Lock your windows and bar your doors, because the first poster for Robert Eggers’ reimagining of Nosferatu is here, and it’s taking no prisoners. Bill Skarsgård’s monstrous vampire is on full display, a far cry from more palatable vampires of films past, slotting perfectly into the grey, bleak atmosphere Eggers is known for.
A poster release likely means we’ll be getting a new trailer soon, which is a relief after months of almost nothing but a couple of so-dark-they’re-almost-black stills of Nicholas Hoult and Lily-Rose Depp. The poster isn’t much better, to be fair, just a shadowy image of the titular vampire inviting you to “succumb to the darkness” — they really don’t want us to see anything but his hands, huh?
This obviously isn’t the first time Skarsgård has played a monster, having taken on the countenance of the evil Pennywise in both of Andy Muschietti’s IT films in 2017 and 2019. But he’s no stranger to the rest of the horror genre either, as he cut his teeth on the 2019 horror comedy Villains before starring in both Barbarian and the recent remake of The Crow.
Dafoe and Hoult, too, have had their fair share of horrific encounters on-screen, the latter facing off against a wholly different vampire in last year’s Renfield, while Dafoe’s currently starring in Beetlejuice Beetlejuice and reunites with his The Lighthouse director Eggers for his role in Nosferatu. It’s new territory for Depp and co-star Emma Corrin, however, though the latter’s turn as the mind-invading Cassandra Nova in Deadpool & Wolverine — distinctly not a horror film, but a chilling performance nonetheless — gives them a decent leg up when it comes to joining Eggers’ crew.
Eggers’ take on the classic vampire story — originally reimagined from Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula with the serial numbers scraped off — is more truly Gothic than the original 1922 film, described as a “tale of obsession between a haunted young woman and the terrifying vampire infatuated with her, causing untold horror in its wake.” What exactly that entails, we still don’t know, but based on Eggers’ track record, it certainly won’t be a story with a happy ending.
The film also stars Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Simon McBurney, and The First Omen star Ralph Ineson, with Eggers writing the screenplay as well as directing, and producers Jeff Robinov, John Graham, Chris Columbus, p.g.a., and Eleanor Columbus, p.g.a.
Get ready to be terrified by Nosferatu this Christmas, and check out the new poster below:
