Robert Eggers, the writer-director behind The Witch, The Lighthouse and The Northman, has always wanted to do a movie about that blood-sucking creature of the night, (The?) Nosferatu, a.k.a. Dracula. While previous attempts have failed, it looks like his dream project is moving forward once again.
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According to Deadline, Eggers has brought his vampiric project over to Focus Features and has Bill Skarsgard—an actor with many roles under his belt, including the clownish Pennywise in IT—on board to play Nosferatu himself. Lily-Rose Depp (Voyagers, Silent Night) is also in talks to co-star in the film.
Nosferatu has been Eggers white whale as a writer-director. During an interview this April with on WTF with Marc Maron, he shared that he’s tried to make a Nosferatu film twice and failed, and that maybe the gods of Nosferatu films past (the 1922 silent version being pictured above) were trying to tell him to forget about it.
Eggers’ most recent attempt was back in 2019 when Harry Styles and Anya Taylor-Joy were attached to the movie, which was then at the production company Studio 8. That effort reportedly halted because of budget and talent schedule challenges, but Eggers didn’t take his own advice and walk away.
For this new effort, Taylor-Joy had to bow out when it was revived at Focus due to scheduling challenges; Skarsgard was loosely attached back in 2019 and was nailed down to take part in this version. No news yet on whether Styles will be in the latest iteration of the project as well.
With Nosferatu back on track, let’s hope that Eggers will finally get to make the movie he’s always wanted. Things are still early days, however, so we’ll have to see how the writer-directors vampiric ambitions pan out.
