The “seminal” Arnold Schwarzenegger movie that inspired Robert Eggers

It’s safe to say that most contemporary filmmakers will always draw inspiration from films of the 1980s. Many will have been born or grown up in the decade, making it a source of nostalgia and possibly their introduction to cinema. Not to mention the sheer volume of films from the decade, making it easy to find even the most unlikely of inspiration. However, it’s unlikely that anyone would come away from one of Robert Eggers’ historical horror films thinking about the Power decade.

But the auteur is a complex individual with a myriad of influences, often citing both the 1922 German Expressionist horror film Nosferatu and the 1983 documentary From Star Wars to Jedi: The Making of a Saga as his major influences. Ah, the duality of man.

For his 10th-century Viking epic The Northman, Eggers had an unexpected subconscious inspiration stemming from the ’80s obsession with muscle-bound action movies. Of course, his first inspirations were a bit more mythic and academic. Encouraged by his wife to read the Icelandic sagas, he came away from their trip to the country knowing he wanted to make a Viking film. Then came Hamlet and the 13th-century History of the Danes folktale it was inspired by.

But who can watch Eggers’s blood-soaked and barbaric The Northman without conjuring up images of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Conan the Barbarian? Speaking to Filmmaker Magazine, Eggers said of the 1982 Arnie flick, “Conan wasn’t something I was consciously trying to reference, but it was a very seminal film for myself as a kid and for Sjón as a teenager. I think it’s OK that there are a lot of unconscious Conan references in the film, but if someone were to rewatch Conan within the [next] year, they might think, ‘Wow, there is a lot [of Conan] in The Northman!’”.

So while Eggers can often take an academic approach to his films—which is still evident here with the Shakespearean moments of the film—he isn’t one to shy away from the more mainstream, campy influences that we have all internalised. He hopes that those influences are alchemised and absorbed to create something entirely new.

However, what is not new is the criticism that is often levelled at films that depict violence in an unadulterated way. And while Eggers’ gore certainly plays into the brutal reality of Viking life more than the campy, over-the-top violence of Conan, both films were criticised for their heavy use of violence. So, there’s another point for its similarities to films of the ‘80s.

Even Eggers himself laughs at how the film sometimes “feels like an ’80s or ’90s movie that has been directed by a semi-talented Soviet auteur… against his wishes”. This is an astute reading of the film, especially in that Eggers himself seems to have become somewhat of a reluctant auteur of ‘80s violence himself.

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