The talented American actors and directors Willem Dafoe and Robert Eggers are reportedly working together on the next remake of F. W. Murnau’s 1922 classic, Nosferatu.
According to Deadline, Dafoe will join Lily Rose-Depp, Bill Skarsgard, and Nicholas Hoult in the ensemble. Dafoe and Eggers have previously worked together on the films The Lighthouse from 2019 and The Northman from 2022.
Eggers’ story follows a young woman (Depp) in 19th-century Germany who becomes the victim of an old Transylvanian vampire, drawing heavily on the 1922 original (Skarsgard).
Significantly, the part will take Dafoe back in time. In the bizarre historical drama Shadow of the Vampire, which chronicled the production of Murnau’s Nosferatu and Max Schreck’s incredible devotion to his role, Dafoe played the blood-sucking antagonist.
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When the movie was released around the turn of the new century, it received mixed reviews from reviewers and went unnoticed. It also starred John Malkovich, Udo Kier, Cary Elwes, and Eddie Izzard.
In conversation with Rotten Tomatoes, Eggers discusses his love of Nosferatu and the German filmmaker F. W. Murnau, stating: “He’s responsible for some of the best images in cinema of all time, from Nosferatu to Faust to Sunset. His work was so influential that filmmakers generations later can be referencing Murnau without knowing it”. While Murnau made several classic films, it is Nosferatu that Eggers holds so dear.
“There are horror movies before it, obviously — Nosferatu invents horror movies. The editing of the parallel story together in some ways invents cinema,” Eggers gushes, heralding the film for sparking the cultural obsession with cinema’s most terrifying genre.
The 1922 original still haunts audiences to this very day, with Eggers being the perfect filmmaker to update the chilling tale.
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