Robert Eggers’ medieval werewolf film Werwulf has received an R rating with a warning that goes beyond the wording attached to his previous 4 features: “strong bloody/disturbing violent content, gore, sexual assault, graphic nudity and strong sexual content.”
“Gore” and “sexual assault” appear in an Eggers rating descriptor for the first time. So does the exact phrase “strong sexual content.” All 5 films are rated R, but their stated reasons differ.
The Witch’s descriptor reads “disturbing violent content and graphic nudity.” The Lighthouse’s reads “sexual content, nudity, violence, disturbing images, and some language.”
The Northman carries “strong bloody violence, some sexual content and nudity,” while Nosferatu carries “bloody violent content, graphic nudity and some sexual content.” Graphic nudity therefore has precedents in Eggers’ work; the newly explicit warnings concern gore, sexual assault and the strength of the sexual content.
Set in 13th-century England, Werwulf follows a creature threatening a community as its folklore takes physical form. Eggers described his intentions at a September 2026 promotional event, in comments published by IGN on September 26:
“After Nosferatu, I kind of said, ‘Let me try to write the scariest thing I can write.’ I don’t know that I did that, but I definitely wrote the darkest thing.”
Eggers connected that darkness to historical accounts of werewolves: “The historical werewolves that I had read about starting in high school, they were doing things that were so taboo and hard for anyone to wrap their mind around because it was so extreme that the culture that they existed in said, ‘You can’t be a human, you must be a werewolf.’ So it was going to be very dark and very primal subject matter.”
Focus Features will release Werwulf in U.S. theaters on December 25, 2026.
