Anya Taylor-Joy and Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu Revives the Strangest Movie Vampire

Dracula is the most prolific character in cinema. Really. Anya Taylor-Joy are at last remaking Nosferatu? Well, that’s a corpse of a different pallor… and one that’s eminently more sinister.

Yes, technically speaking, the director and star pair who made The Witch Nosferatu (1922). But they’re also exhuming a legacy more twisted than that. Which provides them a lot of leeway to get weird with archetypal vampires and the ancient spells they cast.

This stems from the fact that Murnau’s Nosferatu is not officially an adaptation of Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel. This detail was the result of a shady attempt by the German filmmakers to get around the novel’s copyright holder, Stoker’s widow Florence Balcombe. The scheme didn’t work. Nonetheless, it allowed Murnau to take what in 25 years had slowly become the definitive vampire yarn and reinterpret it into something infinitely more gruesome.

Released nearly a decade before Bela Lugosi successfully changed the vampire into a figure of sexual desire in Hollywood’s first Dracula adaptation, the silent Nosferatu went in a starkly different direction. The ‘22 film’s Count Orlok, portrayed with an unsettling pitifulness by actor Max Schreck, appeared as more of a walking cadaver than even Stoker’s literary creation. With sunken cheeks and rodent-like teeth, he was the manifestation of disease and pestilence—a decaying rat given human shape, and who brought the literal Black Death with him to .

More abstract than Stoker’s source material, the Expressionistic Nosferatu is a surreal nightmare from which the DNA of all horror cinema can be traced. And while future Dracula movies continued on an increasingly familiar path after Lugosi, the legacy of Count Orlok’s grotesque visage refused to go the same way. In fact, the first Nosferatu remake by writer-director Werner Herzog was even more artful and detached than Murnau’s film. Long cinematic sequences drenched in atmosphere and dread are built around just the image of Klaus Kinski’s vampire sailing down a river.

In ancient folklore, the vampire was neither a creature of desire or great intelligence. It was a wraith; a revenant back from the grave who existed only to leech off the living. Herzog leaned into that idea and found even a macabre serenity in it, recreating Renaissance paintings that lovingly embraced the baroque despair wrought by plagues. One of the film’s best visuals is of rats who traveled with the vampire to Wismar now swarming an outdoor feast’s table. In times of modern pandemic and renewed interest in outdoor dining, such imagery hits all the closer.

Kinski would reimagine this version again in Nosferatu a Venezia (1988), a schlocky Italian pseudo-sequel that moves yet further from traditional vampire storytelling, reinterpreting “Nosferatu” (as he’s now simply referred to in that film) as a creature of comfort; a demon lover who frees his prey from the dreariness of this mortal coil and the constraints of their youth.

That Robert Eggers of Eggers told us as much in 2019 when we asked him about whether he was still moving ahead with a Nosferatu remake then.

“I spent so many years and so much time, just so much blood on it, yeah, it would be a real shame if [Nosferatu] never happened,” Eggers said at the time. “But also, I don’t know, maybe Nosferatu doesn’t need to be made again, even though I’ve spent so much time on that.”

Apparently, Eggers couldn’t let the project go, even as his and frequent muse Anya Taylor-Joy’s profiles continued to rise. Indeed, Eggers’ The Lighthouse won several Independent Spirit Awards, including for Willem Dafoe’s performance and cinematography. Meanwhile Taylor-Joy’s career has skyrocketed in recent years thanks to roles in The Northman. And it was Taylor-Joy who revealed this week to The Los Angeles Times that she and Eggers are prepping their third collaboration: Nosferatu.

Which raises the question of what Eggers and Taylor-Joy might bring to the material. Likely it’d be something as rooted in ancient vampire lore as the witchy authenticity of their first film, and the nautical superstitions in The Lighthouse… but also perhaps something that can justify a third major interpretation of such a storied title. A Countess Orlok, perhaps? It’s easy to imagine both parties sinking their teeth into that kind of interpretation…