‘Split’ Star Joins ‘The Witch’ Director’s Remake of ‘Nosferatu’

Director Robert Eggers and actress Anya Taylor-Joy struck success with their paranoia-driven tale of the supernatural with 2016’s The Witch, with the duo now in talks to collaborate again on a remake of 1922’s Nosferatu, according to Variety. Taylor-Joy also had a hit on her hands earlier this year when she starred in M. Night Shyamalan’s Split.

Audiences had polarizing reactions to The Witch, with some praising it for its deliberately paced depiction of Satanic paranoia in 1830s New England while others were disappointed with its subtleties and era-accurate dialogue. Regardless of whether you enjoyed The Witch, Eggers’ experience as a production designer before filling the director’s chair helped him convey a colonial family stuck in the middle of ominous and terrifying woods. Those skills at creating atmosphere and mood make him the perfect choice to update the tale of Count Orlok and his foreboding castle.

The filmmaker has been wanting to make the project for quite some time, having told IndieWire last year, “Nosferatu has a very close, magical connection for me.” In fact, Eggers points out he directed a stage version of Nosferatu when he was only 17 years old, but with his own spin on it. “It was very expressionist,” Eggers explains, “It was much more expressionist than the film is. It was Cabinet of Dr. Caligari style [German Expressionistic].”

Eggers has learned a lot since his original approach to the story, and says, “If I were to make the movie 17-year-old Rob was going to make of Nosferatu it would have been something between like The Nightmare Before Christmas and Sin City, whereas this is going to be the same approach as The Witch, where 1830s Biedermeier Baltic Germany needs to be articulated in a way that seems real.”

In the world of horror, no movie is sacred when it comes to filming a remake, and even Eggers expressed his initial doubts about accepting the project. “It feels ugly and blasphemous and egomaniacal and disgusting for a filmmaker in my place to do Nosferatu next,” he reveals. “I was really planning on waiting a while, but that’s how fate shook out.”

Rest assured that Eggers is just as invested in the project as anyone could be, with his connection to the film starting when he was just a kid. “I saw a picture of Max Schreck as Count Orlok in a book in my elementary school and I lost my mind,” Eggers clarified, and following the discovery of the image, he forced his mom to travel to a video store to rent a copy of the film.

This will be the second remake of Nosferatu, with the previous being 1979’s Nosferatu the Vampyre, directed by Werner Herzog and starring Klaus Kinski and Isabelle Adjani.