If the embed has slunk off into the mist, the second Werwulf trailer is also here on YouTube.
The Motion Picture Association has finally run the rule over Robert Eggers’ Werwulf, and its verdict reads less like a film certificate and more like the charge sheet at a medieval assize. The film is rated R for “strong bloody/disturbing violent content, gore, sexual assault, graphic nudity and strong sexual content”. For comparison, Nosferatu, a film in which Bill Skarsgård’s count spent much of his screen time doing unspeakable things in a nightgown, got away with “bloody violent content, graphic nudity and some sexual content”. That’s quite a step up for a director whose idea of a light moment is a goat with opinions.
None of it should come as a surprise. Eggers has been telling anyone with a microphone that this is the darkest thing he has ever written, and every one of his features has carried an R. He has also been careful to say that the gore isn’t the point; it’s the dread that does the work, with only a couple of jump scares. Since the beast has been kept almost entirely out of the marketing, one suspects the scariest thing in the trailers so far is Willem Dafoe’s grizzled Old Hunter looking at someone for slightly too long.
The film, co-written with the Icelandic novelist Sjón, his collaborator on The Northman, is set in 13th-century England with much of the dialogue in Middle English. Aaron Taylor-Johnson plays the cursed farmer, Lily-Rose Depp his wife, and Dafoe the man sent to clear the land of wolves, with Ralph Ineson and Bodhi Rae Breathnach also in the cast. It was shot on 35mm in the boxy 1.37:1 Academy ratio, and Focus Features is leaning into that by putting tickets on sale for 35mm screenings at selected American cinemas on opening day. The film closes, apparently, on a six-minute song from Ethel Cain called “Wynter Waxeth”, which is the most Eggers song title imaginable, short of something spelled entirely in runes.
The timing remains the best joke in the package. Werwulf opens in the US on Christmas Day via Focus, just as Nosferatu did in 2024, and Universal brings it to British cinemas on New Year’s Day 2027. Eggers appears to have appointed himself the Ghost of Christmas Unspeakable. Somewhere there’s a family who’ll book it on the strength of the poster and the words “Christmas release”, and they’re going to have a very quiet drive home.
Period werewolf horror has a respectable pedigree, from Hammer’s The Curse of the Werewolf to Neil Jordan’s The Company of Wolves, but nobody has quite tried to do it with Eggers’ level of mud-under-the-fingernails research. If the film lives up to its rating, it will be the most historically accurate way to have your Christmas ruined since the Black Death.
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