“After Nosferatu, I kind of said, ‘Let me try to write the scariest thing I can write.’ I don’t know that I did that, but I definitely wrote the darkest thing,” writer-director Robert Eggers told the press at a promotional event Friday for his upcoming horror film, Werwulf. And based on the roughly 20 minutes of select footage I saw from the film, Werwulf indeed has all the makings of being Eggers’ darkest and scariest movie yet.
Werwulf follows a 13th-century farmer (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), simply referred to as Man, who is cursed as a werewolf. Lily-Rose Depp plays his wife and the mother of his children, while Willem Dafoe, Ralph Ineson, and Jack Morris play a trio of wolf hunters on a mission to kill the werewolf.
Eggers kicked the event off by screening the opening scene of Werwulf, a dialogue-free nighttime sequence. The howling of wolves can be heard over a black screen. Then the Man’s face is revealed. He is foaming at the mouth and in great pain. The Man sprints naked through the woods and enters an empty home. Inside, he suffers wild convulsions in the moonlight and growls in agony. He writhes on the floor, and eventually ends up in the shadows where his transformation continues unseen. Taylor-Johnson performed all these body-bending movements himself (save for one shot that could not be accomplished practically), and it was truly a wild sight to behold. Eggers stressed, though, “that is not the set piece werewolf transformation.”
“I think werewolf movies are a difficult genre. And 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,” Eggers said. But a period werewolf movie “really helps ground you and ground the audience. At least that’s the intention.”
While I won’t give blow-by-blow details of the other scenes in order to avoid spoilers, the additional footage showed: aspects of the Man’s youth; hints at how and why he ended up cursed; the arrival of three wolf hunters at the Man’s home in the middle of the night to violently enlist his help in hunting down a werewolf; and the Man and the hunters’ journey to find a strange old woman who may know a thing or two about werewolves.
Eggers did copious amounts of research on England in the 13th century for the screenplay, he co-wrote with his The Northman collaborator, Sjón. The film’s dialogue is in Middle English, although it’s 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, who helped make the dialogue more period accurate.
Although the dialogue is in Middle English, Eggers said that 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.”
Eggers’ fascination with werewolf lore goes back to this youth. “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,” the filmmaker said.
“I wanted to make it in England and because Edward I was trying to protect the wool trade around the time of this movie, he set a campaign to exterminate all the wolves. 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. 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.”
The world of Werwulf is so dark and brutal that Eggers’ said cinematographer Jarin Blaschke texted him after he first read the script and asked, “’Does this take place in hell?’ And it needs to be hell for Aaron. And I think some medievalists would be annoyed that I’m kind of clinging to the stereotype of the Middle Ages being so muddy and dirty and rainy and miserable, but it needs to be so muddy, and rainy, and dirty, and miserable, and shit-covered, and it does need to be hell. But again, I always find that doing the research about the period, you learn stuff that makes it more interesting and more specific. And for this particular movie, more hell-like.”
Audiences will discover for themselves just how hell-like Werwulf is when it opens in theaters Christmas Day.
