After turning Christmas into vampire season with “Nosferatu,” Robert Eggers is returning to the holiday corridor with another period horror nightmare. Focus Features has unveiled the first look at “Werwulf,” Eggers’ new 13th-century horror film starring Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Lily-Rose Depp.
The film marks Eggers’ fifth feature after “The Witch,” “The Lighthouse,” “The Northman,” and “Nosferatu,” and reunites him with Taylor-Johnson and Depp after last year’s gothic vampire tale. This time, Eggers is moving from Transylvanian terror to medieval England, with a story centered on a rural community haunted by folklore, blood, and something monstrous stalking the landscape.
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The first footage, shown as part of Focus’ CinemaCon presentation, reportedly leans hard into the director’s usual mix of historical texture and full-body dread: pagans burning a church, peasants wandering the cold lands of Dartmoor, dead sheep, blood-filled concoctions, and Taylor-Johnson’s character convulsing under a full moon as he begins to transform. In other words, Eggers does not appear to be chasing a slick, modern werewolf movie so much as a filthy, pagan, curse-soaked descent into madness.
Focus is clearly bullish on what Eggers has made. In a recent Letterboxd interview, Peter Kujawski, chairman of Focus Features, said the teaser did not even need Eggers’ name attached to be identifiable as his work. “But I promise you, Werwulf is on a whole other level,” Kujawski said. “No one has seen a movie that looks or feels like this movie does.”
“Werwulf” is written by Eggers and Sjón, who previously collaborated on “The Northman.” Willem Dafoe and Ralph Ineson also star, continuing Eggers’ habit of building his genre nightmares around actors who can make archaic language, bodily terror, and spiritual doom feel like a single weather system.
The official synopsis has not been released yet, but Focus lists the film simply as horror, which feels almost funny given how specific Eggers’ brand of horror has become: obsessive period detail, ritualistic violence, and the sense that history itself is crawling with evil. After “Nosferatu” became the filmmaker’s biggest box-office success, “Werwulf” arrives with plenty of expectations—and, judging by the early footage, very little interest in softening the blow.
“Werwulf” opens in theaters on December 25, 2026, and you can watch the new trailer below.
