He Is Coming in the first teaser trailer for Nosferatu

Last month, Nosferatu star Bill Skarsgård called his take on the notorious Count Orlok “gross” but also “very sexualized.” “Hopefully you’ll get a little bit attracted by it and disgusted by your attraction at the same time,” he told Esquire of director Robert Eggers’ vision for the film.

Now, the freaks finally have a chance to see for themselves. At long last, Nosferatu has released its first footage. No peaks at Skarsgård’s hot/nasty vampire visage yet, but never fear: as the teaser insists over and over, He Is Coming.

Adapted from the 1922 F.W. Murnau silent classic, Nosferatu (itself a riff on Dracula) follows the fearsome vampire Count Orlok (Skarsgård in the new film), who moves to a small town in Germany where he terrorizes a real estate agent named Thomas Hutter (Nicholas Hoult) and his wife, Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp). The official logline reads: “Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu is a Gothic tale of obsession between a haunted young woman and the terrifying vampire infatuated with her, causing untold horror in its wake.”

While he’s best known for films like The Lighthouse, The Witch, and The Northman, that may change upon the Christmas release of this film. Nosferatu is Eggers’ white whale. It was announced that he was working on his remake all the way back in 2015 at the Sundance premiere of The Witch, with him telling Den Of Geek in 2019, “Look, I spent so many years and so much time, just so much blood on it, yeah, it would be a real shame if it never happened.”

Since then, the movie has gone through several casting shakeups. Frequent Eggers collaborate Anya Taylor-Joy departed due to scheduling conflicts and was replaced by Depp, while Nicholas Hoult (thankfully) took over the Hutter role from Harry Styles in 2022. The fact that the film had apparently “fallen apart twice” before going into production, coupled with the COVID-19 pandemic, meant that Eggers ended up filming and releasing his Viking fantasy, The Northman, first.

In the end, it sounds like all the stops and starts were actually a blessing that helped the director go “beyond what I’m capable of” on the “difficult” film shoot. “I’m so happy to have made The Northman first and to have learned what I learned,” he told Empire in 2023. “When I think about the production plan of Nosferatu that we had the first time around, I’m sure I would have somehow pulled it out of my butt, but it’s hard not to imagine it being a failure.” If this first look is anything to go by, it seems like the pieces finally fell into place this time around.

Nosferatu premieres in theaters December 25.