Nosferatu director teases Bill Skarsgård’s "scary, smelly" Count Orlok, says he goes in the "complete opposite direction" of Twilight’s Edward Cullen

Nosferatu director Robert Eggers teases Bill Skarsgard's Count Orlok – and says the movie makes vampires scary again.

"We’ve gone all the way to Edward Cullen, where vampires are not scary. So how do we go in the complete opposite direction of that? Vampires were scary enough that people used to dig up corpses and chop them into bits and set them on fire." Eggers tells Total Film in our final issue out on Thursday, October 10, which features Gladiator 2 on the cover. 

Skarsgård’s vampire count, however, is nothing like Edward Cullen. He worked with an opera coach to lower his voice by an octave, and shed a serious amount of weight. "I think we deserve a scary, smelly corpse again," Eggers says, referring to the jump scare in the 1922 Nosferatu when Count Orlok's coffin opens. 

The movie, a remake of the 1922 film based on the novel Dracula by Bram Stoker, is a gothic tale of obsession between a haunted young woman (Lily-Rose Depp) in 19th century Germany and the ancient Transylvanian vampire (Skarsgård) who stalks her, bringing untold horror with him.

Nicholas Hoult stars Thomas Hutter, the real estate agent who unknowingly tries to broker a deal with the Count. You can see him in our exclusive picture below. Depp plays his wife Ellen. Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Emma Corrin, Willem Dafoe, Ralph Ineson, and Simon McBurney all also star.

Nosferatu is released on December 25 in the US and on January 1 in the UK. And you can read more about it and a whole lot else besides in the final issue of Total Film when it hits shelves and digital newsstands on Thursday, October 10.

Check out the covers below:

Subscribers have the exclusive text-free cover on the way to them right now, with the issue then hitting shops and digital newsstands on Thursday October 10.