“Keep my husband safe… from his cursedness.”

After hearing so little of Robert Eggers’ Werwulf for so long, it had slipped from the minds of many. However, with the debut of the first trailer, Eggers shows us he’s about to come back in a big way.

In the clip, we are taken to northern England around the year 1300. Dripping with that familiar bleak atmosphere that has become Eggers’ calling card, what we uncover next might make Werwulf his darkest tale yet.

We meet a young boy, who is subject to a terrifying and disturbing ritual. Years later, he has become a farmer with a dark secret. His soul has been tainted, and he is cursed to walk the land as part man and part beast.

As fog shrouds the moors, he battles the dark side of his soul, torn between wanting to protect his family, and the urge to spill fresh blood.

Could Werwulf be the darkest take on werewolf lore we’ve seen thus far? Possibly!

According to Eggers, that was his plan, as the filmmaker sought to avoid cliches and present something unfamiliar and genuinely terrifying:
“The cool thing about going back into the past is that you can kind of hit a reset button. So, all the clichés of being bitten by a werewolf and silver bullets and a lot of the stuff that has become almost campy doesn’t exist in the mythology of this movie. So, you don’t need to have seen Lon Chaney Jr.’s The Wolf Man or An American Werewolf in London to get what’s going on here.”

Of course, reinventing lore is nothing new for Eggers, as his modern take on Nosferatu and vampire mythology was wildly successful. Will we see similar results this time around?

Werwulf stars Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Lily-Rose Depp, Willem Dafoe, and Ralph Ineson.

The movie is set to stalk into US theatres on December 25th 2026, with a European release to follow on January 1st 2027.

Embrace the darkness by checking out the trailer below: