines of an eerie, isolated forest.
Horror fans frequently debate whether the horror films distributed by A24 — which include The Witch, Green Room, and Under the Skin — are made for mainstream moviegoers or for a more esoteric, indie film–loving set .
With its industrial sound effects (including, Mark Korven's menacingly booming score), suffocating black and white photography, and dreamlike narrative logic, The Lighthouse evokes David Lynch's monochrome nightmare Eraserhead, as well as the cosmic terror of H.P. Lovecraft and the silent expressionist cinema of F.W. Murnau (Eggers is an admitted Nosferatu fanboy, after all), right down to its vintage square box aspect ratio.
His initial follow-up was set to be the third iteration of Nosferatu , the immortal Murnau take on Dracula.
It’s rather telling that the director opted for this aesthetic given that his second feature was originally supposed to be a remake of Nosferatu – and if this film is any indication, he probably would’ve nailed it.
La mimesis de la realidad es reemplazada por su inevitable abstracción, construida en tonos de gris y negro, luminismo hecho de blancos y sombras que recuerda los claroscuros expresionistas de El gabinete del Dr. Caligari (1920) de Robert Wiene y Nosferatu (1922) de F.W. Murnau.
Reportedly, Eggers has since been attached to a Nosferatu remake and a miniseries about Rasputin, both of which sound very interesting.
After the critical success of his abstract 2016 horror The Witch , he signed on to direct a reimagining of Nosferatu - but with that project seemingly fallen by the wayside, he’s instead channelled his desire to update the early horror films of the German Expressionism movement into his boldly original second feature.
Valhalla Rising (2010)
Directed by Nicolas Winding Refn
influenced The Northman (2022)
Themes Visuals
It’s a Viking epic unlike anything we’ve seen since Nicolas Winding Refn’s awesome Valhalla Rising, and I’d put this one right up there with it as the best this particular subgenre has to offer.
Though as exhilaratingly violent as one of its most obvious filmic cousins with Nordic ties, Nicolas Winding Refn’s “Valhalla Rising,” “The Northman” stays true to Eggers’ more offbeat sensibilities, contrasting gruesome imagery of brutally slaughtered bodies with the ethereal mysticism of a hero’s visions, whether of his past and future family tree, alarming premonitions, or ancient deities.
The Northman is a far more ambitious affair, a full-on Viking epic that tries to succeed where previous attempts – sorry, Nicolas Refn’s Valhalla Rising – failed, and thankfully, I got to see it in a better state of health, as well.
While inevitable comparisons will be made with Robert Eggers’ The Witch (2015), it’s more spiritually akin to Peter Brunner’s Luzifer (2021). But Agnes is a protagonist who behaves inversely to the victims we often see in films like this because she’s pious–an innocent. Whereas the rebellious young women in The Crucible engage in behavior which instigated a witch hunt, Agnes turns inward, seeking self annihilation.
Early on, Franz and Fiala’s new film recalls Robert Eggers’ The Witch, despite being set more than a century later, in 1750. It has a comparable emphasis on ambience and authentic historical detail, which is possibly even more granular here. But vague suggestions of witchcraft quickly turn out to be misleading, with the story instead fueled by converging forces of religion, folklore and nature.
The Devil’s Bath operates according to the tenets of folkloric horror, but doesn’t feature anything remotely fantastical outside Agnes’ fever dreams. Whereas Robert Eggers’ The Witch molds olden tales of oppressively religious teachings into outright horror imagery, The Devil’s Bath remains grounded and earthly.
The dense, swampy landscape and gloomy aesthetic of The Devil’s Bath serve well to enhance the film’s narrative tension, comparable to the cinematography of Robert Eggers’ The Witch. Nature at the beginning of the film seems friendly, as we see Agnes joyfully weaving flowers into her wedding headpiece and playing with an insect. The forest appears more sinister, however, as Agnes becomes emotionally detached.
From the film’s harrowing opening scene, immediately invoking the austere natural beauty and historical accuracy of Robert Eggers’ The Witch, we see the dire consequences of this troubling view on salvation.
Movies like The Witch, or It Comes at Night, or Hereditary are not easy sells, and offer no simple encapsulations.
But Hereditary , The Witch , The Babadook , Get Out , and most recently, Us , prove the genre is ripe with potential.
Much like Alex Ross Perry’s Queen of Earth and Robert Eggers’ The Witch , Midsommar belongs to a growing series of films by anointed male auteurs using cult homages to explore female sexuality – yet can sometimes seem contrived in intuiting the desires of their subjects.
One the one hand, Midsommar presents it pagan zealots as agents of ecstatic liberation, paralleling the way that Robert Eggers’ The Witch (2015) ultimately portrays satanic pacts as preferable to stifling Puritanism (especially for women).
Midsommar has more in common with inaccessible cult thrillers like The Wicker Man (1973) and The Witch (2015) than mainstream horror faves like those in The Conjuring universe, but it may have some crossover appeal.
At least there is Florence Pugh, whose seamless transition from innocence to all-knowingness as the beleaguered Dani recalls a character in Robert Eggers’ The Witch, another movie that Aster has evidently seen.
There is something shadowy and indistinct about the woods in The Witch that recalls, appropriately, The Blair Witch Project .
The Witch, the latest Sundance sensation to spark a studio bidding war, reminded this viewer more than once of The Blair Witch Project .
The Witch is a game-changer along the lines of The Blair Witch Project, a stripped-down approach to horror that doesn't depend on bogeymen or blood gushers, just macabre surrealism.
It's like The Blair Witch Project all over again.
The simple conceit of It Follows—a monster who takes the form of an ordinary person—was too mundane for some; The Blair Witch Project’s shaky-cam marathon in the woods left many viewers nauseated rather than terrified.
The other film that I found myself thinking about as the closing credits of The Lighthouse rolled was Ingmar Bergman’s 1966 drama Persona , in which a nurse moves to a remote cabin to care for an actress who has stopped speaking.
Increasingly outrageous behavior from both men, which appears to give “The Lighthouse” the feel of Bergman's “Persona” on acid, begins to feel like a chore.
That's about all you get for plot, yet it's enough for Eggers—who broke through four years ago with gothic horror masterstroke The Witch—to craft a moody, disorienting and utterly bonkers psychodrama about the insanity of isolation, one which bears traces of both The Shining and Ingmar Bergman's hallucinatory Persona .
It’s also a psychological thriller in the vein of Persona, an existential drama with shades of The Turin Horse, and is decidedly more funny—fart gags in tow—than Eggers’ debut, The Witch.
Frankenstein (2025)
Directed by Guillermo del Toro
influenced by Nosferatu (2024)
Themes Visuals Characters
…it lacks the meticulous craft and brooding intensity that made last year’s “Nosferatu”—another retelling of an oft-worn tale—so hauntingly immersive.
Motion pictures can make familiar ancient texts feel new again through sumptuous imagery, as with Akira Kurosawa’s Ran or last year’s Nosferatu.
…the materialization of the project recalls arthouse horror favorite Robert Eggers finally getting his shot to adapt Nosferatu in 2024 (both even feature Ralph Ineson!)
Este caso recuerda lo ocurrido hace poco con Nosferatu (2024), de Robert Eggers…
A sorrowful sister to Nosferatu’s Ellen Hutter…
…the only glaring flaw of Frankenstein is that it's not being given a chance to be witnessed on a larger screen, akin to Nosferatu…
If anyone can recall that over dramatic swashbuckling action film starring Kirk Douglas and Tony Curtis as friends and rivals in the 1958 classic, The Vikings , Robert Eggers’ vision will definitely knock any remaining memory from your mind.
There haven’t been too many Viking movies, most likely because the time and place involved pretty seriously restrict the format to two things—sailing and marauding, and the more violent the better; Richard Fleischer’s 1958 The Vikings , which was very violent for its time, still stands tall in the mini-genre.
Yet the period detail is unstinting; scholars of Old Norse who were unconvinced by Tony Curtis’s miniskirt, banded with chevrons, in “The Vikings” (1958), will be reassured by Eggers’s dedication.
Coogler shows as much interest in the metaphorical potential of the vampire as Robert Eggers did with Nosferatu earlier this year…
But it IS a vampire movie, and with that comes the familiar tropes and predictability that are hard to get around. To be fair, I felt this way even with the excellent Nosferatu (2024), which doesn’t hurt that film in the slightest but does soften the impact somewhat because we’ve all seen it before and will likely see it again in another reworking of the genre.
We’ve recently gotten Nosferatu, Abigail, and The Last Voyage of the Demeter…
With Nosferatu dominating the box office to kick off 2025, it’s safe to say vampires are back in business…
Richard Brody of The New Yorker, who had enough sense to pan The Brutalist (2024), Nosferatu (2024), A Complete Unknown (2024), Civil War (2024), Perfect Days (2023), Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022), in a row of releases that didn’t deserve the amount of critical goodwill they received, was one of the more competent critics who gave Sinners glowing praise.
Eggers is working again with The Witch cinematographer Jarin Blaschke, here shooting with 1930s vintage Baltar lenses, and the way in which they represent backbreaking work through textured images of such sensual loveliness at times recalls Béla Tarr’s The Turin Horse (2011).
It’s also a psychological thriller in the vein of Persona, an existential drama with shades of The Turin Horse, and is decidedly more funny—fart gags in tow—than Eggers’ debut, The Witch.