Robert Eggers has lined up his next project.

The historical horror auteur, known for films like The Witch and Nosferatu, will adapt William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. Sources for The Hollywood Reporter, which broke the story, say the actors will speak in Olde English.

Focus Features, the distributor behind Nosferatu and Eggers’ next film, Werwulf, came out on top of a bidding war for Romeo and Juliet that included A24, Sony, and Warner Bros with a deal understood to be in the high-seventy millions.

Since Shakespeare wrote it in the 1590s, Romeo and Juliet has been regarded as one of the Bard’s most celebrated plays. The story of two star-crossed teenagers from feuding families in 1300s Verona was notably adapted by Baz Lurhman in the 1996 modern-day romantic crime thriller Romeo + Juliet with Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes in the title roles.

The news of the adaptation comes ahead of the Christmas release of Werwulf, the writer-director’s creature feature horror film starring frequent collaborators Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Lily-Rose Depp, and Willem Dafoe. He is also attached to an adaptation of A Christmas Carol in development at Warner Bros, with Dafoe as his top choice for Scrooge.