Newest Nosferatu trailer still won't show us the damn vampire

It’s overall a very good thing that Nosferatu‘s marketing team is being so damn cagey about the character design of their titular blood-sucker, but come on. We’re dying for a little peak; even just a half-a-second shot of Bill Skarsgård’s face half-covered in shadow Apocalypse Now-style. Remember when the actor told Esquire back in May that audiences would hopefully “get a little bit attracted by it and disgusted by your attraction at the same time”? Four months is so long to sustain a tease that titillating.

That’s exactly the point, of course. Even Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp), the film’s primary damsel in distress, wants another taste of the entity she calls “death” immediately after describing what sounds like the worst wedding put to film since Melancholia or maybe even Kill Bill. “It is like a dream. It was our wedding. When we turned around, everyone was dead. The stench of their bodies was horrible… but I’d never been so happy,” she narrates. 

While this line may sound like an extremely dark version of Cassie’s infamous rant from Euphoria, the rest of the trailer is anything but. If you are looking for a TV comparison, the atmosphere of the upcoming Robert Eggers film is so similar to Penny Dreadful that you might wonder when Eva Green is going to pop out while watching the trailer. She’s not involved in this one, unfortunately, but we do get extended looks at Nicholas Hoult as Ellen’s husband Thomas, Aaron Taylor-Johnson as Friedrich Harding, and—in a real plot twist—Willem Dafoe as maybe the most normal-looking one of the bunch as vampire hunter and occult scientist Professor Albin Eberhart von Franz. (At least his character still got a sick name.)

Nosferatu, which premieres December 25 in theaters, is sure to be a cheery Christmas film for the whole family. At least we’ll finally get to see Skarsgård in his sexy, disgusting vampire makeup as a present.