Robert Eggers’s historical folk horror Werwulf will be in cinemas this winter. It’s set in 1305, when wolves still roamed parts of England. As they vanished from English shores due to sustained hunting, however, the werewolf myth moved abroad. The creature changed from a pitiable victim into a diabolical killer, before being rediscovered and reinvented by the Victorians.
In Eggers’s film, a hunter arrives in an English village to enlist local peasants in a wolf hunt declared by the king. The premise has a real historical basis, as the character appears to be inspired by Peter Corbet, a Shropshire baron of the Welsh Marches.
