Robert Eggers left a gift-wrapped vampire under the Christmas tree in 2024. This year, the Nosferatu director—who’s as renowned for his attention to period detail as he is for his devotion to the macabre—has another frightfully festive treat in store: Werwulf, which stars Aaron Taylor-Johnson, seen here with some furry friends in this first-look image.
Eggers regulars Willem Dafoe and Lily-Rose Depp co-star, and all Focus Features will say about the movie so far is that it’s “Robert Eggers’ most visceral and haunting experience yet” and is “a harrowing tale of devotion, damnation, and the devil within.” Nowhere in that description is the word “werewolf,” but that title more or less spells it out.
In his first Werwulf-adjacent interview, conducted by Esquire, Eggers confirmed what kind of monster we’ll be seeing in the film. And, in keeping with his obsession with history, he found a way into the 700-year-old tale through real-world means.
“I learned that basically because of protections for the wool trade, there was a big effort to get rid of all the wolves in England. It was pretty successful,” he told Esquire. “So the movie takes place around 1300, and that’s as late as it could be because once there were no wolves in England, there was no more werewolf lore in England. That became interesting, that it was going to be set so medieval.”
He also said, unsurprisingly, that Werwulf will offer its own take on werewolf lore, much in the same way Nosferatu and The Witch offered their own perspectives on well-worn horror tropes. “The cool thing about going back into the past is that you can kind of hit a reset button,” he said. “So all the clichés of being bitten by a werewolf and silver bullets and 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.”
As for the characters, Dafoe plays a hunter; Depp plays a farmer’s wife, and Taylor-Johnson plays the farmer. But also, the latter is “a man who is cursed. It’s a story about a man who is cursed and is trying to find salvation through love. He’s a character who is haunted and in great pain.”
Werwulf hits theaters December 25. There’s a full moon on December 24, just so you know.
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