Buckle up: Robert Eggers is back on his horror game. The filmmaker began his big-screen career with The Witch, delivering nightmarish images and a thrum of all-out dread. And while his other features, The Lighthouse and The Northman, boasted considerable horror inflections, his latest work sends him back into the deepest darkness – a new take on legendary vampire pic Nosferatu, looking set to deliver all-out gothic horror on a grand scale. This one stars the ever-shapeshifting Bill Skarsgard as the creature, with Lily-Rose Depp as Ellen Hunter, and Nicholas Hoult as her husband Thomas. Take a look at the nerve-shredding trailer here:
Phew! Eggers is really back in business with this one, working on an impressive scale while conjuring an intimate sense of fear. The icy-blue night scenes deliver a deathly chill; the Victorian setting looks lavishly realised; and there are ominous candle-lit tableaus that hark back to the eerie compositions of The Witch. This trailer is more vibes than plot – but what vibes! – though Nosferatu is a generally Dracula-adjacent tale (Murnau’s original was an unofficial Bram Stoker adaptation), with Depp’s Ellen being haunted by the vampiric spectre of Count Orlok. Elsewhere the cast here includes Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Emma Corrin, plus Eggers regulars Willem Dafoe and Ralph Ineson.
Fingers crossed, then, we’ll be in for a full-strength Robert Eggers experience with this one – perfect fare for, um, a Christmas Day release. Death the halls with boughs of garlic, people.