Nosferatu arrives in theaters a couple of days from now but an alleged first look at Bill Skarsgård's Count Orlok has just leaked online and...well, something tells us this will be divisive.
It's been said on several occasions that Skarsgård's version of the iconic vampire would be quite a bit different from what we've seen on screen before and that's definitely the case here. A little more grounded perhaps, this Orlok has a bushy moustache and what seems to be rotting flesh on his face.
His visage is undeniably terrifying, and while the shot being shared on social media isn't the clearest, this is bound to only increase interest in what's in store for us when the vampire is revealed in all his glory in theaters over the holidays.
While we can't say for sure that this is the real deal, accounts sharing it on X have been hit by copyright strikes.
Count Orlok has deliberately been kept under wraps in the marketing campaign for this new take on Nosferatu (the studio is keen for it not be to referred to as a "remake"), and filmmaker Robert Eggers' recent comments pointed to the movie featuring a drastic reinvention.
"Vampirism and Dracula is the thing that I’ve been thinking about and looking at for a long time," the director explained. "I had read Montague Summers [the clergyman scholar who wrote about the occult] as a teenager, and many other authors of vampire lore, but I think, until I set out to make Nosferatu, I was still too contaminated by the cinematic tropes."
"And so, you’re infusing things you’re reading with cinematic tropes that aren’t there. In doing the research to write this script, I needed to be disciplined to forget what I knew. And then, you start looking at the really early vampire accounts, and you’re like, ‘They’re not even drinking blood, they’re just strangling people, or suffocating people, or f*cking them to death.’ And that was really interesting."
"What would a dead Transylvanian nobleman actually look like?" Eggers continued. "That was basically where I started from, and I wanted to still acknowledge Max Schreck’s makeup design."
A new take on F. W. Murnau's 1922 version and Werner Herzog's take in 1979, Nosferatu is a gothic tale of obsession between a haunted young woman and the terrifying vampire infatuated with her, causing untold horror in its wake.
Written for the screen and directed by Robert Eggers, Nosferatu stars Bill Skarsgård, Nicholas Hoult, Lily-Rose Depp, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Emma Corrin, Ralph Ineson, Simon McBurney and Willem Dafoe.
The movie arrives in theaters on Christmas Day. You can view this apparent leak on Reddit (via FearHQ.com).
[IMAGE REMOVED AT THE REQUEST OF THE STUDIO]