WERWULF Trailer Reveals Robert Eggers’ Werewolf Horror

The new WERWULF trailer is here, and Robert Eggers is finally letting us see more of the nightmare waiting under the full moon.

Focus Features released the second official trailer for WERWULF today, giving us a much more revealing look at Eggers’ medieval take on werewolf horror. Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Lily-Rose Depp and Willem Dafoe lead the film, which arrives exclusively in theaters on December 25, 2026.

The new WERWULF trailer gets much darker

Focus is still keeping the actual story fairly guarded. Its official description calls WERWULF a tale of “devotion, damnation and the devil within,” and Trailer 2 seems perfectly happy to let the images do most of the talking.

The footage is dirty, bleak and uncomfortable in exactly the way you would expect from the filmmaker behind The Witch, The Lighthouse, The Northman and Nosferatu. Taylor-Johnson’s character is clearly suffering from something far beyond an ordinary illness, while the trailer leans heavily into curses, religious fear, wolves and the growing panic surrounding whatever is happening to him.

Dafoe also gets more attention this time around, and the trailer makes it clear that the threat is not going to be treated like the familiar Hollywood version of a werewolf story. There is no playful transformation montage or monster movie wink here. Everything looks painful, grim and deeply serious.

Eggers is going back to folklore

Eggers wrote WERWULF with Sjón, his collaborator on The Northman. Focus describes the movie as his most visceral and haunting experience yet, and the new footage certainly looks committed to the kind of historical detail and old world superstition that have become trademarks of his films.

This is also not our first look at the movie. We previously covered Eggers’ plans to preview WERWULF at the Sitges Film Festival, where he is also set to receive the festival’s Time Machine Award. The Christmas release remains unchanged, putting a very different kind of holiday movie in theaters on December 25.

What We Think

I have been waiting for this trailer because werewolves are my favorite horror subgenre, but Robert Eggers is also exactly the filmmaker who makes me nervous about getting too excited.

I respect what he does, especially the historical detail and the way his movies look, but his slower pacing has not always worked for me. Nosferatu came closest, and WERWULF has always felt like the movie that could finally push me completely over the line.

This trailer doesn’t really sway me either way. It looks like an Eggers movie and this one highlights the dirt and filth everyone is living in for me. The world looks filthy, dangerous, and hard to live in which could be good or it could be another exercise in historical accuracy that’s just slow. I still expect a slow burn because this is Robert Eggers, but maybe it will take what he did with Nosferatu and improve on it. At least this trailer had a small bit of werewolf in it, so that’s keeping me interested.