Movies
At This Point, Even Robert Eggers Isn’t Sure His ‘Nosferatu’ Movie Will Come to Life
Especially with The Northman coming to theaters this month, we’ve been getting a lot of questions about a planned remake of Nosferatu from director Robert Eggers, and we’ve never really had much of an answer there because the project seems to always disappear as soon as it’s brought up. As it turns out, even Eggers himself isn’t sure it’s ever going to happen.
It was announced all the way back in 2017 that Anya Taylor-Joy (The Witch, The Northman) would be starring in an Eggers-directed Nosferatu movie, and we had heard more recently that the project had started to take shape… before the pre-production process was halted. As you may recall, we also recently learned that Harry Styles had to drop out of the project.
So what’s the current status of Robert Eggers’s Nosferatu? “Dude, I don’t know,” Eggers tells Indiewire this week, getting straight to the point. “It’s fallen apart twice. I’ve been trying to get the word out because the word did carry that Harry Styles was going to be in the movie. I just want to be clear that he was going to be Hutter and not Nosferatu himself. “
Eggers continues, “I’ve been trying so hard. And I just wonder if [F.W.] Murnau’s ghost is telling me, like, you should stop.” Murnau of course directed the original classic.
Meanwhile, in a separate interview with Slash Film this week, Eggers notes that if his Nosferatu project ever does come to life, he’d love to re-team with Willem Dafoe (The Lighthouse) on it. Mind you, that doesn’t mean Eggers would cast Dafoe as Nosferatu, a role that the actor already played so memorably back in 2000 in the movie Shadow of the Vampire.
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.
Universal has been having a hell of a time getting their Universal Monsters brand back on a better path in the wake of the Dark Universe collapsing, with four movies thus far released in the years since The Mummy attempted to get that interconnected universe off the ground.
First was Leigh Whannell’s The Invisible Man, to date the only post-Mummy hit for the Universal Monsters, followed by The Last Voyage of the Demeter, Renfield, and now Abigail. The latter three films have attempted to bring Dracula back to the screen in fresh ways, but both Demeter and Renfield severely underperformed at the box office. And while Abigail is a far better vampire movie than those two, it’s unfortunately also struggling to turn a profit.
Where does the Universal Monsters brand go from here? The good news is that Universal and Blumhouse have once again enlisted the help of Leigh Whannell for their upcoming Wolf Man reboot, which is howling its way into theaters in January 2025. This is good news, of course, because Whannell’s Invisible Man was the best – and certainly most profitable – of the post-Dark Universe movies that Universal has been able to conjure up. The film ended its worldwide run with $144 million back in 2020, a massive win considering the $7 million budget.
Given the film was such a success, you may wondering why The Invisible Man 2 hasn’t come along in these past four years. But the wait for that sequel may be coming to an end.
Speaking with the Happy Sad Confused podcast this week, The Invisible Man star Elisabeth Moss notes that she feels “very good” about the sequel’s development at this point in time.
“Blumhouse and my production company [Love & Squalor Pictures]… we are closer than we have ever been to cracking it,” Moss updates this week. “And I feel very good about it.”
She adds, “We are very much intent on continuing that story.”
At the end of the 2020 movie, Elisabeth Moss’s heroine Cecilia Kass uses her stalker’s high-tech invisibility suit to kill him, now in possession of the technology that ruined her life.
Stay tuned for more on The Invisible Man 2 as we learn it.
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