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Robert Eggers , the director of the 2024 remake of the classic silent film “ Nosferatu ,” confirmed that he knows about the Transylvanian vampire Count Orlok’s connection to Bikini Bottom on Thursday. Eggers — in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter at his film’s Los Angeles premiere — was asked about “ SpongeBob SquarePants ” introducing younger generations to the vampire, who was notably seen flickering the lights at the end of the season two episode “Graveyard Shift.” Eggers tied how kids know about “Nosferatu” through the hit Nickelodeon show to how he learned about cultural references watching Jim Henson’s “Muppet Babies” when he grew up.
′′[The show] would play little clips of Lon Chaney’s ‘ Phantom of the Opera ’ and early versions of ‘ Cyrano de Bergerac ’ and stuff,” Eggers noted. “And that actually, that weird cartoon gave me exposure to a lot of movies that I watched when I was a little older with memories from ‘Muppet Babies.’ So thanks, SpongeBob.
” Director Robert Eggers thanks SpongeBob for introducing younger people to #Nosferatu pic.twitter.com/HQgmQ4WEMR Count Orlok, who goes by the name Nosferatu in the show, has gone on to become a recurring character in “SpongeBob SquarePants” just as a younger version of the vampire named Kidferatu has called the spinoff show “Kamp Koral: SpongeBob’s Under Years” home.
The character wasn’t originally planned to make his Bikini Bottom debut in “Graveyard Shift,” either, but former “SpongeBob Squarepants” crew member Jay Lender wound up looping him into the episode. Lender, in a feature attached to the “Nautical Nonsense and Sponge Buddies” DVD, said there was a different gag in the episode where SpongeBob rips up a section of the floorboard in the Krusty Krab and says that he’s “delivering the mail to Floorboard Harry” at night . “And there’s a little guy under the floorboards who reaches up and grabs the mail and pulls it in, ‘Thanks,’” said Lender as he looked at storyboard art from the episode.
“This was going to be the end of the show. We used Nosferatu in the end but once upon a time, Floorboard Harry was going to be the guy who was flicking the light switch but we found out that Nosferatu was funnier.” Lender told Polygon in 2022 that he was a big fan of the magazine Famous Monsters of Filmland as a kid and recalled seeing a still of Count Orlok “standing in the doorway.
” “So my first experience with Orlok and with that image is as this disjointed non sequitur. When the moment came that I needed to come up with a replacement horror non sequitur, that image was already in that slot in my brain,” he said. Other news outlets have retreated behind paywalls.
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Already contributed? Log in to hide these messages. “What’s interesting is that because of SpongeBob, for 20 years, everyone else’s first experience with Orlok came as a weird disjointed non sequitur horror image too.” Eggers’ “Nosferatu,” featuring the beloved vampire that inspired the “SpongeBob SquarePants” bit, hits theaters on Christmas Day.
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