Writer-director Robert Eggers has officially unveiled the most brutal, primal vision of his career with Werwulf, a 13th-century werewolf horror film set to open in theaters on Christmas Day. Speaking at a promotional event on Friday, Eggers teased the movie’s darkest and most terrifying moments after screening roughly 20 minutes of select footage, describing the project as the scariest thing he has ever attempted to write. The film follows a cursed 13th-century farmer as he battles a monstrous transformation, and it arrives at a time when audiences are hungry for period horror with genuine dread.
The story centers on a farmer—simply referred to as “Man,” played by Aaron Taylor-Johnson—who is cursed as a werewolf. Lily-Rose Depp portrays his wife and the mother of his children, while Willem Dafoe, Ralph Ineson, and Jack Morris take on the roles of a trio of wolf hunters on a deadly mission to track down the beast. Eggers kicked off the event by screening the film’s opening sequence, a dialogue-free nighttime scene that immediately establishes the movie’s visceral tone. Against a black screen, the howling of wolves fills the air before the Man’s face is revealed—foaming at the mouth and wracked with pain. He sprints naked through the woods and into an empty home, where he suffers wild convulsions in the moonlight and growls in agony before collapsing into the shadows, where his transformation continues unseen. Taylor-Johnson performed all of the body-bending movements himself, save for a single shot that could not be accomplished practically, and Eggers stressed that the sequence “is not the set piece werewolf transformation.”
A Period Piece Grounds the Monster
Eggers explained that werewolf movies are a difficult genre to execute well, noting that even in a great film it can be hard to believe that an ordinary person is turning into a monster. “I think sometimes even if it’s a great werewolf movie, it’s hard to believe that your dad’s turning into a werewolf or your next door neighbor who’s a high school basketball player is turning into a werewolf,” he said. But he argued that a period setting “really helps ground you and ground the audience,” adding that “at least that’s the intention.” The film’s historical framework is the result of extensive research into 13th-century England, which Eggers pursued for the screenplay he co-wrote with his The Northman collaborator Sjón.
“The historical werewolves that I had read about starting in high school, they were doing things that were so taboo and hard for anyone to wrap their mind around because it was so extreme that the culture that they existed in said, ‘You can’t be a human, you must be a werewolf.’ So it was going to be very dark and very primal subject matter.”
Robert Eggers
The film’s dialogue is rendered in Middle English, though it has been altered by dialect coach William Conacher to make it more comprehensible for the modern ear. Eggers also worked with two Middle English scholars at Oxford University—Eleanor Baker and Daniel Wakelin—to help ensure the language remained period accurate. Despite the archaic speech, Eggers said Werwulf “was designed to be kind of like a silent movie. You don’t need to understand what anyone’s saying to understand the movie because you’re with everyone on an emotional level, particularly Aaron and his family.”
Why Hell Itself
The film’s grim atmosphere has already drawn comparisons to the deepest recesses of the afterlife. Eggers revealed that cinematographer Jarin Blaschke texted him after first reading the script and asked, “Does this take place in hell?” The director embraced the comparison, insisting that the world “needs to be hell for Aaron.” He acknowledged that some medievalists might be annoyed by his embrace of the stereotype of the Middle Ages as muddy, dirty, rainy, and miserable, but argued that the setting “does need to be so muddy, and rainy, and dirty, and miserable, and shit-covered, and it does need to be hell.” Eggers credited his period research with making the world feel more specific and more hell-like, noting that the more he learned about the era, the darker and more brutal it became.
Eggers’ fascination with werewolf lore traces back to his youth, when he read about historical werewolf accusations that were so extreme that the surrounding culture concluded the accused “can’t be a human, you must be a werewolf.” He chose to set the film in England around 1300, during the reign of Edward I, whose campaign to exterminate wolves to protect the wool trade had nearly wiped out the animals. “Actually, Willem’s character is based on a real person who did such a good job that in another 200 years there were not wolves in England. So without wolves, you don’t have werewolf lore,” Eggers explained. “So if I was going to set it in England, it had to be this early in history around 1300. And that was even more exciting, because the world would be so primitive and so visceral and primal that that would make this all the more dark and brutal.”
Looking Ahead
Beyond the opening sequence, additional footage teased aspects of the Man’s youth, hints at how and why he became cursed, the arrival of the three wolf hunters at his home in the middle of the night to violently enlist his help, and the Man and the hunters’ journey to find a strange old woman who may hold knowledge about werewolves. Eggers cautioned that he would not reveal blow-by-blow details of the remaining scenes in order to avoid spoiling the experience for viewers.
As the release date approaches, the film’s reputation as a landmark entry in the werewolf genre continues to grow. When Werwulf opens in theaters on Christmas Day, audiences will discover for themselves just how hell-like the world of the cursed farmer truly is.
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