Focus Features has unveiled the first look at Werwulf, revealing Aaron Taylor-Johnson’s protagonist.

Speaking with Esquire in his first interview for the upcoming horror film, Robert Eggers described Aaron Taylor-Johnson’s performance as “incredibly harrowing” and the “best of his career”. The 28 Years Later star will play a cursed farmer, whom Eggers describes as “haunted and in great pain.”

“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,” TheWitch director said. “So you don't need to have seen Lon Chaney Jr.'s The Wolf Man or An American Werewolf in London to get what's going on here.”

Where Nosferatu was a nineteenth-century Romantic horror film, Werwulf is set in medieval England. “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.” Reuniting with his long-time DP Jarin Blaschke, Eggers revealed that the film was shot on 35mm film and that he and his cinematographer used an orthochromatic treatment in post-production to make the skin tones more “wrecked”.

Blaschke previously told Phantasmag while prepping the film in pre-production that Werwulf would look “grim and brutal”. “This next one, we’re really going to try to give it some texture. And I’ve got some ideas. Early tests are very promising. It won’t look like anything I’ve seen this decade, that’s for sure.”

Eggers also praised the performance of his Nosferatu lead, Lily-Rose Depp. “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.”

The director also disclosed that his long-time collaborator Willem Dafoe will be playing a hunter.

Werwulf will hit US theatres this Christmas Day, exactly two years after Nosferatu.