Can Robert Eggers repeat his Nosferatu success with Werwulf?

In 2024, Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu became a surprise holiday hit (this after Eggers steadily built a devoted audience, beginning with 2015’s The VVitch). His next film is Werwulf, starring Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Lily-Rose Depp, and as Lainey mentioned, given the Christmastime success of Nosferatu, Werwulf is slated for Christmas 2026. The first trailer is here, and as a devotee of Eggers, yes, I will spend one segment of my precious year-end liminal space watching this film.

While I really enjoy Robert Eggers’ work, which is rooted in thorough historical research and a fanatical eye for detail, Nosferatu fell a little flat for me. I need to revisit it, though, because Robert Eggers is engaged in a project I admire a lot—he’s recording western folklore into the cinematic annals, not making direct adaptations so much as grafting ancient stories into modern storytelling in a way that I find both entertaining and incredibly rewarding viewing.

So far, he has covered witches and the Devil (The VVitch), mermaids/sea madness (The Lighthouse), and vampires (Nosferatu). The work that sort of sticks out is The Northman, an adaptation of the legend of Amleth, a Danish saga that Shakespeare mined for Hamlet. The Northman, while not directly addressing a folkloric tradition like Eggers’ other works, does continue a centuries-long lineage of storytellers repeating and altering this tale for new eras. The Northman might work best as an abstract for Eggers’ larger project, a distillation of how he’s adapting and evolving these stories for 21^st century audiences.

One way he does that is with his visuals, steeped in history and rich with detail. I always say that in a Robert Eggers film, everyone looks like they have lice and smell like horse sh-t, like he’s making the cinema of stink. Werwulf is no different, everyone looks miserably dirty and smelly. The funny version of this is Monty Python and the Holy Grail and the “he’s a king because he hasn’t got sh-t on him” joke. The serious version is Robert Eggers, who started out as a costume and production designer, making the kind of films that actually looks like the cast rolled around in sh-t before every take. His films are such a compelling mix of beautiful diegetic lighting and painterly composition, and the worst looking locations you’ve ever seen in your life.

Werwulf also brings back numerous members of Eggers’ acting troupe. ATJ and Depp are back from Nosferatu, Willem Dafoe has been in all of Eggers’ feature films, and Ralph Ineson is a veteran of The VVitch, The Northman, and Nosferatu. ATJ and Depp star as farmers, with Depp sporting a prosthetic cleft lip. Their clothes look itchy as hell. ATJ appears to be the one affected by the curse of the werewolf, and it looks like Eggers is going in the direction of the werewolf myth being an allegory for domestic violence, which is the same thread Leigh Whannell pulled in Wolf Man.

I want to see Werwulf because I like Robert Eggers and I want to see what he makes of the werewolf myth (he once again collaborated with the Icelandic poet and writer Sjón on the script), but I also am curious to see if he can repeat his Nosferatu success. He’s up against big competition—literally just BIG films—with Dune: Part Three and Avengers: Doomsday, where Nosferatu’s biggest competition in 2024 was Mufasa and A Complete Unknown. Audiences have plenty of options this December, so competition will be stiffer this time around. December is going to be a true taste test for audiences in the 2020s.