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Yes, Nosferatu Really Used 5,000 Live Rats on Set - Here's How They Did It
And all the rats survived, according to the production designer.
Sure vampires are scary — and Bill Skarsgård’s decaying Count Orlok is especially vile — but you’d be forgiven by being even more freaked out by the thousands of plague-infested rats that crawl about a German town in Nosferatu. If you happen to be one of those people who has a rodent phobia, there’s more bad news: most of the rats were real, and director Robert Eggers had 5,000 of them crawling on his set.
The movie, now in theaters, is a highly anticipated reimagining of F.W. Murnau's 1922 original Nosferatu, an unlicensed adaptation of Dracula that has since become an iconic piece of vampire fiction in its own right. But all versions of Nosferatu’s second act have the Count coming to a gothic German town, joined by rats who carry disease.
How Nosferatu (2024) used 5,000 real rats on set
While special effects have advanced considerably since the silent movie era, the rodents are mostly real in Eggers' Nosferatu, with only some CGI and props used to augment their already sizeable numbers.
“If there are rats in the foreground, they’re real, and then they thin out and become CG rats in the background,” Eggers said in a recent conversation with Guillermo del Toro, per Variety. “And they were well-trained.
Crucially, in a conversation with the trade magazine, production designer Craig Lathrop noted that none of the rats were killed or harmed during the filming. This is notable, as a previous adaptation of Nosferatu, Werner Herzog’s 1979 film Nosferatu the Vampyre, had animal abuse allegations leveled against it for the way it treated the real-life rats used in that film.
This was certainly not the case in Eggers’ Nosferatu. “The rats. None of them were lost. We found all of them. They were all there. We built these plexiglass barriers so that the live rats would be in a controlled area,” Lathrop told Variety. “In the scene on the street, the horses are on one side of the plexiglass barrier, and the rats are on the other, so that the rats wouldn’t run underneath their feet and get squashed, so nobody would get hurt.”
For a film with so much blood and death for the characters on-screen, it's nice to know the rats who stole a few scenes themselves had a nice experience.
Nosferatu is now in theaters, get tickets here from Fandango.
