‘Werwulf’ Trailer: Aaron Taylor-Johnson Transforms in Robert Eggers’ New Gothic Horror Movie

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Jun 30

Robert Eggers returns to Christmas horror with ‘Werwulf,’ a 13th-century werewolf nightmare starring Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Lily-Rose Depp, Willem Dafoe and Ralph Ineson.

Robert Eggers is going back into the fog.

Focus Features has released the first trailer for ‘Werwulf,’ the director’s new gothic horror film starring Aaron Taylor-Johnson as the title creature. Set in 13th-century England, the film follows a rural community as local folklore becomes terrifyingly real and a mysterious beast begins stalking the countryside. The film is scheduled to open in theaters on Dec. 25.

The trailer leans directly into Eggers’ favorite territory: superstition, dread, period texture and the fear that something ancient has stepped out of myth and into the physical world. Taylor-Johnson is teased undergoing an intense transformation, with the imagery suggesting a film less interested in clean monster-movie spectacle than in bodily terror, religious panic and the slow collapse of a village trying to explain what it cannot survive.

Taylor-Johnson and Lily-Rose Depp reunite with Eggers after appearing in ‘Nosferatu,’ the director’s Christmas 2024 vampire film. Willem Dafoe and Ralph Ineson also return to Eggers’ orbit, giving ‘Werwulf’ the feeling of another entry in the filmmaker’s growing repertory company. Jack Morris, Jan Bijvoet, Ritchi Edwards and Bodhi Rae Breathnach also star. Eggers co-wrote the film with Sjón, his collaborator on ‘The Northman,’ and the project is backed by Focus Features, Working Title Films and Maiden Voyage Pictures.

For Eggers, ‘Werwulf’ feels like a natural continuation of his career-long obsession with old worlds and the terror inside belief systems. ‘The Witch’ turned Puritan paranoia into one of the defining horror debuts of the last decade. ‘The Lighthouse’ transformed isolation and masculinity into black-and-white madness. ‘The Northman’ pushed Viking myth into blood-soaked revenge tragedy. ‘Nosferatu’ revived one of cinema’s most iconic vampires through rot, desire and plague. Now ‘Werwulf’ appears ready to bring that same historically obsessive eye to lycanthropy.

The Christmas date also makes sense for Focus. Eggers’ ‘Nosferatu’ opened on Christmas Day in 2024 and became a strong commercial performer, earning more than $181 million worldwide after a major holiday launch. That success proved there is still a sizable theatrical audience for elegant, adult-skewing horror when the filmmaker, cast and release strategy line up. ‘Werwulf’ now gives Focus another dark holiday counterprogramming play, this time replacing the vampire myth with a werewolf nightmare.

The footage suggests Eggers is not softening his approach. Early CinemaCon footage from the film was described as ominous and visually severe, with the creature largely withheld and Taylor-Johnson’s possible transformation used as a source of dread rather than instant reveal. Eggers has reportedly called ‘Werwulf’ one of his darkest projects, which is saying something from a filmmaker whose work already tends to live somewhere between historical immersion and spiritual decay.

That restraint may be what separates ‘Werwulf’ from more conventional werewolf films. The genre has often lived between tragic body horror and creature-feature release, from ‘The Wolf Man’ to ‘An American Werewolf in London’ and beyond. Eggers seems more interested in the folklore beneath the transformation: what a medieval village believes, what fear does to a community and how quickly superstition can become a survival language when something impossible starts killing people in the dark.

Taylor-Johnson is an intriguing fit for that center. The actor has spent years moving between action spectacle, comic-book roles, period work and more physically intense performances, but ‘Werwulf’ appears to push him toward something more primal and grotesque. If the trailer is any indication, the transformation is not being treated as a clean effects showcase. It looks painful, violent and spiritually contaminating, which is exactly the kind of horror Eggers tends to favor.

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Depp’s presence adds another layer after ‘Nosferatu,’ where she became the emotional and physical center of Eggers’ vampire nightmare. Dafoe and Ineson, both deeply at home in the director’s worlds, bring the kind of weathered intensity that can make exposition feel like prophecy. Few contemporary filmmakers cast faces as carefully as Eggers, and ‘Werwulf’ already looks designed around bodies, voices and textures that feel carved out of another century.

The key question is whether ‘Werwulf’ can turn the werewolf myth into something newly unsettling. Eggers’ best work has always come from refusing to treat folklore as fantasy. In his films, belief has consequences. Evil does not arrive because the story needs a villain. It arrives because a world has made room for it. That is why the logline’s promise of folklore becoming reality feels so suited to him. A werewolf in an Eggers film is unlikely to be just a monster. It is likely to be a curse, a contagion, a punishment and a mirror.

With ‘Werwulf,’ Focus and Eggers appear to be betting that Christmas audiences are once again ready for something cold, ancient and deeply unholy. After ‘Nosferatu,’ that bet no longer feels strange. It feels like a brand.

‘Werwulf’ opens in theaters Dec. 25.