Yes, ‘Nosferatu’ Director Robert Eggers Knows That ‘SpongeBob SquarePants’ Joke

Robert Eggers, the director of the 2024 remake of the classic silent film “Nosferatu,” confirmed Thursday that he is aware of Transylvanian vampire Count Orlok’s connection to Bikini Bottom.

Eggers — in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter at the premiere of his film in Los Angeles – was asked about “SpongeBob SquarePants” which introduced younger generations to the vampire, which was mainly seen the flickering of the lights at the end of the season two episode “Graveyard Shift.”

Eggers connected the way children know “Nosferatu” through the popular Nickelodeon show to how he learned cultural references from watching Jim Henson’s “Muppet Babies” growing up.

″[The show] would play little snippets of Lon Chaney’s ‘Ghost of the Opera‘ and early versions of ‘Cyrano de Bergerac‘ and all that,” Eggers noted.

“And actually, that weird cartoon gave me the opportunity to see a lot of the movies I saw when I was a little older, with memories of ‘Muppet Babies.’ So thanks, SpongeBob.

Count Orlok, who goes by the name Nosferatu in the show, has moved on become a recurring character in “SpongeBob SquarePants” just like one younger version of the vampire named Kidferatu has called the spin-off show “Kamp Koral: SpongeBob’s Under Years” home.

The character was also not originally supposed to make his Bikini Bottom debut in “Graveyard Shift,” but former “SpongeBob Squarepants” crew member Jay Lender eventually brought him into the episode.

Lender, in a position added to the DVD “Nautical Nonsense and Sponge Buddies”, said there was another joke in the episode where SpongeBob tears up part of the floorboard in the Krusty Krab and says he “delivers the mail to Floorboard Harry” at night.

“And there’s a little guy sitting under the floorboards reaching out and grabbing the mail and bringing it in, ‘thank you,’” Lender said as he looked at the storyboard art from the episode.

“This would be the end of the show. We ended up using Nosferatu, but at one time Floorboard Harry was going to be the guy who turned on the light switch, but we found that Nosferatu was funnier.

Lender said Polygoon in 2022 that as a child he was a big fan of the magazine Famous Monsters of Filmland and remembered seeing a still of Count Orlok ‘standing in the doorway’.

“So my first experience with Orlok and with that image is like this disjointed non sequitur. When the time came for me to come up with a replacement horror non sequitur, that image was already in that slot in my head,” he said.

“What’s interesting is that, thanks to SpongeBob, everyone else’s first experience with Orlok was also a strange, incoherent, non-sequitur horror picture for twenty years.”

Eggers’ “Nosferatu,” featuring the beloved vampire who inspired the “SpongeBob SquarePants” play, opens in theaters on Christmas Day.