Robert Eggers breathes new life into the 1922 horror classic Nosferatu, with Bill Skarsgard delivering a chilling performance as Count Orlok, which he calls the “scariest performance” of his career.

“I’ve never been more scared of playing a character,” the actor who played Pennywise in horror thriller It, added.

“I have done these sorts of performances before but none quite like this one,” Skarsgard further says in a behind-the-scenes video dropped by the makers on Monday. “I felt I could play a vessel of evil, like Orlok. He is the pinnacle of horror characters.”

The Crow star also shared the challenges he faced while bringing Count Orlok to life. “The voice was one of the biggest challenges. Robert wanted the voices as deep as possible. So I worked with an opera singer to get the vocals right. We worked with a movement coach to explore different ways of how he’d move. There’s so much power in how deliberate his movements are,” Skarsgard elaborates.

He adds that his co-stars went, “Oh, shit!” on sets after seeing Skarsgard’s transformation into Orlok.

Robert Eggers’ remake of Nosferatu is the third adaptation of the classic vampire tale, following F.W. Murnau’s 1922 silent film and Werner Herzog’s 1979 remake of the same name. The logline of the film says Nosferatu is a “a gothic tale of obsession between a haunted young woman and the terrifying vampire infatuated with her, causing untold horror in its wake”.

The star-studded cast of the Nosferatu includes Lily-Rose Depp, Nicholas Hoult, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, William Defoe, Emma Corrin, Simon McBurney and Ralph Ineson.

Nosferatu released in Indian theatres on January 10.