One of the most iconic vampire movies in the history of cinema initially began life as a ripoff that found itself subjected to a legal claim, but F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu is still held up as an undisputed classic of both film as an artform and the horror genre a full 99 years after it was first released.
It was hardly the most subtle imitation of Dracula, and led to the estate of Bram Stoker suing the production, with the courts ordering that every copy of Nosferatu be hunted down and destroyed. Luckily, a handful survived the purge and it went on to inspire a century of vampire movies, while Werner Herzog loosely remade it with 1979’s Nosferatu the Vampire, and a fictionalized meta account of the shoot inspired 2000’s Shadow of the Vampire.
Robert Eggers announced his intentions to mount yet another retread as far back as the middle of 2015, but it still hasn’t happened as of yet. The filmmaker has since gone on to helm The Lighthouse and next year’s The Northman, the latter of which reunites him with The Witch lead Anya Taylor-Joy, who signed on to Nosferatu in 2017.
There’s been very little movement on the project since, though, but a new report confirms that the Golden Globe winning The Queen’s Gambit star remains attached. The piece details the 25 year-old’s packed schedule for the foreseeable future that includes Edgar Wright’s upcoming Last Night in Soho, culinary dark comedy The Menu, George Miller’s Mad Max: Furiosa and thriller Laughter in the Dark, after which the path towards Nosferatu is relatively clear. It’s been a long time coming, but at least we know it still remains in some sort of development.