The holidays are about to be horrifying once again, thanks to Robert Eggers. Back in 2024, the acclaimed director gift-wrapped his unnerving remake of Nosferatu for theaters on Christmas Day and was rewarded for it with rave reviews and a $182 million box office haul. Now, his new gothic folk horror follow-up, Werwulf, is ticketed for the same date this year, bringing with it a few returning faces, like Lily-Rose Depp, Willem Dafoe, and, this time in the leading role, Aaron Taylor-Johnson. With less than half a year until its release, Focus Features is finally lifting the fog to give a proper look at the director’s latest in all its grim and gritty glory.
Swapping vampires for lycanthropes, the first trailer for Werwulf has arrived with a haunting tease of Eggers’ take on the classic monster. Like his rendition of Count Orlock embodied by Bill Skarsgård, though, he’s not fully shedding light on the creature just yet. Compared to other classic werewolf movies, Eggers’ latest pulls more from traditional Dark Ages stories to create an embodiment of incomprehensible evil in the English countryside that doesn’t rely on clichés like silver bullets and the curse spreading through bites. For the local villagers, the titular creature’s presence represents folklore come to life, creating anxiety as they set traps in an effort to stop the beast from its bloody rampage.
At the center of the story is Taylor-Johnson, who plays a 13th-century farmer plagued by a terrible curse of an origin that the film will unravel throughout its runtime. The beast within haunts him to his core and, as Eggers has teased, his best hope of salvation may lie in the love of his wife (Depp) and family. Speaking to Esquire, the director teased that the world of Werwulf may be among his bleakest to date, with gnarly transformation scenes that will fully illustrate the pain Taylor-Johnson’s character lives with. In Eggers’ eyes, the harsh environment and the lofty physical demands brought out a career-best performance from the actor that’s as emotional as it is horrifying.
“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 are incredibly extreme. The emotional intensity he brings to role is equally as extreme.”
Collider Exclusive · Horror Survival Quiz Which Horror Villain Do You Have the Best Chance of Surviving? Jason Voorhees · Michael Myers · Freddy Krueger · Pennywise · Chucky
Five killers. Five completely different ways to die — if you’re not smart enough, fast enough, or self-aware enough to avoid it. Only one of them is the villain your particular set of instincts gives you a fighting chance against. Eight questions will figure out which one.
🏕️Jason
🔪Michael
💤Freddy
🎈Pennywise
🪆Chucky
01
Something feels wrong. You can’t explain it — you just know. What do you do? First instincts are the difference between the survivor and the first act casualty.
02
Where are you most likely to find yourself when things go wrong? Setting is everything in horror. Where you are determines which rules apply.
03
What is your most reliable survival asset? Every survivor has a quality the villain didn’t account for. What’s yours?
04
What kind of fear is hardest for you to fight through? Knowing your weakness is the first step to not dying because of it.
05
You’re with a group when things start going wrong. What’s your role? Horror movies are brutally clear about who survives group situations and who doesn’t.
06
What’s the horror movie mistake you’re most likely to make? Honest self-assessment is a survival skill. Denial is not.
07
What’s your best weapon against something that can’t be stopped by conventional means? Every horror villain has a weakness. The survivors are always the ones who find it.
08
It’s the final scene. You’re the last one standing. How did you make it? The final survivor always has a reason. What’s yours?
Your Survival Odds Have Been Calculated Your Best Chance Is Against…
Your instincts, your strengths, and your particular way of thinking under pressure point to one villain you actually have a fighting chance against. Everyone else — good luck.
Camp Crystal Lake · Friday the 13th
Jason Voorhees
Jason is relentless, but he is also predictable — and that is the gap you would exploit.
He moves in straight lines toward his target. He doesn’t strategise, doesn’t adapt, doesn’t outsmart. He simply pursues.
Your ability to keep moving, use the environment, and resist the panic that freezes most victims gives you a genuine edge.
The Crystal Lake survivors were always the ones who stopped running in circles and started thinking about terrain, water, and distance.
You think like that. Which means Jason, for all his indestructibility, would face someone who simply refused to be where he expected.
Haddonfield, Illinois · Halloween
Michael Myers
Michael watches before he moves. He is patient, methodical, and almost impossible to detect — until it’s too late for anyone who isn’t paying close enough attention.
But you are paying attention. You notice the shape in the window, the car parked slightly wrong, the silence where there should be sound.
Michael’s power lies in the invisibility of ordinary suburbia — the fact that nothing ever looks wrong until it already is.
Your spatial awareness and instinct to map every room, every exit, and every shadow before you need them is precisely the quality Laurie Strode had.
You are not a victim waiting to happen. You are someone who already suspects something is wrong — and acts on it.
Elm Street · A Nightmare on Elm Street
Freddy Krueger
Freddy wins by getting inside your head — using your own fears, your own memories, your own subconscious as weapons against you. That strategy requires a target who can be destabilised.
You are harder to destabilise than most. You’ve faced uncomfortable truths about yourself and you haven’t looked away.
The survivors on Elm Street were always the ones who understood what was happening and chose to face it rather than flee from it.
Freddy’s greatest weakness is that his power evaporates in the presence of someone who refuses to give him the fear he feeds on.
Your psychological resilience — the ability to stay grounded when reality itself becomes unreliable — is exactly the quality that keeps you alive here.
Derry, Maine · It
Pennywise
Pennywise is ancient, shapeshifting, and feeds on terror — but it has one critical vulnerability: it cannot function against someone who genuinely stops being afraid of it.
The Losers Club didn’t survive because they were braver than everyone else. They survived because they faced their fears together, and faced them honestly.
You ask the questions others avoid. You look directly at what frightens you rather than turning away.
That directness — the refusal to let fear fester in the dark — is Pennywise’s worst nightmare.
It chose the wrong target when it chose you. You are exactly the kind of person whose fear tastes like nothing at all.
Chicago · Child’s Play
Chucky
Chucky’s greatest advantage is that nobody takes him seriously until it’s already too late. He exploits the gap between how something looks and what it actually is.
You don’t have that gap. You take threats seriously regardless of how they present — and you never make the mistake of underestimating something because of its size or appearance.
Chucky relies on surprise, on the delay between recognition and response. You close that delay faster than almost anyone.
Your instinct to treat every unfamiliar thing with appropriate scepticism — rather than dismissing it because it seems absurd — is the exact quality that keeps you breathing.
Against Chucky, not laughing is already winning. You are very good at not laughing.
Eggers Already Has His Next Film Set After ‘Werwulf’
Working on the screenplay for his harrowing new tale reunited the director with Icelandic poet and author Sjón, who previously co-wrote his Viking epic The Northman. While Werwulf has been his primary focus, his next project is already set and may be a bit of a departure from his streak of darker horror features. Eggers signed on to direct a sequel to Jim Henson‘s fantasy cult classic Labyrinth at the beginning of 2025, again pairing up with Sjón to craft the next adventure. Both Chris and Eleanor Columbus are also rejoining them as producers after being attached to Werwulf. Since its announcement, though, there’s been little word about the film, but progress may pick up after Taylor-Johnson’s beast has been unleashed on the big screen.
Werwulf bows in theaters on December 25. Check out the trailer in the player above.
