Four full moons, four drops. The first Werwulf trailer arrived on June 29, the poster on July 29, the first merch on August 28, and today, September 26, with the moon full again, Focus Features has put out Trailer 2 for Robert Eggers’ medieval werewolf film. Aaron Taylor-Johnson howls at that moon in it, Willem Dafoe‘s hunter arrives to deal with the wolves, and the full transformation is still held back.
The June trailer was almost all texture: fog, wet wool, candlelight. This one gives the story a shape. There is a farmer (Taylor-Johnson), a wife (Lily-Rose Depp) and children, a countryside being eaten by plague, and a knight who has come because the locals have decided wolves are the problem. The final line points at salvation, which is the word Eggers keeps using for this story, and it lands like a confession rather than a threat.
The Howl Does the Work
The best decision in the cut is the one Focus did not make: there is still no full transformation, and no clean look at the beast. Two trailers in, the creature remains a howl, a shadow and a village’s worth of terrified faces, and it is more frightening for it. A werewolf shown in daylight is a costume or a render. A werewolf you only hear is a problem you cannot solve.
That restraint is deliberate. Speaking to Empire, Eggers said werewolf movies tend to fail at the monster, which either looks like “guys in suits” or looks like CG, and pointed to the first Alien as the model, where the creature is “a mystery and in the shadows.” Whether he keeps it there for the whole film is the question this trailer is built to make you ask.
Why the Movie Is Set in 1300
The year is not set dressing. Eggers told Esquire the film takes place around 1300 because that is as late as it could: England spent the 13th century exterminating its wolves to protect the wool trade, and once the wolves were gone, so was the werewolf lore. The story had to happen while the country still had something to be afraid of in the woods.
Going that far back also let him throw out the rulebook: no bite that passes the curse along, no silver bullet, and, per the same interview, no names for anyone in the film apart from a dog. It is the same instinct he described to iHorror when he told us he will never set a film in the present day.
The Marketing Runs on the Lunar Calendar
Every beat of this campaign has landed on a full moon, and the trailer arrives with a game built around the next three: DevourethAllMankynde.com, named for the tagline on the July poster. During each of the September, October and November full moons, a hidden “sign” appears somewhere online for 24 hours, and players have to find it, decipher it and enter the answer on the site before it vanishes. Solve all three and a prize is promised. Tonight is the first window.
The film’s own X account set up today’s drop the night before with a 15-second teaser: clouds crossing the moon, then the howl, and two words of caption.
Trailer tomorrow.
— Werwulf (@werwulfmovie) September 25, 2026
The remaining full moons before release are October 26, November 24 and December 23. Given the pattern, expect something on each of them.
Depp Is the Heart of It
Taylor-Johnson, Depp and Dafoe all come straight off Nosferatu, and Eggers has called Depp’s role “the heart of the movie”: the farmer’s wife, a mother of several children, in a performance he told Esquire is “truly transformative.” Ralph Ineson, the doomed father from The Witch, and Bodhi Rae Breathnach (Hamnet) round out the cast, and Eggers wrote the script with Sjón, his co-writer on The Northman.
Werwulf opens exclusively in theaters on December 25, 2026, two years to the day after Nosferatu turned Christmas into a $181 million vampire movie for Focus. Eggers already has Romeo and Juliet lined up as his next film at the studio, and our breakdown of the first trailer shows how much this one adds.
The December 23 full moon falls two days before the film opens. If the beast is going to be shown in full before then, that is the night it happens. If not, Eggers is keeping it for the dark of a theater, which is exactly where it belongs.
