Robert Eggers has carved out a terrifying niche in historical horror. In works like The Witch and Nosferatu, he’s told folkloric stories in excruciatingly accurate settings, but for his next movie, Werwulf, he’s going back further in time than ever. Set in the 1200s, a nameless farmer finds himself transforming into a monstrous creature every full moon.
Anticipation has been building for Werwulf ever since Nosferatu’s box office success; the film features many of the same actors, and, uniquely, a script full of Middle English. Now the first trailer is finally here, and we can see how it all comes together. In Eggers’ trademark dark style, we see our protagonist (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), and then we flash back to him as a teenager being lured into the forest by a strange man. “Do not dread the darkness,” the man says. “Embrace it.” As he speaks, we see roaring flames and levitating, shaking bodies. Back in the present, he’s married to a woman played by Lily-Rose Depp, another Nosferatu alum, and is the father of three children. Check it out below:
If that was confusing to you, that’s on purpose: apparently, there are no character names in this movie at all. On the other hand, one of the trailer’s most surprising elements is that the dialogue is actually understandable. When the movie’s Middle English element was first introduced, many assumed that this would mean Werwulf would essentially be a foreign-language film, with viewers relying on subtitles to comprehend it.
But in a recent interview with Esquire, Eggers explained that this wasn’t his intention. “We worked with two Oxford professors on the dialogue, which is in Middle English, and then worked extensively with a dialect coach on a way to temper the pronunciation in a way that would be understandable to modern audiences,” he said.
We see the results of this process in the trailer. While the dialogue definitely sounds like Middle English, it’s also intelligible, as if the movie revitalized an accent that hasn’t existed in centuries. Will it be easy to understand in theaters later this year? Maybe not. But you won’t need an MA in Medieval Studies to follow along either.
Werwulf hits theaters on December 25, 2026.Learn Something New Every Day
