Robert Eggers is going beast mode. Following Esquire’s exclusive first look at Eggers’s next movie, Werwulf, Focus Features has unleashed the official trailer. Possessing the same eldritch vibes as the director’s previous work like Nosferatu, The Lighthouse, and The Witch, Werwulf is shaping up to be another dark and spooky hair-raiser for the Christmas season.
Focus Features debuted the full-length trailer to Werwulf, a new period horror movie by Robert Eggers. Set in 13th-century medieval England, Werwulf stars Aaron Taylor-Johnson as a cursed farmer living a lycanthropic nightmare. Lily-Rose Depp, who previously starred in Eggers’s acclaimed Nosferatu, costars as Taylor-Johnson’s wife, while frequent collaborator Willem Dafoe plays a creepy hunter on the hunt for a “raving beast” that roams the countryside. (So expect those two to clash in the climax, if we had to wager.)
The money shot happens in the final moments of the trailer, when Taylor-Johnson—whose eyes and sweat glisten in the light of a full moon—begins foaming at the mouth in slow motion. The marketing for the film is, wisely, holding back on what a medieval werewolf will look like. Admit it: You want to see what Taylor-Johnson looks like with silver hairs all over his body. Well, you’re going to have to sit your butt inside a theatre on Christmas Day to do so.
With visible film grain, a compressed Academy aspect ratio, and what Eggers told Esquire is modified Middle English dialogue, Werwulf is more of the immersive and meticulously designed historical horror that the director has specialised in since his breakout hit The Witch in 2015. Now that Eggers has made films with evil witches and vampires, it’s fitting he takes on another quintessential monster archetype. Hopefully his efforts fare better than Leigh Whannell’s middling Wolf Man, whose own werewolf reveal was ruined when its title monster was unceremoniously unveiled at Universal Studios in drab lighting like a Spirit Halloween display.
As for the medieval setting, it isn’t arbitrary. In an interview with Esquire, Eggers said that the setting was chosen because of the end of the English wool trade around the year 1300. “[T]hat’s as late as it could be, because once there were no wolves in England, there was no more werewolf lore in England,” he said. “The werewolf lore there is born from people who were doing such horrific, indescribable acts that it was hard for other people to wrap their minds around it. They figured these people can’t be human. They must be inhuman. They must be werewolves.”
Eggers elaborated that the movie shies away from other werewolf story clichés—silver bullets, for example—because of its specific period setting. “A lot of the stuff that has become almost campy doesn’t exist in the mythology of this movie. So you don’t need to have seen Lon Cheney Jr’s The Wolf Man or An American Werewolf in London to get what’s going on here,” he said.
But there is a transformation sequence, which Eggers hyped up as “harrowing” and one of Taylor-Johnson’s single best performances. “The stuff that he does physically in the transformation scenes are incredibly extreme.”
But will Werwulf actually scare us to death? We’ll know come Christmas Day if theatres are packed with feral audiences.
