There are filmmakers who make period pieces, and then there is Robert Eggers, who makes periods. The Witch didn't depict 1630s New England so much as trap you in it, down to the era's grammar. The Lighthouse was a sea shanty with a body count. The Northman rebuilt Viking cosmology from the archaeology up, and Nosferatu resurrected the vampire film's original nightmare and grossed around $181 million doing it, released, in what has become an Eggers signature move, on Christmas Day. So the announcement that his next film is Werwulf, a werewolf story set in 13th-century England, arriving this Christmas, is less a pitch than an inevitability. The werewolf is the last great monster of European folklore he hasn't touched, and it belongs to exactly the muddy, fog-bound, God-haunted world he builds better than anyone alive.
The details confirm he's going all the way in. Eggers wrote the script with Sjón, the Icelandic poet and novelist who co-wrote The Northman, and the dialogue is reportedly true to the period, actual Old English-rooted speech, with translations and annotations built into the script for everyone else. Read that again: the biggest horror release of the Christmas season is being performed in language its own crew needs footnotes for. That's not production design, that's possession, and it's precisely the commitment that made The Witch's archaic dialogue feel like documentary rather than costume.
The trailer arrived a few weeks ago, and it's everything the premise promises, grainy, boxed into a nearly square frame, opening on a boy undergoing some kind of rite as a voice instructs him: "Do not dread the darkness. Embrace it." Watch it:
The cast is the Nosferatu family reassembled. Aaron Taylor-Johnson, credited simply as Man, is the one who transforms, and the trailer's final image makes clear the change will be shown, not implied. Lily-Rose Depp plays his wife, glimpsed anointing his forehead with blood, and Willem Dafoe arrives as a stranger with word of a raving beast loose in the countryside, which is to say Willem Dafoe is once again the person you least want knocking in an Eggers film. Ralph Ineson, the patriarch from The Witch, is in there too, closing a loop for anyone who's been following since 2015. The logline is folklore stripped to the studs: in 13th-century England, a mysterious creature stalks a foggy countryside as local legend becomes terrifyingly real.
Why this one matters more than the average monster revival: the werewolf film has never really had its masterpiece. Vampires got theirs repeatedly, but the wolf's filmography peaks at beloved rather than definitive, great transformations in service of stories that rarely match them. The werewolf is fundamentally a medieval idea, sin and appetite wearing the body, the beast as confession, and no one has ever set the story where the folklore actually lives, in the century that believed it, in the language that told it. That's the gap Eggers is walking into with the exact toolkit the gap requires. Focus has backed him from The Witch onward; this is their fifth film together, and the Christmas date signals they expect Nosferatu-scale results.
December 25. In cinemas, in the dark, where this stuff was always meant to be heard half-understood.
Werwulf opens on Christmas Day; the trailer and first-look imagery are at Focus Features.
