Around 1210 A.D., Gervase of Tillbury, an English cleric and scholar who was widely traveled throughout Europe, wrote down everything he had learned in his years of study and exploration. The work became a hand-made encyclopedia known as Otia Imperialia, and in those Dark Ages any such compendium of science, history, politics, and geography was both rare and extremely valuable. However, some entries in the catalogue are more unusual than others. The third volume, for instance, includes section CXX (“12O” in Roman numerals), which is titled in Latin: De hominibus, qui fuerunt lupi—which translates as: “Of Men Who Were Wolves.”
Vnum scio apud nostrates cotidianum esse, quod sic fatis hominu currentibus, quidam per lunationes mutantur in lupos, Gervase wrote: “One thing I know that is common among our people is that, as the fates of men run their course, some are changed into wolves by the lunations.” The medieval author chronicled several specific examples of individuals he knew to have been afflicted by a strange, transformative malady. The violence they unleashed, he wrote, had emptied remote villages, led to the vanishing of children, and left survivors mutilated with bites and scratches.
There were many other written accounts of shapeshifting beasts from this era, and these archaic texts were all writer-director Robert Eggers needed as inspiration for his latest film: Werwulf. The filmmaker behind Nosferatu, The Northman, The Lighthouse, and The VVitch is renowned for his immersive and authentic style, crafting stories that feel less like movies and more like time travel to dark, distant, and uncertain eras.
As part of Esquire’s exclusive first look at Werwulf, featuring star Aaron Taylor-Johnson as a 13th-century man haunted by his bestial metamorphosis, Eggers speaks about what he drew from the various ancient lores for his original story, and what he discarded from modern-day pop culture werewolf tales. He also breaks down the roles played by Lily-Rose Depp and Willem Dafoe, and provides the very first details about what to expect when Werwulf debuts this December.
ESQUIRE: Where should we begin with this film?
ROBERT EGGERS: This my first Werwulf interview and my first interview in a while, so let's see how it goes.
Maybe you could tell me when your brain began to turn over this story? You've gone from vampires now to werewolves, and witches before…
Yeah, obviously this stuff is all part of my DNA and part of my childhood interests, but I wanted to follow up Nosferatu with another horror movie. I had written something that was a bit too obscure. So I thought, Let me be sensible and make a werewolf movie. [Laughs.] I wanted to do it in the UK because that's where I live now.
You always do a lot of research from real life. What were you drawing on for your inspirations in terms of the historical record?
I learned that basically because of protections for the wool trade, there was a big effort to get rid of all the wolves in England. It was pretty successful. So, the movie takes place around 1300 and that's as late as it could be because once there were no wolves in England, there was no more werewolf lore in England. That became interesting, that it was going to be set so medieval.
That's truly the Dark Ages, so-named because history is not very clear.
The British stuff is fairly scanty. So eventually I did have to go over to continental Europe. The werewolf lore there is born from people who were doing such horrific indescribable acts that it was hard for other people to wrap their minds around it. They figured these people can't be human. They must be inhuman. They must be werewolves.
That's where that came from?
I mean, if we really want to get into it, we can talk about the Berserkirs [an ancient Norse term for especially ferocious warriors who wore bearskins] and the Úlfhéðnar [another Old Norse word for “wolf-coats”) that you see in the Northmen, that come from Viking culture. And there's all kinds of wolf warriors from before that. But in a Christian setting, people who turn into werewolves become evil, and the early associations in the Christian mythology become satanic.
For Werwulf, what pieces of mythology, old or new, did you choose to use or leave behind? If you ask most people, they’d say you become a werewolf by being bitten by one. And of course rabies causes madness and violence and confusion and bewilderment. Is there a biological component to this lore?
Backpedaling away from influences and mythologies that do and don't have to do with the film, the cool thing about going back into the past is that you can kind of hit a reset button. So, all the clichés of being bitten by a werewolf and silver bullets and a lot of the stuff that has become almost campy doesn't exist in the mythology of this movie. So you don't need to have seen Lon Cheney Jr.'s The Wolf Man or An American Werewolf in London to get what's going on here.
Fair enough. What can you share about Aaron Taylor-Johnson’s character?
He's a farmer. He's a man who is cursed. It's a story about a man who is cursed and is trying to find salvation through love. He's a character who is haunted and in great pain.
Can we know his name?
Nobody has a name in the movie. Aside from a dog. [Laughs.]
You said he's cursed. Is this something he brought upon himself or something that's just part of some sort of family?
Part of this being a horror movie is that it’s about mystery and suspense and the slow-burn, uncomfortable vibes that lead us into darkness and ultimately horror. I think the less we know, the better.
As a farmer, he must be somebody who lives remotely, lives on the land. What's the world like for this man?
It's a really brutal, unforgiving, merciless, grotesque world. More than ever, it's mud and blood and dung and rain and pain and suffering. Aaron's performance is incredibly harrowing. We'll say without a doubt that it's his best performance, and the stuff that he does physically in the transformation scenes are incredibly extreme. The emotional intensity he brings to role is equally as extreme.
Who is in his life? Lily-Rose Depp is in the movie. Both of them are working with you again after Nosferatu.
Lily, she is the heart of the movie. Lily is truly transformative. There's a very clear physical change in her body and her makeup, but she inhabits a very different person that's very different from her and very different from any character she's ever played. She's Aaron's wife, and she's a mother of several children and also a farmer. She’s sort of the most gracious person in the film.
What can you share about Willem Dafoe’s character? Everybody's curious to see what you do with him since you've worked so closely with him over the years in all of your films.
It’ll be clear from the trailer that Willem is a hunter.
You mentioned the wool trade and that the werewolf lore evaporated after the wolves were exterminated. Around the world, the conflict between human beings and these apex predators was pretty legendary.
Yeah, and to some degree, probably more exaggerated in the minds of the people and the time. The wolf also becomes a symbol of Satan in sermons on Sunday. There is some stuff like that in the film. The idea of the wolf as “The Dark One who's trying to ruin your life” was pounded into these people's heads.
It's in our language, right? Wolf at the door, wolf in sheep’s clothing. Lone wolf. It's become a shorthand for an unknown danger that you need to fortify yourself against.
Absolutely. We went to a wolf sanctuary during prep and certainly from a contemporary perspective, you're not seeing the wolf as any kind of threat. But they are powerful. It's not a dog. It's not an Alsatian. It's not a Great Dane. It is a wolf—and that's super clear when you're right up close to them.
Did you work with actual wolves in the making of this?
We worked with wolf-dog hybrids, which we also worked with in Nosferatu. But Aaron spent time with a real wolf, and we learned a lot about the wolf's behaviour. We incorporated a lot of what we learned into his performance, and his interactions with Lily, and some of the other things that he does in the film.
In Nosferatu, Lily displayed intense physical anguish on screen. Among your Werwulf collaborators, you're working again with movement coach Marie Gabriel-Rotie, who helped guide her through that. Is there anything you can share about what Aaron put himself through physically in this performance?
It was kind of unlike anything that any of us on set have ever seen. He spent I-don't-know-how-much time naked in the rain and snow, covered in blood, and doing this intense physical bodywork. It was months of training in prep and throughout production to get it all perfect.
Contortions, is that a good word to use?
Yeah, it's definitely contortions, but all the movements need to be charged with emotion for it to work.
What did you see in the notion of werewolves that was interesting to you as a psychological metaphor? Is there part of this we can relate to even though we're centuries removed from when this story is set?
You see Aaron as a young man and the werewolf trials of serial killers. What was really interesting was that for some of the men, it was really clear in their confessions and through the things that they were saying in the trials that they are victims of trauma. Sometimes contemporary horror movies can be very one-note in their social message, which is not something that I find particularly interesting. But some of these stories of young men who had traumatic childhoods was inspiring and something that we explore here.
A great primal fear is losing control, right?
Yeah, of course. The beast within is something we can all relate to as well.
You co-wrote this story with the Icelandic author and musician Sjón (2000’s Dancer in the Dark), who collaborated with you on The Northman. Can you tell me about working together on Werwulf?
Sjón is just incredibly imaginative and inspiring. We worked with two Oxford professors on the dialogue, which is in Middle English, and then worked extensively with a dialect coach on a way to temper the pronunciation in a way that would be understandable to modern audiences.
Another repeat collaborator on Werwulf is director of photography Jarin Blaschke, who worked with you on all your previous films. What can you share about this movie’s cinematography?
The look of the film, while it has similarities with the other films, is also unique. We shot on 35mm film and we used an orthochromatic treatment in post to make the skin tones more wrecked [meaning complexions that appear sickly, or discoloured.] Additionally, we've found a way to incorporate the grain structure of black and white film onto colour film. So it has a very unique look.
What emotional effect does that create?
Along with the landscapes and world-building, this world that is perhaps as scary or horrific as the werewolf, but it is something that you want to be immersed in. It's really important to see it in theatres so that you can be there and smell it and taste it and hear it. The grain adds something archaic and makes the film more grungy and dirty. Even though it was plenty of grungy and dirty on set, let me tell you. But then [the cinematography] can also sharpen up a beard hair or a piece of nasty porridge hanging on a beard hair.
You and your production designer, Craig Lathrop, another who has been with you on every film, always create settings that feel authentic. Did you shoot in any actual medieval places, or was everything created anew?
It was all built from the ground up. There's several churches in the film that are based on real churches, but even these very old churches in England don't look the way they did. Things have been upgraded over the years. So every structure was built for the film.
Where were some of the places you shot on location?
We shot in Dartmoor [a national park full of craggy rocks]. There are some forests in the south of England, but some of the most spectacular forests were actually in Wales.
When we spoke previously about Nosferatu, we got into how your imagination was shaped growing up in New England and seeing old walls and buildings going back centuries. Is that still a motivator for you with a story like this, told deep in the past?
Big time, big time. There's a fresco from a church wall with a hell mouth eating all the souls that are being sent there by Satan. And Henry III painted over all those cool murals. But when you go to a church that has been partially restored and you see the faint bits of this really spectacular mural, you know that that's what these people were looking at. Most of these peasants were illiterate, so the power of these intense graphic images painted in red [make you think] how they must have felt.
And your version in the film is a recreation of a real fresco?
Yeah, it’s very close to the real thing.
With Nosferatu, you held back the reveal of the title character for a long time. Fair to say that's going to be your strategy on this as well, that the Werwulf itself is something you’re going to keep under wraps for a bit longer?
[Smiles.] It seems to be a good approach.
This story originally appeared on Esquire