{"id":911451,"date":"2026-09-30T21:22:15","date_gmt":"2026-09-30T21:22:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/911451\/"},"modified":"2026-09-30T21:22:15","modified_gmt":"2026-09-30T21:22:15","slug":"weve-seen-20-gory-minutes-from-robert-eggers-werwulf","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/911451\/","title":{"rendered":"We’ve Seen 20 Gory Minutes From Robert Eggers’ ‘Werwulf’"},"content":{"rendered":"

When Robert Eggers<\/a> sent the script for his new movie<\/a>, Werwulf, to his cinematographer Jarin Blaschke, Blaschke texted back, \u201cDoes this take place in hell? Is this hell?\u201d The answer, obviously, is no. But after seeing footage from the film, you understand the confusion.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think some Medievalists would be annoyed that I\u2019m kind of clinging to the stereotype of the Middle Ages being like so muddy and dirty and rainy and miserable,\u201d Eggers said at an event in Los Angeles last week<\/a>. \u201cBut like, it needs to be so muddy and rainy and dirty and miserable and shit-covered. It does need to be hell.\u201d<\/p>\n

After the success of his 2024 gothic monster movie<\/a>, Nosferatu, Eggers gave himself a challenge. \u201cI kind of said, \u2018Let me try to write the scariest thing I can write,’\u201d he said. \u201cI don\u2019t know that I did that, but I definitely wrote the darkest thing.\u201d The result is Werwulf, which is set in the 1300s and follows a man (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) cursed with being a werewolf who balances that with his family, outside forces, and more.<\/p>\n

If you\u2019ve seen the trailers<\/a>, you can already tell that this might be Eggers\u2019 most primitive and visceral film yet. And, at the event, Eggers presented 20 minutes from the first half of the film that showed just that. It\u2019s all spoken in Middle English, and it looked very dark, very dirty, and very real.<\/p>\n

While the footage didn\u2019t reveal a ton about the movie itself, if you want to go in cold, it\u2019s probably best to avoid the rest of this article.<\/p>\n

\"Io9<\/p>\n

One of the biggest revelations of the footage is that Werwulf starts with a werewolf transition. But, Eggers pointed out, it\u2019s not what he called the \u201cset piece\u201d transformation fans are expecting. That comes later.<\/p>\n

Werwulf opens over darkness. There\u2019s howling. We cut to a tight close-up of Taylor-Johnson as his mouth starts to foam. The shot gets wider as we see he\u2019s naked, outdoors, and runs into a barn. Inside, he begins to have violent spasms. His body moves in many unnatural positions. Eggers explained later that this was really Taylor-Johnson in the shots. The man falls, stays still for a few beats, and gets back up as the shaking gets worse. The lighting of the shot, which is almost all in one take, has three shadows down the middle, almost like claws.<\/p>\n

The man tumbles into darkness, comes back out, and we see that his back begins to bubble and break out with something that looks like an infection. We cut to black, hear a loud howl, and see the moon.<\/p>\n

\"WerwulfSome of the scenes we saw were in the trailer\u2014here\u2019s one example. \u00a9 Focus <\/p>\n

The next scene may be in sequence, but it was unclear. A young girl emerges from her home to see a field full of dead sheep. This is followed by vast landscape shots with a single, naked person traversing up a mountain. It\u2019s Taylor-Johnson. He arrives at a cabin and knocks at the door. A woman opens it and is in shock. This is Lily-Rose Depp\u2019s character who, we soon learn, is his wife. The woman slowly approaches the man as he begins to sniff her head and hair before the two passionately kiss.<\/p>\n

In a new scene, we see a child lying on a snow-covered ground. The child hears a voice. At first, he thinks it\u2019s his father, but the voice says it\u2019s not. He tilts his head and is scared of what he sees. The camera then turns from the child\u2019s face, slowly goes down and across the ground, and back up to become his point of view. There\u2019s a wolf standing there. The child gets ready for battle; he grabs a bird off the ground, bites its head off, and blood splatters all over his face.<\/p>\n

The final two scenes introduce some new characters. A trio of men knocks on the door of Taylor-Johnson and Depp\u2019s cabin. One is a terrifying-looking bald man who clearly has some kind of disease, the second is Ralph Ineson<\/a> in an eye patch, and the third is Willem Dafoe. The man and woman let them in and make them a meal. It\u2019s tense around the table, especially when the bald man starts to grab at Depp\u2019s character. She fights back, he pins her against the wall, and Taylor-Johnson gets involved. A fight breaks out, which is stopped by Dafoe finally speaking.<\/p>\n

\"WillemDafoe\u2019s character. \u00a9 Focus <\/p>\n

He reveals that he\u2019s been sent by the king to kill a werewolf that has been terrorizing this area and forces Taylor-Johnson\u2019s character to join them on the quest. It\u2019s unclear if he knows this is the person he\u2019s hunting, but there might be some suspicion. In the next scene, the group gets ready to go as the man and woman\u2019s two children come out to hug and say goodbye to their father.<\/p>\n

Later, Dafoe and the now three other men come across a section of woods filled with bodies. They\u2019ve been torn to shreds. More bodies are also hanging on a nearby tree for the birds to feast on. One is fresh. They encounter an odd-looking woman and ask her to take them to someone they refer to as the \u201cold cunning woman.\u201d She leads the way.<\/p>\n

They approach a very old, weathered hut. An old woman is inside, and Dafoe\u2019s character asks her about her husband, whom he believes to be a werewolf. She dives into a slow, sad speech that\u2019s kind of difficult to understand (on purpose, Eggers said, because the characters aren\u2019t supposed to fully understand it either). But we do get the gist that her husband was a werewolf, but she loved him anyway. She presents his skull as proof that he\u2019s now dead and, eventually, Dafoe throws her up against the wall, possibly killing her. He says that no one can know the things she knows.<\/p>\n

\"WerwulfThe husband\u2019s skull. \u00a9 Focus <\/p>\n

Again, Eggers explained that all these scenes are from the first half of the movie. So, presumably, the truth of Taylor-Johnson\u2019s character will become more prevalent, and we\u2019ll eventually see him showdown with Dafoe and his orders. And, at some point, we\u2019ll get a big, gross, transformation scene. Which is saying something because the one that opens the movie is pretty big and gross on its own.<\/p>\n

Werwulf opens on December 25. And if you\u2019d like more, Focus also just launched a Werwulf alternate reality game, which you can dig into here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Want more io9 news? Check out the best movies and TV shows<\/a> to stream this month and all the upcoming sci-fi, fantasy, and horror books<\/a> that should be on your radar.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When Robert Eggers sent the script for his new movie, Werwulf, to his cinematographer Jarin Blaschke, Blaschke texted…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":911452,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[48315,64,63,134,471029,344,214660,296973,85732],"class_list":["post-911451","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-aaron-taylor-johnson","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-entertainment","tag-lily-rose-depp","tag-movies","tag-robert-eggers","tag-werwulf","tag-willem-dafoe"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/911451","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=911451"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/911451\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/911452"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=911451"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=911451"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=911451"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}