This winter Robert Eggers’s gothic horror remake Nosferatu will unleash onto the world, but it has been a long time coming for the director who has been wanting to reimagine the 1922 classic for quite some time. In fact, the helmer says he almost shot it straight after his 2015 break-out film The Witch.
However, Eggers is ultimately glad he didn’t as he told GamesRadar+ at the UK premiere of Nosferatu, “I’ve just grown so much as a filmmaker. I’ve become more fluid with my collaborators. We’re further extensions of each other, you know. It just wouldn’t have been as good.”
But really, Eggers’s Nosferatu could have come about during any point in the director’s life as he says he has been obsessed with the story ever since he saw the ’20s flick at just seven years old. “They turned [Bram] Stoker’s novel into a very enigmatic and simple fairy tale,” says the director of the silent movie. “And I think as an adult, that’s the thing that stuck with me the most.”
Starring an unrecognizable Bill Skarsgård as the terrifying Count Orlok, Eggers’s Nosferatu is a classic gothic tale of supernatural seduction following a young woman in 19th-century Germany and the ancient Transylvanian vampire obsessed with her. The film is based on Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror, which is in turn an unauthorized adaptation of Stoker’s legendary 1897 novel Dracula.
But Eggers states that his film is not a straight remake. Although he admires “the haunting atmosphere of the original film,” in particular “Max Schreck’s performance as the vampire, his iconic look,” he ultimately decided to go for something different. From the glimpse we get at Skarsgård in the Nosferatu trailer, we can already tell Eggers’s version of the Count is vastly different from anything we have seen before. And, luckily for horror fans, much more terrifying.
Star Ralph Ineson who plays Doctor Wilhelm Sievers in Nosferatu, also starred in Eggers’s The Witch as Anya Taylor-Joy’s protagonist Thomasin’s father. When asked how his experience shooting the Dracula flick compares to The Witch almost a whole decade on, the star said despite having the same team behind Eggers, Nosferatu is “just on a much, much bigger scale, a much grander scale. But the passion and the eye for detail is exactly the same as it always was.”
As well as Skarsgård and Ineson, the cast of Nosferatu also includes Lily-Rose Depp as Ellen Hutter, Nicholas Hoult as Thomas Hutter, Willem Dafoe as Professor Albin Eberhart Von Franz, Emma Corrin as Anna Harding, Aaron Taylor-Johnson as Friedrich Harding, and Simon McBurney as Herr Knock.
Nosferatu hits US theaters on December 25 and UK cinemas on January 1, 2025. Until then, read our Nosferatu review for more on Eggers’s gothic tale, or keep up with other upcoming horror movies.