Robert Eggers has become perhaps the most acclaimed horror film director in the movie industry, in part because of his insistence on authenticity. Eggers’ well-known and popular films, including The Witch (2015), The Lighthouse (2019) and The Northman (2022), have all been set in non-contemporary historical periods, and the director has gone to great lengths to ensure that his re-creations of the past are realistic and accurate right down to the last detail.
This approach has continued in the director’s new hit feature film, his stylish and frightening 2024 remake of the silent-movie era classic Nosferatu. In this reimagined version of one of horror fiction’s most well-known tales, the movie’s lead character is an ancient vampire who speaks an extinct Balkan region language known as Dacian, which hasn’t been uttered in the real world for more than 1,500 years.
Count Orlok, an Eerie Visitor from a Forgotten Era
The movie is set in the year 1838, preserving the 19th century Transylvania setting introduced in the classic novel upon which Nosferatu is ultimately based, Bram Stoker’s Dracula. The supernatural antagonist in the movie, the grotesque and dreadful Count Orlok, is an ancient vampire who was born hundreds of years before the 19th century, which is why (if he were a real person) he would not have been a native Romanian speaker.
While most people wouldn’t have known the difference if Orlok had spoken modern Romanian, Robert Eggers simply doesn’t roll that way, which is he he chose Dacian as the count’s native tongue.
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It seems that Orlok was born sometime in the early part of the first millennium AD (the exact date is somewhat murky), and that is why Eggers chose to have the count speak a language that disappeared from Romania, and from the world altogether, sometime around the year 500 AD.
Bran Castle, also known as Dracula’s Castle, in Transylvania, from where both Counts Orlok and Dracula hail. (Calatorinlume/Public Domain).
"Orlok is an ancient noble, predating even the foundations of the Romanian Empire,” Eggers stated, in explaining his choice of this forgotten language. “He needed a voice that felt as timeless and forgotten as his own existence. Dacian was perfect—it’s a spectral presence, much like Orlok himself."
Eggers’ selection of Dacian as Orlok’s language certainly reinforces his reputation for valuing authenticity above anything else. Dacian is an ancient Indo-European language that was widely spoken in the Carpathian Mountain region in the distant past, and in the Transylvania subregion that has been made so famous by the vampire legend.
As uttered by actor Bill Skarsgård, the man cast to bring Count Orlok to life, Dacian is introduced as a distinctive language with a ear-catching guttural aspect, making it difficult to mistake for any language commonly spoke today.
Romanian, the language spoken in the region now, evolved gradually following the Roman Empire’s conquest of the kingdom of Dacia in the year 106 AD. Dacia had formed as a nation in the early first century BC, and it’s territory spanned the borders of present-day Romania plus parts of Bulgaria, Serbia, Moldova, Hungary, Slovakia, and Ukraine (with the Carpathian Mountains and Transylvania right in the center).
With the changing of the guard that saw Romanian lands fall under the rule of the Romans, the Dacian language was doomed. But now that extinct language has been resurrected in a fictional setting, and the words coming from Count Orlok’s mouth in the movie are indeed real words derived from the actual Dacian lexicon.
Bringing Dacian Back to Life
In the lead up to the filming of Nosferatu, Robert Eggers consulted with historians and linguists to reconstruct as much of Dacian as he could. Unfortunately there are only fragments of the language preserved in various Greek and Latin historical texts, meaning the director didn’t have access to anything close to a full Dacian vocabulary. Nevertheless, these fragments provided enough raw material for the purposes of the film.
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The Dacians who settled in the lands of modern Romania were a Thracian tribe, native to Central and Eastern Europe, and their language was derived from an older form of Thracian spoken in the Balkans region far back into antiquity.
While languages like Dacian and the original Thracian are believed to belong to the Indo-European family, the bits and pieces that have survived have not revealed much about grammatical customs or structures, making interpretation complicated. Many of the words that have survived seem to refer to places and people, and do reveal some details about the language’s structure. Words such as brânză ("cheese") and mal ("riverbank") in Romanian are thought to have Dacian origins, so the language did leave at least some imprint on its replacement.
Image of Count Orlok, taken from the 1922 silent film Nosferatu. (Public Domain).
Bringing Dacian to life in Nosferatu required a lot of effort. Eggers hired Romanian screenwriter Florin Lăzărescu and consulted with linguists specializing in extinct Balkan languages in an attempt to make the movie’s version of Dacian as close to the original as possible.
The use of Dacian extended beyond Orlock’s dialogue. Eggers actually integrated the language into the film’s score, with the choir chanting in Dacian during several scenes. These chants were created by the score’s composer Mark Korven, who like the director worked closely with linguists to create musical lyrics that would sound like an ancient European tongue.
Recreating the Ancient Past Through the Use of Language
Interestingly, this is not the first time the makers of a movie have resurrected a lost language to incorporate into their work.
In the 2021 Marvel Cinematic Universe film Eternals, the lead characters were time-traveling immortals who spoke ancient Babylonian, or Akkadian, using words that had been recovered from 3,000-year old texts. That movie was not very successful (unlike Nosferatu), but its efforts to reconstruct a dead language from the ancient past did add an air of authenticity to an otherwise fantastical premise.
The use of the Dacian language in Nosferatu undoubtedly adds to the haunting atmosphere of the movie, and to the feelings of strangeness and alienness that define its main character. Count Orlok is a living relic of a long-lost time and place, one that exists now only as a vague echo well-disguised inside the modern Romanian culture. In the movie Orlok brings that dead culture back to life for a couple of hours, in a way that seems far more realistic and believable because of the ethereal ancient language that he speaks.
Top Image: From a stage play of ‘Nosferatu.’
Source: Javier Armas/Flickr/CC BY-SA 2.0)
By Nathan Falde
