Robert Eggers opens Werwulf on December 25. The folk horror film is set in 13th-century England and follows a town terrorized by a ravenous beast. Aaron Taylor-Johnson leads the cast, with Willem Dafoe and Lily-Rose Depp. Eggers wrote the script with Sjón and has described it as the darkest thing he has ever written.
His filmography reads like a research project. Each feature begins from a creature or a myth and reconstructs the world around it from primary sources. The language is period-accurate. The dread is structural, not gestural.
The four films below run in chronological order and are not ranked. The case for watching them in sequence is that Eggers works in accumulation: each film assumes the previous one and raises the stakes. Werwulf lands differently when you arrive at it through the work.
