Anticipation for The Witch and The Northman director Robert Eggers' Nosferatu remake is at an all-time high following the recent release of a terrifying full trailer, and the filmmaker has now promised that Bill Skarsgard's new take on Count Orlok will make vampire's scary again.
Aside from a few brief glimpses and an unsettling look at his silhouette as he terrorizes his latest victim, the trailers have kept Orlok under wraps, but Eggers teases that our first proper look at the ancient blood-sucker will be worth the wait during a new interview with Total Film.
"We’ve gone all the way to Edward Cullen, where vampires are not scary. So how do we go in the complete opposite direction of that? Vampires were scary enough that people used to dig up corpses and chop them into bits and set them on fire."
"I think we deserve a scary, smelly corpse again," he adds.
The story, which is a loose adaptation of Bram Stoker's Dracula, will see the Count travel to Germany to stalk and seduce (lucky girl) a young woman named Ellen Sutter (Lily-Rose Depp), while her husband Thomas (Nicholas Hoult) remains a prisoner in Transylvania.
In the new image below, we see Thomas attempting to escape Orlock's castle. If you've read Dracula or seen any of the previous adaptations, you'll know there's a very good reason why he looks so terrified here, and that his experience with the creatures of the night leaves him a broken man.
Check out the new still at the link below, and have another look at the recently-released trailer.
F.W. Murnau directed the original 1922 classic, while Werner Herzog helmed a rather bizarre 1979 remake.
"Nosferatu tells a gothic tale of obsession between a haunted young woman in 19th century Germany and the ancient Transylvanian vampire who stalks her, bringing untold horror with him."
Nosferatu also stars Willem Dafoe, Aaron Taylor Johnson, Emma Corrin, Ralph Ineson, and Simon McBurney. The movie was recently given an official release date, and will arrive on Christmas Day, 2024.