Robert Eggers, director of The Witch, spoke with IndieWire’s Filmmaker Toolkit Podcast, and revealed that his next film will be a remake of Nosferatu from 1922.
“[It’s shocking] to me,” said Eggers. “It feels ugly and blasphemous and egomaniacal and disgusting for a filmmaker in my place to do ‘Nosferatu’ next. I was really planning on waiting a while, but that’s how fate shook out.”
This is set to happen just after Eggers had a hit with The Witch in 2016, a supernatural horror film which focuses on a 16 century family getting torn apart by a coven of witches.
Nosferatu is a 1922 adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, one with names and locations changed so that the film could get away with the copyrighted material of the book. This included Count Dracula’s name being changed to Count Orlock, a character once played by Max Shreck.
And this won’t make it the first time it’s been remade, either. The film was previously remade in 1979 as Nosferatu the Vampyre, directed by Werner Herzog, and featured Klaus Kinski as the iconic vampire.
Although Eggers is still a fairly inexperienced director, I have no doubts with him retelling this classic story. He’s clearly a capable director, as proven with The Witch; a film that created a beautifully haunting world and visuals that were wonderfully vintage. I would even go as far as to say it has many atmospheric similarities with Nosferatu. And the thought of him doing to vampires what he did with witches is nothing short of exciting. The horror genre sure can use some new life in these tired monsters… And Eggers is the man to do it.
Source: IndieWire