If the embed has slunk off into the fog, the second trailer is also here on YouTube.
Somewhere in Focus Features there is a marketing executive who now owns a lunar calendar and is not afraid to use it. Every beat of the campaign for Robert Eggers’ Werwulf has landed on a full moon: the first trailer on 29 June, the poster on 29 July, the first merchandise on 28 August and the second trailer on 26 September. October’s Hunter’s Moon peaked at 4.11am London time this morning, and right on cue the studio has moved its alternate reality game into round two.
The game lives at DevourethAllMankynde.com, named after the poster’s tagline, and runs across three full moons. Each time, a hidden “sign” appears somewhere on the film’s digital platforms, and players have 24 hours to find it, decipher it and enter the answer before it vanishes back into the mist. September’s clue was posted on the film’s X account and written in the Theban alphabet, the old witches’ script beloved of grimoires and goth notebooks alike, and its answer, “huntere”, pointed straight at this month’s moon. For round two, Focus has reportedly launched a Snapchat lens that lets players point their phones at the real full moon to reveal the next sign. It is a wonderfully daft idea, and the most medieval thing a social media app has ever been asked to do.
Los Angeles also got a full moon pop-up on Sunday night, next door to The Brig on Abbot Kinney in Venice, with exclusive merchandise designed with The Cinegogue, original costumes, research material from the film and a vintage photobooth. The second clue went live at 9pm Pacific the same evening, so if the 24-hour rule holds, British players should have until the early hours of Tuesday to get their phones out and stare skywards. The mysterious prize for completing all three moons will be revealed at the Beaver Moon on 24 November. Be warned that the rewards themselves are reported to be for the US only, although anybody can play along.
As for the film, Eggers has co-written it with the Icelandic novelist Sjón, his partner on The Northman, and set it in 13th-century England, with much of the dialogue in Middle English. Aaron Taylor-Johnson plays a farmer cursed to become a wolf, Lily-Rose Depp is his wife and Willem Dafoe arrives as the knight sent to clear the land of wolves, with Ralph Ineson also in the cast. Eggers has so far kept his beast resolutely in the shadows, citing Alien as his model for a monster that stays a mystery, which suggests he has seen a few too many men in hairy suits. That’s the mistake Hammer neatly sidestepped in 1961 by casting Oliver Reed in The Curse of the Werewolf, a man who barely needed the make-up.
Werwulf opens in the US on Christmas Day, and Universal releases it in the UK on New Year’s Day 2027. There is a full moon on 23 December, two days before the American opening, and if the beast is going to be shown off at all before release, that would be the night to keep watch. Either way, it is a more interesting marketing campaign than yet another “exclusive first look” in a glossy, and a good deal more fun than a Christmas jumper.
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