We Finally Have Our First Look At Robert Eggers’ Werewulf
Robert Eggers’ latest is based in real werewolf legend.
You know what to expect from a Robert Eggers movie, and yet, you never know what’s coming next. The filmmaker behind The Witch and Nosferatu has now made a career for himself in gritty, dark, horror movies in a period setting. But with his next movie, Werwulf, Eggers is taking things up a notch with a 13th century movie about a young farmer who has to cope with lycanthropy.
Like Eggers’ other features, Werwulf is set in the past, but goes to great lengths to retain historical accuracy, going as far as delivering dialogue in Middle English. But as we learn more about this mysterious movie, there’s actually a real-life historical event it’s borrowing from.
Robert Eggers’ next movie borrows on a grim — and possibly fantastical — chapter of history.
Werwulf doesn’t have named characters. According to Eggers, only a dog has an actual name. But Aaron Taylor-Johnson plays the young man at the center of this transformation. “He’s a farmer. He’s a man who is cursed,” he told Esquire. “It’s a story about a man who is cursed and is trying to find salvation through love. He’s a character who is haunted and in great pain.”
This story is actually borrowed from real-life werewolf lore from continental Europe. “The werewolf lore there is born from people who were doing such horrific, indescribable acts that it was hard for other people to wrap their minds around it,” Eggers said. “They figured these people can’t be human. They must be inhuman. They must be werewolves.”
Take, for example, the real-life case of Peter Stumpp, a 17th century German farmer who was tried for the murder of over a dozen victims, along with witchcraft and cannibalism. Under the duress of torture, he admitted to being a werewolf, which many took as the only explanation for such acts.
Werewolf legends ran rampant in Europe in the Middle Ages.
Much like his previous movie, The Witch, Werwulf seems to focus on the paranoia around unsaid things in a community and how that creeps up into the extreme. “Part of this being a horror movie is that it’s about mystery and suspense and the slow burn, uncomfortable vibes that lead us into darkness and ultimately horror,” Eggers said.
But even if we’re kept in the dark about a lot of things, it’s clear that these historical events were a major inspiration. “You see Aaron as a young man and the werewolf trials,” Eggers said. “What was really interesting was that for some of the men, it was really clear in their confessions and through the things that they were saying in the trials that they are victims of trauma.”
Much like with witch trials — in fact, werewolf trials are often considered just a subsection of witch trials — these supernatural legends were just a way for people to rationalize what they cannot understand. But this is truly a supernatural horror movie, so there will, in fact, be actual werewolves. But how will the transformation affect this nameless hero, and what will it say about his own trauma and the trauma of the real historical figures who inspired it? We’ll have to wait until Christmas to find out.
