Nosferatu – Release Date, Cast, Director, And More Info

How did you come to know our lord and savior, Count Orlok? If you're of a certain age, your first exposure might have come from the "SpongeBob SquarePants" episode "Graveyard Shift," in which the rascally vampire kept secretly flickering the lights during the night shift at the Krusty Krab. Or maybe you watched "Shadow of the Vampire," E. Elias Merhige's darkly comedic 2000 fictional account about the making of F.W. Murnau's 1922 German Expressionist classic "Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror." Or perhaps you even saw Murnau's unauthorized "Dracula" adaptation itself or Werner Herzog's 1979 remake "Nosferatu the Vampyre" (which did away with any pretenses and just referred to Orlok as Count Dracula).

Whatever the case, Orlok has sunk his fangs deep into our collective pop-cultural consciousness these last 100-plus years. With his pallid visage, sunken eyes, and bald head, he just stands out from all those other blood-suckers, straddling the line between human beauty — as embodied by the flamboyant Lestat de Lioncourt, the brooding Edward Cullen, and, obviously, the Count from "Sesame Street" — and the vampire in its purely monstrous form. It's little wonder he's drawn the attention of Robert Eggers, a filmmaker who has quickly affixed himself as a connoisseur of folklore and macabre fairy tales with his first three features. That he's now having a go at re-imagining "Nosferatu" is cause for celebration in and of itself. But what can we expect from his retelling, exactly?

It's a Christmas miracle! Focus Features has announced that Robert Eggers' "Nosferatu" will slink up the stairs and into theaters on December 25, 2024. Notably, the production company and distributor is a division of Universal Pictures, which had already staked (no vampire punnery intended) a claim on that date for Jordan Peele's as-yet-untitled new horror film. But as marvelous as it would be if we got a double dose of scariness over the winter holidays, that probably means the latter movie will be moving at some point between then and now. Then again, scary ghost stories are as festive as they come, so perhaps the internet can work its magic and start hyping an Eggers-Peele double feature as the next "Barbenheimer" before Universal changes things up.

Either way, "Nosferatu" is on its way to becoming Eggers' second Christmas movie after "The Lighthouse." Tis the season for blood-draining and malevolence, after all.

If you know the bare-bones of "Dracula," then you also know the basic plot of "Nosferatu." The story follows a 19th-century German real estate agent, Thomas Hutter, as he travels to Transylvania to close a deal with his boss's new client Count Orlock, who turns out to be a literally blood-thirsty nightmare. Murnau's original film tapped into the general populace's then-fresh memories of the 1918-1920 flu pandemic, as Orlock unleashes a plague upon the locals after following Hutter home and preying on his wife, Ellen. It's a good thing there haven't been any recent global health crises for Eggers' remake to allude to, right? [Chuckles nervously]

In previous interviews, Eggers has suggested that Ellen will have more agency and a larger role to play in his retelling. The official synopsis also stresses this idea, describing the film as "a gothic tale of obsession between a haunted young woman and the terrifying vampire infatuated with her, causing untold horror in its wake."

For a long time, "Nosferatu" was poised to serve as Eggers' third collaboration with Anya Taylor-Joy after "The Witch" and "The Northman." (She also wanted to play the fanged mermaid in "The Lighthouse," but Eggers said no. Someone let Anya Taylor-Joy play a man-eating fishperson, dammit!) Alas, the incredibly busy actor was unable to star in the film by the time production finally got underway. Instead, Lily Rose-Depp is playing the key role of Ellen Hutter, with "It" star Bill Skarsgård once again going extra white in the face to play Count Orlok in the film.

Meanwhile, Eggers' returning collaborators Willem Dafoe (who, let us not forget, played a vampiric version of OG Count Orlok actor Max Schreck in "Shadow of the Vampire") and Ralph Ineson will co-star as Professor Albin Eberhart Von Franz and Dr. Wilhelm Sievers, with Nicholas Hoult playing Thomas Hutter. (Ideally, the newly-anointed Lex Luthor actor will have more luck with his return to the vampire genre than he did with the disappointing "Renfield.") Other cast members include Aaron Taylor-Johnson as Friedrich Harding, Simon McBurney as Herr Knock, and Emma Corrin as Anna Harding.

Technically, Eggers' "Nosferatu" will actually be the third remake of Murnau's original film after Herzog's version and director David Lee Fisher's "Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror." The latter, which you've probably never heard of before now (I certainly hadn't), integrates plates from Murnau's film, cleaning them up, adding CGI, and incorporating brand-new footage featuring creature actor legend Doug Jones as Count Orlok. Being more of an experiment than a full-blooded remake, Fisher's project is unlikely to see anything resembling a wide theatrical release (although it did premiere at the Emagine Theatre in Novi on November 11, 2023).

As for Eggers, he's been attached to direct a "Nosferatu" remake since 2015, well before "The Witch" bowed in theaters the following year. It's hard to think of a modern director better suited for the task than him, with his meticulous eye for period-accurate production design and iron-firm grasp of nightmarish atmosphere. And after the big-budget "Northman" saw Eggers having to recut and rework his original vision to make it more palatable to a wider audience, the lower-budgeted "Nosferatu" should allow him to return to the more handmade, weirder stylings of "The Witch" and "The Lighthouse." 

Eggers pours just as much historical research into crafting the dialogue for his films as he does the sets and props, so it's a comfort to know he's writing the screenplay for "Nosferatu." In addition, the filmmaker is serving as a producer alongside Jeff Robinov, John Graham, Eleanor Columbus, and Chris Columbus. 

You read that correctly: The director of "Home Alone" and "Home Alone 2," "Mrs. Doubtfire," and the most boring first two "Harry Potter" films has produced all of Eggers' films to date, save for "The Northman." Let's not forget that Chris Columbus also wrote "Gremlins" and nearly directed "Five Nights at Freddy's," so he's always had a fondness for the kind of mischievous horror that Eggers deals in. I'm not saying "Nosferatu" will go so far as to include farting and masturbation gags like "The Lighthouse," but if Eggers had taught us anything, it's that his own symphonies of terror tend to come with a healthy helping of bizarro humor on the side.