Focus Features has released the first photo from Nosferatu director Robert Eggers’ next period horror film, Werwullf, which can be seen below.
In his first interview about Werwullf, Eggers told Esquire how his film will be unlike any other werewolf movie and also revealed details about the characters played by Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Lily-Rose Depp, both of whom previously starred in Eggers’ Nosferatu.
Werwullf follows a 13th-century farmer (Taylor-Johnson) who transforms into a werewolf. Depp plays his wife and the mother of his children – Eggers calls her “the heart of the movie” – while Willem Dafoe plays a hunter. “Nobody has a name in the movie. Aside from a dog,” Eggers said, laughing.
Taylor-Johnson’s farmer is “a man who is cursed. It’s a story about a man who is cursed and is trying to find salvation through love. He’s a character who is haunted and in great pain.”
The director said Taylor-Johnson’s protagonist inhabits “a really brutal, unforgiving, merciless, grotesque world. More than ever, it’s mud and blood and dung and rain and pain and suffering. Aaron’s performance is incredibly harrowing. We’ll say without a doubt that it’s his best performance, and the stuff that he does physically in the transformation scenes are incredibly extreme. The emotional intensity he brings to [the] role is equally as extreme.”
Taylor-Johnson studied a real wolf to adopt aspects of its behavior, and also worked with movement coach Marie Gabriel-Rotie (another Nosferatu veteran) for months to master the contortions and physical demands of playing a werewolf.
The film’s dialogue – by Eggers and his The Northman collaborator Sjón – is in Middle English, although it’s been “tempered” by a dialect coach to make it more comprehensible for the modern ear.
Shot on 35mm film, Eggers said Werwullf will have “a very unique look” that was achieved by using an orthochromatic treatment in post-production to make the actors’ complexions more sickly and by incorporating “the grain structure of black-and-white film onto color film.”
Eggers drew on Dark Ages werewolf lore from England and continental Europe, and even aspects of Viking culture that likely inspired the idea of a wolf-man. The director said viewers shouldn’t expect any of the tropes they’ve come to expect from decades of werewolf movies:
“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 Cheney Jr.’s The Wolf Man or An American Werewolf in London to get what’s going on here.”
Werwullf opens December 25, 2026.
