‘A Symphony of Horror’: the other 2024 ‘Nosferatu’ remake that nobody’s talking about
2024’s Christmas and New Year film calendar was interesting, to say the least. There wasn’t a genuine Christmas film in sight, so audiences had the option of singing their hearts out in the Land of Oz, watching a superfast blue hedgehog fight an evil egg man, beholding the CGI-rendered origin story of a famously deceased cartoon lion, or travelling to the lost island of Motufetu with an animated Dwayne Johnson. Fascinatingly, though, many cinemagoers chose to counter-programme their holiday season by embracing the darkness of Robert Eggers’ remake of the classic silent vampire tale Nosferatu. Most of them won’t have known, though, that Eggers’ Gothic fairytale wasn’t the only remake of that German Expressionist classic released in 2024. Instead, please spare a thought for the mostly-ignored Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror, starring Doug Jones of The Shape of Water fame.
On December 3rd, 2014, David Lee Fisher’s proposed shot-for-shot remake of FW Murnau’s 1922 masterpiece was successfully crowdfunded on Kickstarter. Fisher’s intention was to make the same film again but with a new cast, a full script and symphonic musical score, and backgrounds created through a mixture of sets and CGI. At this point, Fisher’s version would have been the movie’s second remake after Werner Herzog’s 1979 opus Nosferatu the Vampyre. However, in July 2015 – only eight months later – Eggers’ own remake of the film was announced by Studio 8. This proved that Nosferatu remakes are like buses – you don’t see any for 35 years, then two come along at once.
Unfortunately for both Fisher and Eggers, though, the next decade proved extremely difficult when it came to translating their respective visions to screen. Jones, Hollywood’s premier monster actor, was cast as Fisher’s grotesque Count Orlok and shot his part in 2015, several years before he played the haunting Amphibian Man in Guillermo del Toro’s Oscar-winning romantic oddity. He returned for some pick-up shots two years later before the film fell into what he described as “a very, very long post-production process.”
Eggers, by contrast, was lined up to shoot Nosferatu as his second film after his 2015 breakout The Witch, even though he felt nervous about the whole thing. He didn’t feel he yet had the experience to do justice to the movie he imagined in his head, but he still poured years of his life into writing the script and developing the film. Eventually, this incarnation of the movie fell apart, and Eggers made 2019’s The Lighthouse and 2022’s The Northman before returning to the spindly-fingered embrace of Orlok later that year.
Ultimately, Fisher’s film would finally premiere in Michigan in November 2023 but wouldn’t become widely available to the public until September 2024, when it was quietly released as a video-on-demand rental. Eggers’ star-studded $50million version followed on Christmas Day in the US and New Year’s Day in international markets. Naturally, most people were only aware of the version that starred Lily-Rose Depp, Nicholas Hoult, and Bill Skarsgård as Orlok instead of the strange low-budget version that quickly got lost in the streaming wasteland.
This was a crying shame for Jones, though, who went on to star as Admiral Saru in Star Trek: Discovery and Baron Afanas in What We Do In The Shadows after he hung up his Orlok teeth and bald cap. He loved adding his own version of such a classic movie monster to the cultural conversation, telling Screen Rant, “He’s the dark vampire that came to me when I was younger, putting my bucket list together of what characters I wanted to play.”
In truth, Jones was also perfectly aware that Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror was likely to be swallowed whole by Eggers’ picture, but he still held out hope that discerning horror fans would find room in their lives for both. He mused, “I’m a big fan of Robert Eggers, and I can’t wait to see their movie as well, and I think Bill Skarsgård is going to also kill it.”
Concluding, “But we all have our own spin on that original tale, and I think the fans out there, hopefully, will want to see all of them and celebrate this tale, this fable of Nosferatu, in whatever version comes out. And hopefully, there’s audience enough for all of them.”
