Rights issues causing friction between creators is hardly a new phenomenon in the film industry, and almost 100 years ago it resulted in F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu, a landmark for not just the horror genre but cinema in general, and its monumental legacy is all the more impressive when you consider it’s essentially a ripoff.
The estate of Bram Stoker ultimately sued over the production, and a court ordered that every copy of Nosferatu be destroyed as a result. Luckily, several managed to survive the edict and it’s still held up as a massively influential masterpiece close to a century later. Naturally, several remakes have followed, with Werner Herzog helming 1979’s Nosferatu the Vampire, while a semi-fictionalized account of the shoot served as the basis for 2000’s Shadow of the Vampire.
Filmmaker Robert Eggers has been trying to get another new version off the ground since mid-2015, but so far the pieces have yet to fall into place. In the summer of 2017 it was announced that his The Witch star Anya Taylor-Joy has signed on for an unspecified role, and a new rumor now claims that he’s looking to reunite with another of his former collaborators, namely The Lighthouse‘s Robert Pattinson.
Giant Freakin Robot says that a “trusted and proven” source has told them that the actor is in talks to play Nosferatu, although we should point out that the main character is named Count Orlok and Nosferatu is the title of the film only. There’s also the elephant in the room about how keen Pattinson would be to return to the vampire genre having spent so long distancing himself from Twilight, but it would be an understatement to say it’d be a million miles away from Edward Cullen. He’s proven to deliver the goods working with Eggers in the past, too, so it would be a smart and exciting casting choice should it happen.