Popverse's top stories of the day

• Will Squid Game's record-breaking season 2 debut change Netflix's plan for a season 3 finale?
• 2025 is the year One Punch Man season 3 finally adapts the cosmically weird Monster Association Arc and I can't wait
• Hi-Diddily-Ho! It's the best (and the rest) Ned Flanders episodes of The Simpsons

Hands down, my favorite part of Robert Eggers's Nosferatu was Count Orlok's voice. The low vibrato? The accent? The way he grabbed those R's with both hands and just would not let go? Give Bill Skarsgård that Oscar, dammit. But even cooler than hearing the titular vampire read Eggers's (impressively period-appropriate) dialogue was when he he'd slip into that unfamiliar, ancient language that I couldn't place.

Well now, I know which language he was speaking. And, be still my reanimated monster heart, it was a dead one. According to Robert Eggers himself, Count Orlok was speaking an extinct dialect known as Dacian.

Eggers recently sat down for an interview with Stream Wars to discuss, among many things, the real-world inspirations that went into his latest film. At one point in the conversation, the interviewer asked the director about "the use of language in the film," to which Eggers gave an answer that proved his talent for research.

"When [Count Orlok is] doing his spells," Eggers told Stream Wars, "he speaks ancient Dacian, which is a dead language, and the Dacians were most likely the people who became the ethnic Romanians in Romania."

Eggers is dead right, pun intended - the Dacian people settled in the region that would become the modern Romania between the last century BCE and first AD. This not only gives historical accuracy to the film, but adds a chilling level of antiquity to Orlok's character - the last Dacian speakers probably died out around 500 AD, placing Orlok's age at the time of the film (the 1830s) at a minimum of some 1300 years. Perhaps coolest of all, this addition of Eggers's gives fans a way to dive further into the folklore behind the film as he did; they can even study the language themselves, if they're not too terrified.

After all, you can escape Nosferatu, but that owl from Duolingo? That is a monster.

Nosferatu is in theaters now.

In the immortal words of Danny Elfman, "Life's no fun without a good scare." We couldn't agree more, which is why we think you should check out horror aficionado Greg Silber's list of the best horror movies of all time. Or, if you've already seen those classics, check out our list of the most underrated horror movies from the past couple years. And if you've already seen all of those, Let us tell you what to look forward to (or dread) in Popverse's list of upcoming horror movies.