Merry Christmas: Watch the first trailer for Nosferatu, with IT's Bill Skarsgård

The first version of Nosferatu came out in 1922, directed by F. W. Murnau and starring Max Schreck as the vampire Count Orlock. The story goes that Murnau, a giant of silent cinema, wanted to directed a film version of Dracula, which had been published about 25 years prior. But he couldn't get the rights, so he filed off the serial numbers and made a movie about a different Eastern European vampire who moves to London and terrorized the populace. The result was a horror classic that endures to this day.

Nosferatu has been remade a couple of times in the years since, including a 1979 version from Werner Herzog. Now, Robert Eggers is mounting a new version with a group of modern stars. Bill Skarsgård, who's made a career out of hiding his natural features under makeup and prosthetics to play monsters, is Count Orlok, who certainly has nothing to do with Dracula. Willem Dafoe is Professor Albin Eberhart Von Franz, who has no relation to Professor Abraham Van Helsing. Nicholas Hoult is Thomas Hutter, a lawyer who goes to visit Count Orlock in his crumbling castle; and Lily-Rose Depp plays his wife Ellen, with whom Count Orlock becomes obsessed after he travels to London. They are not playing Jonathan and Mina Harker, who do those exact same things in Dracula. Watch the trailer above!

Since his 2015 debut film The Witch, Robert Eggers has carved out a space for himself as a modern auteur with an eye towards the creepy and surreal. Nosferatu will be his fourth film after The Witch, The Lighthouse and The Northman. I can't think of a better person to take on this story. Eggers drenches his movies in atmosphere and this looks no different. I also like the idea of Nosferatu becoming kind of like the horror version of Little Women, something that's remade every couple decades so audiences can discover it all over again.

In a cute move, Focus Features and Universal are releasing Nosferatu on Christmas Day of this year, so if you're tired of holiday cheer around that time, there will be counterprogramming available.

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