The Northman is opening in theaters this weekend, but director Robert Eggers isn’t sitting on his laurels; he’s already contemplating where his new project might take him, and it seems quite likely that it may take him right back to New England, the setting of his movies The VVitch and The Lighthouse.
Eggers recently sat down with Collider for an interview, and spoke about his desire to do a third folk-horror movie set in his native New England. When pressed on whether he would be doing a sequel, or some other feature based in Norse mythology as his follow up to The Northman, Eggers replied, “I think I’m much more likely to make, which I would like to do, a third New England folk horror film at some point.”
While there’s no telling exactly how that would look, we can make a few suppositions. Eggers’ first feature, The VVitch, draws heavily on the pre-revolutionary history of New England, especially the mass hysteria surrounding the witch trials around Salem, Massachusetts in the late 1600s. Although Eggers is unlikely to return to the well of the witch trials and the hysteria surrounding them, the dark forests of pre-revolutionary America could contain quite its fair share of previously-unexamined haunts or horrors ripe for the filmmaker’s plucking.
Egger’s second film, The Lighthouse, focuses on the psychological horrors of solitude and shame, but the tentacle-y leitmotifs throughout the film smacked heavily of Eggers’ fellow New Englander, horror writer H.P. Lovecraft. Lovecraft wrote stories that dealt with horrors born of the occult, and from planets and realms beyond man’s reckoning. Although several of Lovecraft’s stories have been adapted to the screen to various degrees of success, Eggers could easily use them to assemble a pastiche or amalgam project, just as he used Norse mythology to inspire The Northman.
For instance, one of Lovecraft’s favorite set-pieces was the fictional-yet-infamous Miskatonic University of Arkham, Massachusetts, which appeared in The Dunwich Horror and Herbert West — Reanimator, both of which were later adapted as films. An Eggers film that focuses on a horror born of one of the hallowed ivy-covered halls of academia is not hard to imagine.
Of course, only Eggers himself knows what’s in the offing at this point. Whatever his next project is, his long-standing fans and the new wave sure to follow in the wake of The Northman will be waiting eagerly for the details.
