Director behind Sundance hit The Witch to remake FW Murnau’s 1922 silent Dracula adaptation, following Werner Herzog’s 1979 effort

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This article is more than 5 years old

Sundance 2015 review: The Witch – a focus on themes over plot elevate it to near greatness Read more

What is that strange creaking and scratching noise you hear? Is it an ancient coffin slowly being opened? Or is the sound of a barrel being scraped? Probably the former, as just one remake in almost 100 years might permit a second attempt.

The director Robert Eggers, whose period-set child abduction thriller The Witch had critics quaking in the aisles at Sundance this year, will write and direct a remake of the expressionist horror classic Nosferatu.

That film was an adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, with names and details tweaked, some of which reverted to the original source for Werner Herzog’s 1979 version starring Klaus Kinski.

The 2000 film Shadow of the Vampire presented a fictionalised version of the making of Murnau’s masterpiece, with John Malkovich as the director and Willem Dafoe as the original lead, Max Schreck.