Werwulf’s poster has a figure folded over in a churchyard, one arm stretched up so its clawed hand covers the moon, under a tagline spelled “Devoureth All Mankynde”. Robert Eggers is doing a werewolf, set in England around 1300, and he told IGN that after Nosferatu he set out to write the scariest thing he could, wasn’t sure he’d managed it, “but I definitely wrote the darkest thing.” It opens in American cinemas on Christmas Day and in the UK on 1 January, about six weeks from now.

He wrote it with Sjón, the Icelandic poet who co-wrote The Northman, and the dialogue is Middle English, checked by two Oxford scholars, Eleanor Baker and Daniel Wakelin. A dialect coach, William Conacher, then nudged the pronunciation back towards something a modern audience can follow, so it’s scholarly English bent just far enough to be speakable. Eggers says “you don’t need to understand what anyone’s saying to understand the movie”, and I believe him. In The Lighthouse, Willem Dafoe’s sea curses worked on sound and rhythm long before they worked as sense. Middle English is further off, but it should work the same way.

Aaron Taylor-Johnson plays a farmer listed only as Man, and Lily-Rose Depp is Woman, his wife. Neither gets a proper name, which pushes the whole thing towards folktale before a frame of it has screened. Dafoe, Ralph Ineson and Jack Morris are the hunters sent to kill him. Taylor-Johnson, Depp and Dafoe all come straight from Nosferatu, which I saw on Boxing Day 2024. That film opened on Christmas Day and grossed around $181m worldwide, and Focus has given this one the same date.

Focus is also selling tickets for 35mm screenings in selected cinemas, which is the version I want and almost certainly won’t find anywhere near me. The trailer already looks the part, grainy and boxed into 4:3. I’m aiming for New Year’s Day, most likely on a digital screen.

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