As you may recall, The Witch and The Lighthouse director Robert Eggers, whose new movie The Northman is soon on the way, has been loosely attached to direct a new take on the classic horror movie Nosferatu for several years now, and it was announced back in 2017 that Anya Taylor-Joy (The Witch, The Northman) would be starring in that upcoming movie.
It’s been a while since we’ve heard a peep about that potential project – the last update, in fact, came courtesy of a chat we had with Eggers back in 2019 – leading us to wonder if Eggers still plans on tackling Nosferatu. And if that movie does end up seeing the light of day, will Anya Taylor-Joy be starring in it? A whole lot can change in four years, after all.
We may have the answers to those questions this week, as a new Anya Taylor-Joy interview piece over on LA Times seems to suggest that Eggers’ Nosferatu is still very much on.
The site writes of Taylor-Joy, “Her schedule is booked solid for the next 2½ years, starting soon with The Menu, a dark comedy set in the world of exotic culinary culture directed by Mark Mylod (“Succession”) and then moving next year to Furiosa, George Miller’s prequel to Mad Max: Fury Road. After that, she’ll reunite with “Queen’s Gambit” writer-director Scott Frank for the thriller Laughter in the Dark and Eggers again in a reworking of the vampire classic Nosferatu, the latest collaboration in a partnership that began with her first “real film,” the unnerving 2016 horror movie The Witch.”
Mind you, Taylor-Joy doesn’t actually comment on the movie in the interview piece, so this could just be the LA Times reiterating past information about her role in Nosferatu, a project that hasn’t yet been 100% confirmed to be happening. But we’ll keep you posted.
Eggers mused about Nosferatu with Bloody Disgusting back in 2019, “I mean, that movie [Nosferatu] is really important to me for many reasons, but I think Nosferatu is closer to the folk vampire. The vampire played by Max Schreck is a combination of the folk vampire, of the literary vampire that actually has its roots in England before Germany, and also [has roots in] Albin Grau, the producer/production designer’s occultist theories on vampires. So he’s not a traditional folk vampire but it’s much closer to that than Stoker, even though obviously Stoker is using a lot of folklore that he’s researched to create his vampire. But Dracula is finally much more an extension of the literary vampire that was started by John Polidori, based on Byron.”
The 1922 silent movie followed the vampire Count Orlok, who wants to buy a house in Germany and becomes enamored with the real-estate agent’s wife. It was an unofficial adaptation of Bram Stoker’s “Dracula,” and Werner Herzog directed a 1979 remake.
