The Nosferatu Trailer Makes Vampires Scary Again

A family of Puritans banished by their colony encounters a dark supernatural entity in the woods. A young Viking prince sets out on a quest for revenge after being ousted during a coup staged by his uncle. Two horny weirdos are stuck living as roommates while tending a remote lighthouse. Time and time again, the characters in Robert Eggers' horror films are manipulated by exterior forces, only to discover that they themselves ultimately hold the key to either their downfall or salvation. Those themes of control and agency look to rear their head once more in "Nosferatu," the writer/director's remake of F.W. Murnau's silent 1922 vampire horror classic "Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror" (itself an unauthorized "Dracula" movie) and the second such retelling after Werner Herzog's 1979 "Nosferatu the Vampyre."

Eggers has made it plain that his goal is to make a legitimately scary vampire movie with "Nosferatu," and so far he appears to have done precisely that. With lots of spooky atmosphere and distressing images to spare, like a person casually biting the head off a live pigeon (!), the "Nosferatu" trailer does an excellent job of hyping up Bill Skarsgård's Count Orlok without fully bringing him into the sunlight (which is good since, y'know, sunlight and the Count notoriously don't get along). The trailer arrived with "The Bikeriders" in theaters and, unsurprisingly, leaked online shortly after, but you can now check out the official version, seen above.

Eggers' fingerprints are all over this trailer, from characters speaking in historical English (the filmmaker is famously a stickler for period accuracy) to the arresting visuals, including that shot of Count Orlok's remote manor on a dark and stormy night. The plot is described as "a gothic tale of obsession between a haunted young woman and the terrifying vampire infatuated with her, causing untold horror in its wake," which sounds like an intriguing revamping — hey oh! — of the original 1922 film (one that's also cut from the same cloth as Eggers' wild and creepy feature debut, "The Witch"). Sadly, Eggers' trusty leading lady, Anya Taylor-Joy, had to drop out of the movie due to scheduling conflicts, with Lily-Rose Depp taking her spot as the object of Orlok's "affections," Ellen Hutter.

Among those filling out the cast are Nicholas Hoult, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Simon McBurney, and Emma Corrin, along with Eggers' previous collaborators Willem Dafoe and Ralph Ineson. Dafoe, as it were, is playing what Eggers described to Entertainment Weekly as a "crazy vampire hunter," and even shot a scene featuring "real flames [and] 2,000 real rats." As adorable as the little critters are, the rodents in Murnau's original picture unleash a plague upon Germany after Orlok makes his way there from Transylvania (a nod to the real-life 1918-1920 flu). 100 years later and here we are, with another "Nosferatu" arriving on the heels of a devastating pandemic. You know how the Rust Cohle line goes.

"Nosferatu" opens in theaters on December 25, 2024. Pair this one with "The Lighthouse" for the ultimate Christmas double-feature.