Director Robert Eggers is known for making movies that feel like you are trapped inside a historical nightmare. He did it with ‘The Witch‘, a movie about Puritan fear, and with ‘Nosferatu‘, which was full of gothic dread. So when he started hinting that his brutal Viking movie ‘The Northman‘ might be connected to his new medieval werewolf film ‘Werwulf‘, people began speculating.
However, Eggers recently cleared things up, explaining that the connection is not a shared universe. Instead, it is something much more interesting.
Werewolf Origins in Viking Berserker Culture
In an interview with Esquire, Eggers talked about where the idea of the werewolf really comes from. He went straight back to the warriors shown in ‘The Northman‘. “If we really want to get into it, we can talk about the Berserkirs and the Úlfhéðnar that you see in The Northman that come from Viking culture,” he said. These were legendary Norse fighters, sometimes called “wolf-coats,” who wore wolf skins and fought with a wild, almost supernatural rage. In the movie, there is a scene where the young hero Amleth, played by Alexander Skarsgard, takes part in a ritual that is meant to turn him from a man into a beast. It is a direct look at that old tradition.
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The real connection between ‘The Northman‘ and ‘Werwulf‘ is how this myth changed when it ran into a new Christian world. Werwulf is set in 13th-century England. So instead of the pagan Viking view, we get a medieval Christian one. In the Viking world, these wolf warriors were respected and feared for their power. But a few hundred years later, everything was different. “In a Christian setting, people who turn into werewolves become evil, and the early associations in the Christian mythology become satanic,” Eggers told Esquire. What was once a symbol of power turned into a sign of being cursed.
What to Expect from Robert Eggers’s Darkest Film Yet
This fits perfectly with how Eggers makes movies. He treats old folklore as if it is real history. For ‘Werwulf‘, which stars Aaron Taylor-Johnson as a cursed farmer, this means forgetting everything you know about werewolves from modern movies. “All the clichés of being bitten by a werewolf and silver bullets… don’t exist in the mythology of this movie,” Eggers said.
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He is going straight to the historical records of that time and is even working with Oxford professors to make sure the characters speak in real Middle English. His goal is to show the world the way a person in the year 1300 would have seen it, a scary place where the line between a man and a wolf was a real and spiritual danger.
‘Werwulf‘ is supposed to be Eggers’s darkest movie yet. He has described it as a “brutal, unforgiving, merciless, grotesque world.” It will also bring him back together with Willem Dafoe, who plays a hunter, and Lily-Rose Depp, who is the emotional center of the story. Werwulf is not a direct sequel to ‘The Northman,’ but this deeper thematic connection shows how the old folklore was turned into a new kind of horror. It brings Eggers’s monster movie world full circle in a way that is both smart and deeply frightening.
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