Nosferatu Trailer Recreates the Most Haunting Image From the Original

Even if you don’t know Nosferatu, you know Nosferatu. Part of that knowledge comes from the promotional trailers that Focus Features has been running for the past several months, building excitement for the film’s Dec. 25 release. The latest one, in fact, focuses on Lily-Rose Depp as the story’s Ellen Hutter, a Mina Harker equivalent if you know your Dracula, and her desire for the titular vampire. As her husband Thomas (Nicholas Hoult) and Prof. Albin Eberhart Von Franz (Willem Dafoe) look on in confusion, Ellen explains the fear mixed with excitment that draws her to the bloodsucker Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgård).

The trailer ends with a profile shot of Ellen staring out an open window, the breeze blowing the blue curtains toward her. Through the rustling curtains we see the outline of a vampire. We see Orlok.

Orlok’s silhouette is the other reason you probably know Nosferatu. An unauthorized adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, the 1922 German film, Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror, remains one of the most recognizable movies of the silent era. Although it didn’t properly enter the public domain in the U.S. until 2019, Nosferatu was often treated as copyright-free, with shots from the film integrated into other works (the opening credits to Ernest Scared Stupid, for example).

For that reason, most people have seen Orlok’s (Max Schreck) shadow, complete with clawed hands, creeping along the wall. But it isn’t just the movie’s cheap availability that made the shadow shot so popular. Director F. W. Murnau was one of the key figures in the German Expressionist movements, which used sharp angles and exaggerated proportions for surrealist effect. Orlok’s shadow suggests something inhuman and twisted, all because of the way the darkness hits the wall.

For his update on the shot, director Robert Eggers uses the ripples in the curtain to distort his Orlok shadow. Instead of crouching toward his quarry, Orlok stands upright and seems to float forward, perhaps as a trick of the wind.

However, the trailer does include a more pointed shot of a moving shadow, one included in the first trailer as well. As Ellen whispers about the coming of Orlok, we see a shadow of the creature’s giant, clawed hand floating above the city.

Both shadow shots suggest that Eggers has somewhat altered his visual style for Nosferatu, his fourth feature film. All of his films feature striking imagery, including Black Phillip (Daniel Malik) tempting Thomasin (Anya Taylor-Joy) from the darkness in The Witch, or the vision of Yggdrasil in The Northman. The Lighthouse goes further into the bizarre, from the mermaids that haunt younger wickie Ephraim Winslow (Robert Pattinson) to the light that bathes older sailor Thomas Wake (Dafoe) in Lovecraftian mystery.

But where these moments broke from an otherwise grounded reality in his previous works, the trailer for Nosferatu points to Eggers embracing the heightened look of the original film. By embracing German Expressionism and refracting it through his distinctive style, Eggars takes sights we know from movie history and turns them into something totally new for Nosferatu.

Nosferatu arrives in theaters on Dec. 25, 2024.