Over the last decade we’ve watched, regularly dumbstruck, as Robert Eggers has brought us tales of witches (The Witch), briny eldritch terrors (The Lighthouse), vikings (The Northman), and vampires (Nosferatu). But while this week’s online discourse has been dominated by news that the modern master of horror is soon set to turn his hand to William Shakespeare’s Romeo And Juliet, before Eggers tackles the bard’s suicidally star-crossed teen romance we can first look forward to taking a walk on the wild side with upcoming 13th century-set chiller Werwulf. For Aaron Taylor-Johnson going quite literally beast mode as werewolf hunter Willem Dafoe tracks his latest lycanthropic quarry, look no further — check out the Werwulf trailer below;
The list of truly great werewolf movies is not a very long one, truth be told, but even so this already has all the makings of one of the good ones, doesn’t it? Sure, plot specifics on Robert Eggers’ lycanthrope chiller are scarce beyond the basic “Aaron Taylor-Johnson’s got a beast inside him, Lily-Rose Depp’s his poor wife tending to their fraught family as hubby turns into an actual monster, and Willem Dafoe’s the kooky hunter on ATJ’s tail” (pardon the pun), but honestly that’s about all we need to know because it’s the feel of Werwulf that’s got its claws in us already.
Yes, part of the appeal is the era-accurate Middle English dialogue and the attention to historical detail in the movie’s aesthetic and lore, but when Eggers told Empire not so long ago “If you’re not smelling the shit, you’re not experiencing it properly” he wasn’t kidding: this looks grim, grimy, and all kinds of bleak and ominous, with slaughtered sheep and petrified peasants strewn across the movie’s wolf-ravaged land. “My husband… he is a good man. For the love, I bear him,” says a patently nerve-shot Depp in this trailer. “Please, make him safe from his cursedness.” We wouldn’t get our hopes up on present evidence…
We’ll see whether Eggers’ latest, shot by regular DP Jarin Blaschke and penned alongside co-scribe Sjón, is the dog’s bollocks — or an unlikely howler — when Werwulf hits cinemas stateside on Christmas Day, and British and Irish multiplexes on New Year’s Day, 2027. Until then, if you really want to go down the werewolf hole, there is an official AR game promising a ‘rare reward’ for all those who complete it. And you can find that at the brilliantly titled website https://www.devourethallmankynde.com. Godspeed!
