Variety is reporting that Anya Taylor-Joy will reunite with Robert Eggers, her director on The Witch, for his upcoming remake of Nosferatu. Chris Columbus (Home Alone, Harry Potter) will produce the film, alongside Eleanor Columbus, Jay Van Hoy, Lars Knudsen, and John Silk. Eggers is also writing the film, which will presumably see a monstrous vampire wrecking havoc upon a populated area after leaving his decrepit Transylvanian abode.
The project is set-up at Studio 8, which is also home to another in-development Eggers project, The Knight. The filmmaker is expected to make Nosferatu first, although production will have to wait until Taylor-Joy is free. The actress is currently filming Josh Boone’s X-Men: The New Mutants for Fox, where she plays the Marvel character Magik. Taylor-Joy is currently slated to move on to M. Night Shyamalan’s Glass afterward, where she will reprise her Split role of Casey Cooke for the final installment in the Unbreakable trilogy. Nosferatu could presumably shoot early next year once she wraps her time on Glass.
Nosferatu is one of the early silent era horror films and one which continues to influence the genre to this day. Directed by F.W. Murnau (The Last Laugh) in 1922, the Max Schreck-starring film was an unlicensed adaptation of Bram Stoker’s classic vampire novel, Dracula. An intense legal battle with the Stoker estate ensued in the wake of its success, one that almost saw all copies of the film destroyed. The film was first remade in 1979 by famed filmmaker Werner Herzog, with a cast that included Isabelle Adjani (Possession), Bruno Ganz (Wings of Desire), and the infamous Klaus Kinski (Aguirre, the Wrath of God), who is pictured above. A loose sequel followed almost a decade later in the form of 1988’s Nosferatu in Venice, with only Kinski returning.
While not a remake, 2000’s Shadow of a Vampire chronicles the making of the Murnau film, while also serving as a horror satire. An underrated film, the E. Elias Merhige-directed feature sees John Malkovich portraying Murnau, with Willem Dafoe taking on the role of Max Schreck, who is depicted as actually being a vampire. They were backed by an all-star cast that included Cary Elwes, Udo Kier, Catherine McCormack, and Eddie Izzard.
