Nosferatu director Robert Eggers explains how star Bill Skarsgård helped him improve the movie's 100-year-old ending

Despite Robert Eggers's upcoming horror movie Nosferatu being a remake of the 1922 German expressionist film of the same name, the director says he wanted to completely change that century-old ending. But star Bill Skarsgård persuaded him otherwise.

"I sent him a backstory of Orlok that I wrote. So we came to it together to achieve what I was after. Because I’m so tired of the heroic and sad vampires, I was just like, 'He's a demon. He’s so evil,'" Eggers tells SFX magazine in the new issue, which features Doctor Who's Christmas special 'Joy to the World' on the cover and hits newsstands on December 3.

The director wanted to go against the whole romantic and over-emotional vampire trait we see in most fangy flicks, including many Dracula adaptations. The Count Orlok star has other ideas. "Bill was like, 'Yeah, but there needs to be some times where he has some kind of vulnerability,'" adds Eggers.

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And it looks like the IT star was right as the director explains that keeping some shred of Orlok's humanity works in the movie’s favor. "It's very subtle, and it’s not there often, but it is enough. I think the ending of the movie is much more effective than it would have been without Bill’s acute sensitivity to that – while still delivering on this big, scary, masculine vampire."

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The upcoming vampire horror movie remakes the 1992 film Nosferatu centred around a young couples brush with a deadly bloodsucker, which in turn is based on Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula. From its synopsis, it sounds like The Witch director’s new movie will follow the same premise, as it reads, "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."

As many Dracula fans will know, the ending sees the count massacred by his adversaries in a battle of good vs evil, and in the 1922 Nosferatu, the vamp is killed by sunlight. But by the sounds of it, it looks like Eggers has something a lot more sinister up his sleeve. Who knows, maybe Orlok will come out on top this time.

Alongside Skarsgård, the movie stars Nicholas Hoult, Lily-Rose Depp, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Emma Corrin, and Willem Dafoe.

Nosferatu releases on Christmas Day in the US and on New Year's Day in the UK. Read more in the latest issue of SFX magazine, which features Doctor Who's Christmas special 'Joy to the World' on the cover and hits newsstands on Tuesday, December 3. Check out the fittingly festive cover below...

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