How so?
One example is the early vampires from Balkan and Slavic lore very often didn’t drink blood. They would strangle their victims or fornicate with their victims to death. If they did drink blood, very often it was from the chest. It was this tale of obsession and love. It seemed like, OK, well, visually that seems like a nice poetic motif.
But then I was also thinking about where that folklore comes from. It’s people experiencing sleep paralysis, where they’re having a waking nightmare of this vampiric visitation. They have this pressure on their chest. So it also is grounded in a kind of reality, even though piercing the sternum with the vampire’s teeth is ludicrous. So it was fun to explore those kinds of things that would keep it kind of fresh, but also felt like it could be integrated into this world.
Was most of this film done with practical effects?
I mean there’s tons of CG effects in the movie, but you try to do all the big crazy stuff that would normally be done with CG practically. That way you can use the CG on fixing things and extending things, and you’re less aware of the sleight of hand because you’re not looking out for what looks fake, because the stuff that would normally be fake is real.
I ask because, working at WIRED, I think about AI a lot. With filmmaking, there’s a lot of talk of “AI could do this, AI could do that,” but I look at your films and I don’t think AI could do that. What do you also think about these things?
Guillermo del Toro’s statement that AI’s greatest achievement is to make “semi-compelling screensavers” is fair. AI, I think, is best used to inspire humans to do more human stuff. So that’s all I have to say about that.
I know we’re running out of time, but I have to ask: Which monsters are you going to tackle next?
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
I mean, I would love to see a Robert Eggers Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie.
Maybe I should omit that joke, because it’ll probably go fucking everywhere.
I mean, you already got SpongeBob a lot of press recently.