Robert Eggers' Nosferatu Looks Scary as Hell
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After The Witch, The Lighthouse and The Northman, few filmmakers are as fascinating as Robert Eggers. So, when Focus Features announced that Eggers’ new feature, Nosferatu, was coming out on freaking Christmas day, it seemed like something very unique and special—and, after seeing the first footage from the film, it most certainly seems like it is.
At CinemaCon 2024, Focus Features screened the first trailer for the horror film and said that “This definitely ain’t your father’s Nosferatu,” as well as the fact that the film would give new meaning to the term “Christmas feast” when it opened. We could see why.
The trailer starts with a girl who is bathed in shadow, with an omniscient voice saying “Come to me.” She’s walking around slowly when we hear the words “Hear my call,” and a disembodied hand grabs her around the neck and she screams.
There’s a person riding a horse across a field. A man running down a crowded street. A woman asks “Does evil come from within us? Or beyond?” A camera flies across a landscape toward a massive castle. “He is coming,” someone say,s as we see a person standing in front of a bunch of candles. We see a naked man. Rats running across the street. “He is coming,” several people say while one of them bites the head off a pigeon.
“Who is coming, my child?” Willem Dafoe’s character asks. A shadow that looks like a hand flies across a city. Flames engulf the street. Nicholas Hoult sits up and screams. More things are burning. More rats are running around. A bunch of people approach a door, open it, and see a silhouette. “We are here,” says Dafoe’s character. “Nosferatu.”
The tagline says “Succumb to the darkness” on Christmas.
Overall, the trailer looked very much like a Robert Eggers movie, albeit with more of a broad, mainstream feel compared to his prior films. Basically, he is making a movie that he wants, but also giving us a creepy, weird, horror story at the same time.
Nosferatu stars Bill Skarsgård as Nosferatu, along with Nicholas Hoult, Lily-Rose Depp, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Emma Corrin and Willem Dafoe. It opens this Christmas.
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