'Werwulf' is a fresh take on the Wolf Man legend with no cliches, says Robert Eggers

Robert Eggers didn't waste any time getting to work on his next feature, "Werwulf", a period Gothic horror experience written and directed by Robert Eggers. A follow-up to his radical reboot of "Nosferatu", the film is distributed by Focus Features. The much-awaited movie is scheduled for a Christmas theatrical release on December 25, 2026.

The film serves as a complete departure from modern, mainstream pop-culture werewolf tropes like silver bullets or contagious bites, shared Eggers in an interview with Esquire magazine while revealing the first-look still of Aaron Taylor-Johnson in character. Eggers revealed that he drew inspiration from actual medieval European lore, Viking culture, and dark historical documentation. Set in 13th-century England, the plot follows a cursed farmer seeking salvation through love while battling his harrowing, bestial metamorphosis.

As for stripping away the usual genre-associated cliches, Eggers added that the "cool thing about going back into the past is that you can hit a reset button. So all the clichés of being bitten by a werewolf and silver bullets and a lot of the stuff that has become almost campy don’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."

Eggers also went so far as to call Johnson's performance his "best". While also describing the world of the film briefly, Eggers said, "It’s 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 is incredibly extreme. The emotional intensity he brings to the role is equally as extreme."