"Do not dread the darkness... embrace it."
Ahead of tonight's full moon, Focus Features has released the first trailer for Robert Eggers' Werwulf, and it's every bit as grim, grimy and ghoulish as you'd expect from the filmmaker who brought us The Witch, The Lighthouse, The Northman, and Nosferatu.
The teaser begins with a teenage boy being forced to watch as men who have been accused of being werewolves are burned alive. At some point, a genuine curse falls upon the lad, and as a man (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), we see him undergo a terrifying transformation.
We also get a first look at Lily-Rose Depp as Johnson's character's loyal wife, and Willem Dafoe as a hunter who comes to the village to investigate the tales of a murderous beast stalking the land.
As expected, the fully transformed lycanthrope is not shown here, and likely won't be unveiled until audiences are sitting down to watch the movie in theaters this Christmas.
"For me, going back to the old folklore is a way in, because you’re going to find different stuff – the tropes aren’t the same tropes that are so tired that they’ve become clichés," Eggers explains to Empire. "So that in and of itself gives it some freshness. I’ve also struggled with the creature, because it’s difficult in monster movies to make the monster convincing. I think that’s another pitfall of werewolf movies – they either look like guys in suits, or they look like CG. Are you willing to go along with that, knowing that they look seriously fake, or not? One of the best horror movies – and monster movies – of all time, is the first Alien, where it’s about the monster being a mystery and in the shadows.
"He's a farmer," Eggers said of Johnson's unnamed protagonist during a separate interview with Esquire. "He's a man who is cursed. 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. Nobody has a name in the movie. Aside from a dog. [Laughs.]"
Eggers was careful not to give away too much about the story, but he did reveal that Werwulf won't include the usual tropes associated with the "wolf man" myth.
"Backpedaling away from influences and mythologies that do and don't have to do with the film, the cool thing about going back into the past is that you can kind of 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 doesn'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."
The filmmaker also revealed that Depp's character is the "heart of the movie."
"Lily is truly transformative. There's a very clear physical change in her body and her makeup, but she inhabits a very different person that's very different from her and very different from any character she's ever played. She's Aaron's wife, and she's a mother of several children and also a farmer. She’s sort of the most gracious person in the film."
Check out the trailer below, along with a brief synopsis.
"In 13th-century England, a mysterious creature stalks a foggy countryside as local folklore becomes a terrifying reality for the villagers.”