Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About the Rats in Nosferatu

Nosferatu has no shortage of harrowing human performances, but let’s be honest — this movie’s many, many rat actors are the ones who make our skin crawl. A physical manifestation of Count Orlok’s pestilence, these rodents have a ball running around, crawling all over people, and pretending to eat them alive. But what is it like to direct live rats? To find out, we had to go straight to the source — director Robert Eggers and head animal trainers Jáchym and Ota Bareš from Fauna Film.

The thing about rats, the Barešes said in an email, is that they’re very smart and sociable — until you put too many of them in a room: “When working with a big group, they all of a sudden lose their intelligence in the anonymity of the crowd and are very hard to coordinate and motivate.”

Most of the rats used in this film are brown rats — the most common breed in the film world. They were housed at one of Fauna Film’s facilities. “We built these sort of pools in one of our halls where they were kept and trained,” the Barešes said. The acting rats, who learned how to run on cue, stayed in Fauna’s training studio, where they trained on the production’s set pieces.

As for why live rats are worth the effort over their always compliant CGI brethren? “It really makes the experience from seeing the film feel more real and immersive,” the Barešes said. “Sometimes, they just behave naturally and don’t do what’s expected of them, but that can also be an upside.”

Nosferatu employed 2,000 rat actors.
You know what they say — it takes a village (of rats). Speaking with Vulture, Eggers estimated that his production used 2,000 live rats. In some more populated shots, CG scans of living, breathing rats helped fill the background.

In most cases, the rats were trained to enter and leave on cue. “But when there’s just, like, thousands of rats squirming around,” Eggers acknowledged, they become a little harder to direct. “You have plexiglass enclosures that you can’t see to keep the rats safe, and they just sort of do their rat thing.”

Outdoor scenes with rats are better than indoor scenes with rats.
Rats like to “mark” everywhere they go, which is a nice way to say that they pee on everything. They’re also prolific poop machines. Because of this, as one might imagine, outdoor scenes became easier to film than indoor scenes.

“Outside, you really couldn’t smell it unless you got real close,” the Barešes said. But during the crypt scenes, they had to heat the set because rats don’t like sitting out in the cold: “All that warm air in combination with the rats really made the room smell bad. You could really smell the strong odor of ammonia in the room.” Charming!

Rats are not dangerous scene partners — but they might “mark” you.
To the trainers’ surprise, no one in the Nosferatu cast was afraid of the rats during their initial meet and greets. Still, some actors had to get more up close and personal than others. Emma Corrin — who plays Anna Harding, best friend to Lily-Rose Depp’s Ellen Hutter — had to film a scene covered in rats that crawled on their bare chest. At the time, the trainers admit, no one thought Corrin could do it — and, to be fair, once the rats urinated and defecated on them, there’s a good chance they wished they hadn’t. Still, Corrin powered through, delivering one of the most intense and spine-tingling moments in the film.

Rats are talented improvisers.
Just like humans, rats sometimes want to steal the show. In one scene, Bill Skarsgård had to lay in a closed coffin snuggled up against some 30 rats. The coffin had to be closed before each take, and its heavy lid required a few people to open. During one take, Skarsgård began yelling from under the closed lid, but no one could make out what he was saying. When they finally pried the lid off, there he was, with a rat sitting on his forehead ready for its close-up.

It gets worse: Apparently, some of the rats also wanted to “check on” Skarsgård’s teeth — a nightmare image that will remain seared into our minds for eternity.

How do you motivate 2,000 rats? Help them avoid being perceived.
Rats are clever creatures with incredible memories, and like many of us, they’ll work harder if you reward their efforts with a little treat. When working with one or a few rats, snacks like nuts, seeds, and fruit often do the trick. But when you’re corralling a whole mischief (that’s how one describes a group of rats), things get trickier and more competitive. Thankfully, rats also love to run and hide in dark places. So on Nosferatu, the Barešes motivated their animal actors to run from one place to another by letting them scurry into their rat houses, which are basically boxes where they can feel safe.

The races to the rat houses revealed that some rodents on set were more motivated than others. One group of 15 female rats, brighter in color than the rest, kept zooming past the others to make it into the houses first, making the rest of their furry colleagues look like slowpokes. In certain scenes, the trainers had to bench these ladies to maintain a uniform speed onscreen. As for how they knew who was who? They labeled some of the rats underneath their tails for easy identification.

Rat safety meetings are crucial.
The key to rat safety on the Nosferatu set? Planning and plexiglass.

The trainers held meetings during preproduction to ensure they’d accounted for all necessary safety precautions. “It was really helpful that Robert had everything planned out and he knew what exactly he wanted,” the Barešes said. The director even provided storyboards for the team to follow — an extra collaborative step that made their jobs easier. Scenes were rehearsed days before shooting, so the trainers knew exactly what the setup would look like.

“When working with the rats, we always kept minimum crew on set,” the Barešes said. “Only cast members and handlers were allowed to enter areas with rats.”

For each day the critters showed up to work, the trainers held a safety meeting to make sure everything ran smoothly. Resting areas were erected off set to avoid overworking the rats, who had access to food and water at all times. They rode from place to place in rodent boxes in groups of ten to ensure they had adequate space, and the loading-unloading process, in particular, could be grueling — in part because the rat handlers needed to check each rat to make sure it was healthy enough to go to set. During filming, the production corralled the rats using plexiglass barriers that were invisible to the camera — which is why none ever turned up at craft services.

The ship scene was the hardest to prep.
The rat team needed six months to train all of the rats to enter on cue during the scene where they exit the ship. “Rats naturally run alongside walls, where they feel safer,” said the Barešes. “So they were taught to run in open spaces first.” They had a few set pieces from the production at their facility to help the rats feel more comfortable with their surroundings during filming, and they spent about a week training the rats on the actual set at the backlot. “It’s really important to give the rats their time to smell the set and mark their paths along which they run,” the pair said.

Still, this scene was challenging — largely because the more rats you use at a time, the harder it is to get them to move anywhere at all. “One rat will never take the lead of the rest of the group,” the Barešes said. “But one rat can easily stop a whole army of rats for no reason at all. Only thing we could do is to take the rat out and try again.”

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