Count Orlok Is Coming in the First Trailer for Robert Egger’s Nosferatu

Universal Pictures and Focus Features have finally released a trailer for Robert Eggers’ long-awaited remake of F.W. Murnau’s 1922 horror film, Nosferatu. Take a look:

As you may have noticed, the trailer is deliberately withholding of Bill Skarsgård’s Count Orlok, with various characters simply intoning he’s “coming”—and this Christmas, no less.

Nosferatu is a passion project for director Eggers; a 2016 Indiewire interview quotes him as saying it “feels ugly and blasphemous and egomaniacal and disgusting” for “a filmmaker in [his] place” to remake Murnau’s 102-year old classic. Especially considering Werner Herzog already knocked it out of the park with his 1979 remake, Nosferatu the Vampyre, starring Isabelle Adjani and Klaus Kinski— and don’t forget that movie’s incredible soundtrack by the German progressive rock group Popul Vuh. Nosferatu 2024 composer Robin Carolan will also have a lot to live up to in light of the film’s legacy.

What do you think? Will Bill Skarsgård’s performance hold to candle to Max Schreck’s? Can Eggers capture the Murnau film’s lingering sense of dread? Perhaps its best not to compare. To quote the original, “beware that his shadow doth not burden your dreams with horrible fears.”

Nosferatu stars Bill Skarsgård as Count Orlok, Nicholas Hoult as Thomas Hutter, Lily-Rose Depp as Ellen Hutter, Aaron Taylor-Johnson as Friedrich Harding, Emma Corrin as Anna Harding, Willem Dafoe as Professor Albin Eberhart Von Franz, Simon McBurney as Herr Knock, and Ralph Ineson as Dr. Wilhelm Sievers. As previously mentioned, it’s currently scheduled for a December 25 theatrical release date.

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