New Werwulf trailer reveals more of Robert Eggers’ werewolf film

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Filmmaker Robert Eggers has established himself as a director capable of reimagining classic horror archetypes with renewed menace. Having explored primal terror in woodland settings through The Witch and refreshed the vampire narrative with his recent adaptation of Nosferatu, Eggers now turns his attention to the werewolf genre. His latest project, Werwulf, arrives at cinemas on Christmas Day, marking a continuation of his recurring collaboration with distributor Focus Features and actors including Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Lily-Rose Depp, and Willem Dafoe, all of whom previously worked together on Nosferatu.

Focus Features has accompanied the film's new trailer release with an innovative alternate reality game designed to engage audiences through an extended promotional campaign spanning three lunar cycles. The campaign offers cryptic clues with a 24-hour window of availability, creating urgency for participants to engage with the mystery. The official synopsis describes Werwulf as exploring themes of 'devotion, damnation and the devil within', deliberately withholding specific plot details whilst promising depths beyond a straightforward monster-hunting narrative. Eggers developed the screenplay in collaboration with Sjón, his partner on the Norse-influenced epic The Northman.

Speaking at a press event, Eggers expressed his ambition to craft 'the scariest thing' possible following his vampire film, though he acknowledged instead producing 'the darkest thing'. Press attendees viewed approximately 20 minutes of footage including the film's opening sequence. The director emphasised his approach to grounding the werewolf narrative within a historical setting—specifically 13th-century England—to enhance credibility in a genre he described as inherently challenging. Eggers noted he designed the film with a silent-cinema aesthetic, and worked extensively on Middle English dialogue, consulting dialect coach William Conacher to render the language comprehensible to contemporary audiences whilst maintaining authenticity.

Plot details suggest the narrative centres on a cursed farmer, played by Taylor-Johnson and referred to simply as 'Man', whose condition becomes central to the story. The opening scenes depict his transformation in visceral detail, with Taylor-Johnson executing the requisite physical movements himself. Depp portrays the farmer's wife and mother to his children, while Dafoe joins Ralph Ineson and Jack Morris as a group of wolf hunters tasked with eliminating the creature. The footage shown to press revealed scenes depicting the protagonist's youth, explanations for his curse, and the hunters' recruitment of the afflicted man into their own hunt, along with their pursuit of an enigmatic older woman possessing knowledge of werewolves.

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