I think I’m at the point where I’ll probably watch pretty much anything Robert Eggers makes, and while I know his very particular style isn't going to work for everyone, I do think it is hard not to at least respect what he's doing.
The Witch was the first Robert Eggers film I watched, and that was enough to work out that he had a very particular idea of what horror should feel like, while The Lighthouse showed that he could take that idea somewhere completely unhinged, The Northman proved that his obsession with history wasn't something he was going to leave behind when he moved into bigger productions, and Nosferatu proved that even when he was working with one of the most famous horror stories ever written, he was still going to make it feel completely like his own thing.
So when Werwulf was announced, while I was excited for another Robert Eggers movie, it was actually the period he has chosen to make it in that got me more excited, because a medieval werewolf movie from the director of The Witch sounds almost ridiculously well suited to what he does best.
We've all no doubt seen countless werewolf movies, but we haven't seen Robert Eggers make one, have we?
The Werewolf Gives Eggers Something New To Play With
The werewolf is one of those horror creatures that has been used so many times that it can be incredibly difficult to make the basic idea feel fresh - we've had tragic werewolves, funny werewolves, romantic werewolves, action-movie werewolves and pretty much every possible version of somebody getting bitten and then spending the rest of the movie worrying about what they're going to become.
But most modern werewolf stories begin with the assumption that the audience already understands what a werewolf is, while Werwulf has the opportunity to step much further back than that.
A medieval audience wouldn't have approached a werewolf with the same expectations we have now, as stories about monsters, curses, animals and supernatural transformation existed alongside religious beliefs and folklore, as Werwulf can ask what people in the 13th century might actually have believed they were witnessing, which I think is a much more interesting question.
And if somebody was to ask me which Eggers movie gives me the most confidence that Werwulf could work, I'd probably say The Witch, because that movie understood something that a lot of period horror gets wrong - the historical setting wasn't just there for show, as the characters genuinely belonged to that world, and their beliefs affected the way they understood everything happening around them.
The characters believed in the Devil, they believed in witchcraft, they believed that the forest could contain things that shouldn't be there, and the movie never treated those beliefs as something that needed to be explained away.
That's exactly the sort of approach that could make Werwulf work, too.
If somebody in medieval England genuinely believed that a man could become a wolf, the horror doesn't necessarily come from proving them right or wrong, it can come from watching what happens when that belief becomes impossible to ignore, especially because Eggers has also shown that he doesn't need to invent a completely new idea to make something disturbing.
We've become so used to werewolves that look impressive but still fundamentally resemble creatures designed by a modern special-effects department, and there's nothing wrong with that, obviously, but Eggers has always seemed to want to make strange things feel physical and unpleasant rather than simply making them look cool.
And given how much Eggers seems to care about practical detail, I suspect the transformation itself could be one of the things worth watching for.
The Northman is also important here for a different reason, because Eggers had already established what he could do with smaller, intensely controlled horror movies, but The Northman showed that expanding the scale didn't necessarily mean abandoning the details that made his work distinctive - he was able to build an entire world around rituals, mythology, violence and belief while still making the film feel deeply connected to the period in which it was set.
So the basic story might be familiar in Werwulf, but the cultural history surrounding it isn't, which gives him plenty of room to find something that hasn't already been done a hundred times, where Eggers can take the werewolf back into a world where folklore, religion, superstition and everyday life weren't separated as neatly as they are for modern audiences.
I don't know exactly what Werwulf is going to be yet of course, and I've seen what happens when other directors make werewolf movies, but now I want to see what happens when Robert Eggers gets his hands on one.