Robert Eggers’ Werwulf: First Look and Story Details Revealed for Historical Horror Movie

Focus Features has released the archetypal photograph from Nosferatu manager Robert Eggers’ adjacent play fearfulness film, Werwullf, which tin beryllium seen below.

In his archetypal interrogation astir Werwullf, Eggers told Esquire however his movie volition beryllium dissimilar immoderate different werewolf movie and besides revealed details astir the characters played by Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Lily-Rose Depp, some of whom antecedently starred successful Eggers’ Nosferatu.

Werwullf follows a 13th-century husbandman (Taylor-Johnson) who transforms into a werewolf. Depp plays his woman and the parent of his children – Eggers calls her “the bosom of the movie” – portion Willem Dafoe plays a hunter. “Nobody has a sanction successful the movie. Aside from a dog,” Eggers said, laughing.

Taylor-Johnson’s husbandman is “a antheral who is cursed. It’s a communicative astir a antheral who is cursed and is trying to find salvation done love. He’s a quality who is haunted and successful large pain.”

Aaron Taylor-Johnson stars arsenic Man successful manager Robert Eggers’ WERWULF. (Photo: Rory Mulvey)

The manager said Taylor-Johnson’s protagonist inhabits “a truly brutal, unforgiving, merciless, grotesque world. More than ever, it’s mud and humor and dung and rainfall and symptom and suffering. Aaron’s show is incredibly harrowing. We’ll accidental without a uncertainty that it’s his champion performance, and the worldly that helium does physically successful the translation scenes are incredibly extreme. The affectional strength helium brings to [the] relation is arsenic arsenic extreme.”

Taylor-Johnson studied a existent wolf to follow aspects of its behavior, and besides worked with question manager Marie Gabriel-Rotie (another Nosferatu veteran) for months to maestro the contortions and carnal demands of playing a werewolf.

The film’s dialog – by Eggers and his The Northman collaborator Sjón – is successful Middle English, though it’s been “tempered” by a dialect manager to marque it much comprehensible for the modern ear.

Shot connected 35mm film, Eggers said Werwullf volition person “a precise unsocial look” that was achieved by utilizing an orthochromatic attraction successful post-production to marque the actors' complexions much sickly and by incorporating “the atom operation of black-and-white movie onto colour film.”

Eggers drew connected Dark Ages werewolf lore from England and continental Europe, and adjacent aspects of Viking civilization that apt inspired the thought of a wolf-man. The manager said viewers shouldn’t expect immoderate of the tropes they’ve travel to expect from decades of werewolf movies:

“So each the clichés of being bitten by a werewolf and metallic bullets and a batch of the worldly that has go astir campy doesn’t beryllium successful the mythology of this movie. So you don’t request to person seen Lon Cheney Jr.’s The Wolf Man oregon An American Werewolf successful London to get what’s going connected here.”

Werwullf opens December 25, 2026.