Nosferatu remake: Harry Styles drops out, putting Robert Eggers film on hold

Last Updated on March 29, 2022

Last August, we heard that The Witch (watch it HERE) director Robert Eggers and that film’s star Anya Taylor-Joy would be teaming up again on the remake of F.W. Murnau’s 1922 silent classic Nosferatu (watch that HERE) as soon as a window of opportunity opened up in Taylor-Joy’s busy schedule. According to The New Yorker, they had found a window of opportunity last year to begin on the Nosferatu remake… but they missed it because Harry Styles dropped out of the cast.

The New Yorker says that last September,

Eggers was supposed to be in Prague. The previous week, he had been scheduled to move there to begin preparing a remake of “Nosferatu,” F. W. Murnau’s silent vampire film, from 1922. In high school, Eggers co-directed a stage production of the movie, in which his younger brothers, Max and Sam, who are twins, were painted gray and played motionless gargoyles. The new version featured Taylor-Joy, who also starred in “The Witch,” and Harry Styles. But, at the last minute, Styles pulled out, citing scheduling concerns. Jarin Blaschke, Eggers’s cinematographer, had already enrolled his daughter in school in Prague.

There’s no further mention of the Nosferatu movie Eggers and Taylor-Joy are going to make together in that article (there are more descriptions of his high school play version). So it looks like it’s going to have to wait a while, as the L.A. Times said last year. According to them, Taylor-Joy’s schedule sees her following the darkly comedic psychological thriller The Menu with George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road prequel Furiosa, where she’ll be replacing Charlize Theron in the title role.

After that, she’ll reunite with Queen’s Gambit writer-director Scott Frank for the thriller Laughter in the Dark and Eggers again in a reworking of the vampire classic Nosferatu, the latest collaboration in a partnership that began with her first ‘real film,’ the unnerving 2016 horror movie The Witch.”

An unofficial adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Nosferatu has the following synopsis:

In this highly influential silent horror film, the mysterious Count Orlok (Max Schreck) summons Thomas Hutter (Gustav von Wangenheim) to his remote Transylvanian castle in the mountains. The eerie Orlok seeks to buy a house near Hutter and his wife, Ellen (Greta Schroeder). After Orlok reveals his vampire nature, Hutter struggles to escape the castle, knowing that Ellen is in grave danger. Meanwhile Orlok’s servant, Knock (Alexander Granach), prepares for his master to arrive at his new home.

Stoker’s heirs sued Murnau over the film and a court ordered that all copies of Nosferatu were to be destroyed, but thankfully some survived. Werner Herzog directed a remake in 1979, and the movies Shadow of the Vampire and Mimesis Nosferatu both dealt with the making of Nosferatu movies. Eggers’ remake was first announced soon after The Witch premiered at Sundance in 2015.

In the meantime, we have Eggers’ Viking epic The Northman to look forward to. Taylor-Joy is in that movie, which is scheduled to receive a theatrical release on April 22nd. Are you bummed the Nosferatu remake won’t star Harry Styles?