Bill Skarsgard Is Mr. Steal Your Girl In Vampire Horror Movi

Just when you thought it was safe to visit spooky castles in Eastern Europe occupied by mysterious pale recluses, the new trailer for “Nosferatu” has arrived with an important health and safety warning. The upcoming vampire horror is a new adaptation of F.W. Murnau’s 1922 silent film “Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror,” which lifted its story from Bram Stoker’s “Dracula.”

“Nosferatu” stars Bill Skarsgård as the titular vampire, Count Orlok, alongside Nicholas Hoult, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Emma Corrin, and Lily-Rose Depp as the unfortunate young people who are drawn into Orlok’s influence. The film also reunites director Robert Eggers with Willem Dafoe, who starred in his 2019 surrealist thriller “The Lighthouse,” and Ralph Ineson, who fought an evil goat (and lost) in Eggers’ breakout debut “The Witch.”

The director’s previous films have incorporated slow burn horror elements, but this time around he’s promised a Gothic horror story that’s truly scary. Check out the new trailer for “Nosferatu” above … if you dare.

Like the first teaser trailer for “Nosferatu,” this new trailer doesn’t fully reveal Skarsgård’s Count Orlok, instead only showing him in silhouettes and snippets. Once again, Orlok is present primarily as an object of hype, but this time, the hype takes on a decidedly horny edge as the ancient vampire is framed as the ultimate homewrecker. At one point, Lily-Rose Depp’s Ellen Hutter is seen kneeling before her fiancé, Nicholas Hoult’s Thomas Hutter, and taunting: “You could never please me as he could.”

It’s a trailer that should delight fans of Robert Eggers’ previous work, which has blended horror and eroticism in weird and wonderful ways. In “The Witch,” the aforementioned evil goat seduces Anya Taylor-Joy’s protagonist with whispered offers to “live deliciously.” In “The Lighthouse,” Dafoe and Robert Pattinson’s characters are isolated in close quarters and forced to stew in their own homoerotic juices until things boil over into tentacle visions and doggy role play.

Of course, cuckoldry isn’t a theme that Eggers has randomly inserted into “Nosferatu,” and it’s something that was present in Stoker’s original novel and many adaptations since. In fact, it’s really Jonathan Harker, the character Thomas is based on, who gets seduced first. Dracula/Orlok isn’t just Mr. Steal Your Girl — he’s also Mr. Steal Your Boy (though out of respect to his title, perhaps we should refer to him as Count Steal Your Boy).

“Nosferatu” releases in theaters on December 25, 2024.