Robert Eggers’ Nos­fer­atu remake is a go, with Anya Tay­lor-Joy on board

This morn­ing, the Los Ange­les Times ran a new pro­file of ris­ing star Anya Tay­lor-Joy, who’s cur­rent­ly on the sort of hot streak most young actors can only fan­ta­size about. She’ll soon appear in George Miller​’s Mad Max: Fury Road pre­quel as a young Imper­a­tor Furiosa, and has just wrapped shoot­ing Viking epic The North­man in Iceland.

The buried lede in the arti­cle con­cerns one of those ges­tat­ing projects, long-rumored but only now con­firmed as hap­pen­ing. In their third film togeth­er, Tay­lor-Joy will reunite with direc­tor Robert Eggers for a remake of Nos­fer­atu, anoth­er old-fash­ioned hor­ror yarn build­ing on their joint break­out suc­cess with 2015’s The Witch.

Pre­sum­ably, she’ll por­tray Ellen Hut­ter, ripe-necked wife of the estate agent sent to han­dle con­tract nego­ti­a­tions with the vam­pire Count Orlok. In FW Murnau’s near­ly cen­tu­ry-old hor­ror clas­sic, she ulti­mate­ly proves to be the ghoul’s undo­ing when he’s lured into the oblit­er­at­ing morn­ing light by the temp­ta­tion of her sleep­ing body.

The film has already been remade once, by Wern­er Her­zog in 1979, in a faith­ful col­orized ver­sion that went so far as to recre­ate some shots. So it can be done, and suc­cess­ful­ly, but those famil­iar with Eggers’ sui gener­is style can be sure that he’ll make the mate­r­i­al his own with hyper-spe­cif­ic peri­od detail to match.

Eggers has a his­to­ry with the Nos­fer­atu nar­ra­tive, hav­ing direct­ed his high school’s stage play as a teen, which led to a pro­fes­sion­al the­atre-direct­ing gig that he cred­its with hav­ing launched his career in film. The ques­tion now is who he’ll tap to por­tray Orlok; if he wants to stick with a sta­ble of actors he knows, per­haps The Light­house stars Robert Pat­tin­son or Willem Dafoe are avail­able, the lat­ter hav­ing already played Max Schreck in 2000’s Shad­ow of the Vampire.