Skip to content

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.

Emmy winner John Goodman (The Conners), Ian Alexander and Laura Bailey (The Legend of Vox Machina) have joined the Season 3 cast of HBO‘s The Last Of Us.

The castings are significant, as Alexander and Bailey previously voiced characters from The Last of Us: Part II video game, Alexander as Lev and Bailey as Abby. Kyriana Kratter plays Lev in the live-action series and Abby is played by Kaitlyn Dever.

In HBO’s The Last Of Us, Goodman plays Joey and Alexander plays Paco, a friendly duo who dub themselves “Heroes of the Highway.” Bailey plays Elizabeth, one of the leaders of the religious sect known as the Seraphites.

HBO previously pulled actors from the video games for the live-action series, casting Merle Dandridge and Jeffrey Wright, who both reprised the live-action versions of the characters they voiced in the games – Dandridge as Marlene, head of the Fireflies resistance movement, and Wright as Isaac Dixon, leader of the WLF militia in Seattle. Additionally, Ashley Johnson, who played Ellie’s mom in the Season 1 finale, voiced Ellie in the video games.

Co-created by Craig Mazin and the game’s Neil Druckmann, The Last of Us, based on the award-winning Naughty Dog video game, takes place 20 years after modern civilization has been destroyed. The story began with Joel (Pedro Pascal), a hardened survivor, getting hired to smuggle Ellie (Bella Ramsey), a 14-year-old girl, out of an oppressive quarantine zone. What starts as a small job soon becomes a brutal and heartbreaking journey as they both must traverse the U.S. and depend on each other for survival.

Season 2 picked up five years after the events of the first season. No details regarding Season 3’s plot have been revealed but it is expected to focus on Abby Anderson (Dever)’s arc, in which Seraphites play a major part.

Pascal’s character Joel was killed in the Season 2 finale, so he could not physically appear in Season 3, but it’s possible he could appear in flashbacks. At this point, his return is uncertain.

Goodman, Alexander and Bailey, join several other previously announced new cast members for Season 3, including Li Jun Li as Miriam, a Seraphite, Peter Sarsgaard as Amon, one of the leaders of the Seraphites, a new character that is not in the video games. Also joining the cast this season are Jason Ritter as Hanley, a WLF soldier, Patrick Wilson as Jerry, Abby’s (Dever) father, as well as Michelle Mao, Clea DuVall and Jorge Lendeborg as Manny, taking over the role for Danny Ramirez, who could not return for scheduling reasons.

Season 3 may indeed be the last for the HBO series. In an interview with Deadline after HBO’s 21 Emmy wins earlier this month, Casey Bloys, Chairman and CEO of HBO and Max Content, would not confirm the upcoming season is the last, but said he believes “Mazin has planned it as the final season.”

Mazin, who served as executive producer/co-showrunner alongside Neil Druckmann in Seasons 1 and 2, is the series’ sole showrunner for Season 3. It’s scheduled to premiere in 2027.

Katie Campione contributed to this report.