Some families do hot cocoa and a Pixar movie on Christmas Day. Robert Eggers would like to offer you a cursed farmer foaming in the mud of 13th-century England instead.
Focus Features has dropped the first official trailer for Werwulf, and it is exactly the filthy, folklore-soaked period horror you’d hope for from the man who keeps making the rest of the genre look underdressed. Mark the calendar, this one howls into theaters on December 25, 2026.
Honestly, an Eggers werewolf movie feels less like a surprise and more like something that was always going to happen. Of course, he was going to get here eventually. The only shock is that it took this long.
What the trailer actually shows
Eggers being Eggers, the trailer guards most of its secrets. What it gives you instead is mood, and a lot of it.
Fog rolls over a medieval countryside. A village sits on edge. Something is out there in the dark that the locals have only ever talked about in warnings, and the trailer’s whole pitch is the moment those old stories stop being stories. The official logline frames it simply: in 13th-century England, a creature stalks the foggy countryside as local folklore becomes a terrifying reality.
The footage leans into texture over plot, candlelight and damp wool and faces that look genuinely frightened. There’s no neon, no modern wink. It looks like it was dug out of the ground.
Aaron Taylor-Johnson goes feral
At the center of it is Aaron Taylor-Johnson, playing a man who appears to be cursed and coming apart at the seams.
The trailer teases his transformation without spelling it out, which is the smart move. You get the suggestion of a body betraying its owner, something bestial pushing up from underneath, and a village that very much notices. Eggers has said this version of the werewolf throws out the modern rulebook you know: no bites passing the curse along, no silver bullets, nothing tidy. This is werewolf horror reaching back to a time before the genre got comfortable.
Focus describes the film as “a harrowing tale of devotion, damnation and the devil within,” which tells you the curse here is as much spiritual as it is physical. That’s a very Eggers way to do a monster.
Why Eggers and werewolves were always going to find each other
Think about what actually scares Eggers’ characters. It’s almost never just the creature.
It’s God, and whether He’s listening. It’s the body doing things the mind is horrified by. It’s superstition curdling into certainty. It’s a few people stuck in one isolated place, speaking in old, thorny language, making increasingly terrible decisions while the weather refuses to cooperate.
That is the werewolf myth. That has always been the werewolf myth. The transformation was never really about fur and fangs; it’s about the animal a person has been told lives inside them, and the religious dread of what happens when it gets out. Eggers has been circling this exact nerve since The Witch sent a family spiraling in the woods, through the salt-and-madness of The Lighthouse, the Norse fury of The Northman, and the Christmas-released gloom of Nosferatu.
A medieval werewolf movie isn’t a stretch for him. It’s basically a homecoming.
The cast and the release date
Werwulf reunites Eggers with a bench of collaborators who clearly know the assignment. Alongside Taylor-Johnson, the cast includes Lily-Rose Depp and Willem Dafoe, both fresh off Nosferatu, plus Ralph Ineson, who’s been in the Eggers orbit since he played the doomed patriarch in The Witch.
Eggers co-wrote the screenplay with Sjón, the Icelandic poet who helped him build the brutal world of The Northman. Focus Features, his partner on every one of his features, is releasing the film in theaters on December 25, 2026.
So yes, for the second time, Eggers is counter-programming Christmas with a nightmare. After Nosferatu turned Christmas Day 2024 into a vampire’s feast and made a fortune doing it, nobody’s laughing at the strategy anymore.
The takeaway
We haven’t seen the film, and Eggers trailers are famously good at hiding how strange the finished thing will be. But on atmosphere alone, Werwulf already looks like one of the most exciting horror prospects on the 2026 calendar.
Comfort and joy can wait. This Christmas, Eggers is handing us mud, blood, and a man who can feel the wolf waking up. I’ll be first in line, possibly hiding behind my popcorn.
