Robert Eggers has finally revealed the first trailer for his new period horror movie Werwulf. A lot of talk has gone into how brutal and unrelentingly violent this movie will turn out to be. The trailer has its own say on the matter, and blood is very much a part of the conversation.
The movie will star Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Lily-Rose Depp, and Willem Defoe and it is set in 14th century rural England. A creature stalks the foggy woods around a superstitious small town that will see their local legends emerge from rumor to reality.
Taylor-Johnson plays the titular role, though the trailer merely offers hints of the lycanthrope. A shadow here, flashes of a potential transformation there is all we’re getting in this first look. Defoe seems to be the ever-reliable lore specialist and werewolf hunter, a role not too dissimilar from the one he played in Eggers’ previous movie Nosferatu. There he plays an occult philosopher that knows all about the vampire plague, Prof. Albin Eberhart von Franz.
The trailer does emit strong Nosferatu vibes, with a focus on period-specific details that speak to the director’s signature approach to history and folklore. A sense of poverty pervades, speaking to a kind of horror that afflicts groups of people that live on the fringes of society. It’s a comment on class and the role the supernatural has in it, and it’s also a feature that rears its head in Eggers’ other films.
In The VVitch it takes the form of religious exile and how survival hinges on maximizing the bare minimum while being at the mercy of the wildness. That is, until the Devil comes in with an offer of its own. Nosferatu goes in the opposite direction, showing how sickness and death comes for everyone despite social status. Count Orlok’s plague is much like the one in Edgar Allan Poe’s 1847 short story The Masque of the Red Death, and its victims carry the same class distinction.
This might point to the reason why Werwulf is steeped in mud. Every single character in the trailer looks like they sleep, play, and bathe in it. As a result, the movie has a raw and dirty look that makes things look primal and pagan. This is where historical accuracy comes in to inform tone and mood. It’s a strategy that’s worked wonders for Eggers and it’s in everything he touches.
And then comes the question of the wolf’s final design. Eggers has a lot of myth to pull from here. In some of the earliest examples of the legend, the werewolf is a cursed expression of immorality and social undesirability. This means that it could affect criminals just as much as foreigners and minority groups that ventured into small towns and villages. Racism played a role here, and so did classic fears of the Other.
Later on, it would become a metaphor for anger and for humanity’s natural inclination towards violence and murder, with some stories even expanding the scope of its most depraved elements to cover sexual violence (see Thomas Tessier’s The Nightwalker). Which version of the classic monster will slice and dice the story’s mud-drenched villagers remains to be seen, but the trailer does suggest it will be putting death and dismemberment front and center.
Werwulf is slated for release on Christmas day, 2026. If the first trailer is any indication, this will be quite the holiday gift for horror fans. But this is just the start. I’m sure we’ll see the wolf, or part of it, well before the movie arrives in theaters. That is, unless Eggers wants to keep the final look as much a secret as he did Count Orlok’s mustache in Nosferatu. Keep your eyes peeled and beware the full moon.
