Ahead of the release of Nosferatu, director Robert Eggers has thanked an unlikely source for the enduring interest in the iconic vampire.

• READ MORE: ‘Nosferatu’ review: bloody, beautiful vampire remake is a bit of an empty vessel

The movie, which is set to release on December 25 in the US and January 3 in the UK, is a remake of the 1922 film of the same name, which in turn was based on Bram Stoker’s Dracula. It stars the likes of Bill Skarsgård, Nicholas Hoult, Lily-Rose Depp, Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Emma Corrin.

Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter on Thursday (December 12), The Northman director was made aware that Nickelodeon cartoon SpongeBob had introduced its young viewers to kids to the iconic vampire – also known as Count Orlok –  several times in the show.

Director Robert Eggers thanks SpongeBob for introducing younger people to #Nosferatu pic.twitter.com/HQgmQ4WEMR

— The Hollywood Reporter (@THR) December 13, 2024

He said he was familiar, explaining: “There was a show called Muppet Babies when I was a kid that would play little clips of Lon Chaney’s Phantom of the Opera and early versions of Cyrano de Bergerac and stuff; 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.”

Hoult, who plays Thomas Hutter in the movie, also chimed in, joking: “I’ve got to go back and watch more SpongeBob. And I like that that’s people’s introduction to it and hopefully this will be a reintroduction to it in a different way.”

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The actor recently joked about the film’s “big rat budget” and recalled wading through thousands of them while filming. “I think we had like 5,000 rats,” he said. “Some of them were trained as well. They were all trained, and I was like, ‘You couldn’t have trained all of them.’ There were certain pockets of them that were trained. And they were incontinent rats, so it was kinda stinky.”

He also shared a directorial quirk of Eggers’, namely that the cast were discouraged from moving their eyebrows while filming.

Nosferatu premiered at the Zoo Palast cinema in Berlin on December 2 and is set for release on December 25. In a three-star review, NME described the “bloody, beautiful vampire remake” as “a bit of an empty vessel,” and said: “What marks out Eggers’s take from the many adaptations of Dracula’s story is its visual style. The American filmmaker has rightfully earned a reputation for impressive looking movies but Nosferatu is perhaps the most beautiful film of the past 12 months.