Universal Pictures has announced that Robert Eggers’ new Nosferatu remake, starring Bill Skarsgard, Lily-Rose Depp, and Nicholas Hoult, would hit Indian theatres on Jan 10, 2025. A dark horror fantasy, the film is slated as a Christmas release in US theatres.
Eggers’ film is the latest among the many adaptations and iterations of the iconic Count Dracula from Bram Stoker’s famous novel, known as Nosferatu, aka Count Orlok, in the character’s first appearance in F.W. Murnau’s silent classic, Nosferatu. Filmmaker Werner Herzog gave the character a fresh spin in his 1979 film Nosferatu the Vampyre, starring Klaus Kinski as the titular monster. In 1992, Francis Ford Coppola made his version, titled Bram Stoker’s Dracula.
Eggers’ film is said to be directly inspired by the Murnau and the Coppola films but with his own distinct take on the story and character.
In a recent interaction between Eggers and Skarsgard for Another magazine, the former recalled the first time he watched the Murnau film and having a strangely memorable experience. “I saw it for the first time when I was very young. My dad showed it to me—I was probably too young to understand what it was, but it was unlike other silent films. The runtime was accessible to a child, and I knew that it was a significant film. It shook me. Ironically, in a short silent film I did in Sweden when I was 16 or 17, my character’s name was Teenage Nosferatu.”
Skarsgard expressed ‘complete shock’ at being cast in film
In the interview, Skarsgard mentions being in “complete shock” when Eggers contacted him to play Count Orlok since the duo had planned to work together earlier but couldn’t on account of unforeseeable circumstances.
Talking to Eggers, the actor, familiar to audiences from the IT films and John Wick 4, says that the two “spoke on the phone a lot” and exchanged ideas about the character and his look, with Eggers sharing his own concept art and a backstory. “So I put myself on tape for it. It was so abstract—we had ten days where I would just record things and send you voice memos and little things I was exploring. And you would gently steer me off certain things, towards different things.”
