‘The Witch’ Director to Get His Fangs Back in Anya Taylor-Joy on ‘Nosferatu’ Remake

Like any diabolical mastermind worth his salts would do, The Witch director Robert Eggers has been biding his time. As his breakout star Anya Taylor-Joy has kept remarkably busy over the two-and-a-half years since The Witch first premiered at Sundance, taking roles in everything from a Barack Obama biopic to M. Night Shyamalan’s latest, Eggers has been carefully preparing for his next project. It’s no small undertaking, either; for his sophomore feature, Eggers will tackle what is probably the Rosetta Stone of horror cinema as we know it, the crude template from which all following depictions of vampires would be struck. In an era besotted by remakes, the wise man remakes Nosferatu.

Today, Variety brings the development that Eggers’ take on F.W. Murnau’s cornerstone silent film, announced back when The Witch went wide in theaters during February 2016, is on track and has its star. Nosferatu will reunite Eggers with Taylor-Joy, and while I would love nothing more than to live in a world where a 21-year-old girl portrays a towering, feral carnivore, the smart money says she’ll play Count Orlok’s object of desire Ellen Hutter. That does still leave the role of the title monstrosity open, and the question of who could fill the shoes of Max Schreck, Klaus Kinski, and Willem Dafoe is a tough one. (Feel free to weigh in below on who is modern screen acting’s creepiest presence, and let me say now I don’t think Michael Shannon would be right for this.)

It’s worth noting that by the time Taylor-Joy and Eggers’ paths converge once again, she’ll be a substantially bigger movie star than when they last met. The runaway success of Split has spawned a sequel on the horizon, and the actress has already takes her first superhero role in New Mutants as Magik, whose power is that she is magic. If her added wattage brings this film any more attention, all the better.