Bill Skarsgard Is About To Top His Pennywise Performance In Nosferatu

That’s particularly good news for old-school horror fans because Nosferatu is such a legendary film that any remake needs the right talent both behind and in front of the camera. For example, few fans or critics thought that anyone could ever top the original 1922 Nosferatu by F.W. Murnau: his directorial skills helped transform Max Shreck into the vampiric Count Orlok, one of horror’s earliest icons. But in 1979, Warner Herzog remade the movie (now titled Nosferatu the Vampyre), and Herzog’s talents helped make Klaus Kinski’s Count Dracula even more potently frightening than Orlok ever was.

Hopes are obviously high that Bill Skarsgard’s performance as cinema’s second most-famous vampire will be just as captivating as Kinski’s. So far, we have plenty of reason to be excited: in addition to doing a creeptastic job playing Pennywise the Clown, Skarsgard was amazing as the Big Bad in John Wick: Chapter 4. But as fans of It and Barbarian know, Skarsgard is at his best in horror films, and we’re hyped to see him getting back to his horror roots by starring in a remake of horror’s most foundational film.

While we’re confident Bill Skarsgard will devour each scene like Dracula devouring his latest victim, he’s not the only reason that we’re excited about this Nosferatu remake. Robert Eggers is directing the film, and in his relatively short career, Eggers has become something of a horror legend himself: his films The Witch and The Lighthouse helped redefine what big screen horror could look like, and his mastery of period pieces helped transform The Northman into an epic. Now, it’s all coming together with a Nosferatu remake that combines Eggers’ keen eye for historical detail with the epic scope worthy of a true passion project.

It sounds like Eggers is quite proud of the work Bill Skarsgard has performed, noting how even though the actor wanted to honor those “who had come before him,” he’s also doing his own thing by becoming “even more a folk vampire” onscreen, looking “like a dead Transylvanian nobleman.” Longtime film fans might be relieved that Robert Eggers and Bill Skarsgard have a much better working relationship than Warner Herzog and Klaus Kinski did after they made Nosferatu the Vampyre.

 As Far Out Magazine reports, Herzog admits that he once threatened to kill Kinski if he left the set of Aguirre, saying the actor would soon have eight bullets in his head and that the director was saving the last one for himself. This threat was amplified by the fact that “the next police station was 450 miles away,” and a smug Herzog claims that Kinski “was very docile during the last 11 days of shooting.” Honestly, Herzog sounds just as scary offscreen as he ever did demanding to see “the baby” in The Mandalorian.

In other words, since Robert Eggers didn’t have to threaten to murder Bill Skarsgard during filming, it’s fair to say they already have a better relationship than Herzog and Kinski ever did. We won’t know just how good their partnership was, however, until the Nosferatu remake hits theaters sometime in 2024. Here’s hoping that it’s just as blood-curdling as the last remake or, at the very least, gives us imagery as memeable as Skarsgard’s hilariously infamous Pennywise dance.