Aaron Taylor-Johnson Wolfs Out in New Werwulf Trailer

Robert Eggers’ “Werwulf” is creeping nearer.

The latest blood-soaked historical tale from the director of “The Witch,” “The Lighthouse” and “Nosferatu” arrives in theaters on Christmas Day. “Werwulf” stars Aaron Taylor-Johnson as the man afflicted, Lily-Rose Depp as his wife and Willem Dafoe as a knight tasked with ridding the countryside of wolves, and promises to be just the right amount of counterprogramming for the holiday season. (“Nosferatu” was released on Christmas Day two years ago and made more than $180 million worldwide.) And ahead of the movie’s release, we have the brand-new trailer, which you can watch below. Might want to keep the lights on, though.

TRAILER

As the trailer sums up, Taylor-Johnson plays a man afflicted with lycanthropy who is tasked by a hunter to accompany him on a crusade to rid the area of wolves. Eggers regular Ralph Ineson plays a hardscrabble leper who accompanies them on their journey. The whole thing is spoken in a slightly modified version of Old English, and the color is nearly sapped (or is it bled?) out of the final image. What did you expect?

We were able to attend an event on the Universal lot, where Eggers showed off around 20 minutes of footage from the first half of “Werwulf,” which looks appropriately gnarly, and spoke a bit about where the movie came from.

“You’re always trying to push yourself and challenge yourself and bite off more than you can chew so you can get better,” Eggers explained. After “Nosferatu,” Eggers said to himself, Let me try and write the scariest thing I can write. “I don’t know that I did that, but I definitely wrote the darkest thing,” Eggers added.

The filmmaker had always been interested in werewolves, since reading historical accounts back in high school.

“They were doing things that were so taboo and hard for anyone to wrap their mind around because it was so extreme that they said ‘You can’t be a human, you must be a werewolf,’” said Eggers. “It was going to be very like dark and very primal subject matter.”

Eggers wanted to set and shoot the movie in England, where he now lives, and read about how Edward I wanted to protect the country’s wool trade and established “a campaign to exterminate all the wolves” — a campaign that was so successful that there are no more wolves in England. Dafoe’s character is, in fact, based on a real person who led the charge. If the next 200 years didn’t have any wolves, then you couldn’t have a movie steeped in werewolf lore.

“If I was going to set it in England, it had to be this early in history, around 1300, and that was even more exciting because the world would be like so primitive and so visceral and primal,” said Eggers. “That would make this all the more dark and brutal.”

Based on the footage we saw (and this new trailer), we think he succeeded. “Werwulf” howls at the moon beginning on Christmas Day. We’ll have plenty more from the movie before then.