Robert Eggers releases the first 'Werwulf' trailer, a Middle English werewolf movie set for Christmas Day

Robert Eggers does not make movies that sound like easy sells. A 13th-century werewolf picture with dialogue in Middle English, opening wide on Christmas Day, is the kind of thing a studio greenlights because the director just made it money, not because a focus group asked for it. On Monday, Focus Features put out the first trailer for "Werwulf," and it looks exactly as strange as that logline promises.

The footage is short on plot and long on dread, which is the right call. A foggy English countryside. Villagers who talk like the language has not finished becoming English yet. And Aaron Taylor-Johnson as the thing in the dark, caught mid-transformation: writhing on the ground, foaming, more animal than man by the second. There is no money shot of a finished creature, no hero pose. Eggers withholds, the way he kept Nosferatu's Orlok in shadow until he had to show him. You feel the shape of the horror before you see it.

If the cast looks familiar, that is by design. Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Lily-Rose Depp, Willem Dafoe and Ralph Ineson all came through Eggers' most recent film, "Nosferatu," and they are all back here. So is cinematographer Jarin Blaschke, who has shot every Eggers feature and turns candle flame and gray daylight into something closer to oil paint than photography. Eggers co-wrote the script with Sjon, his collaborator on "The Northman." He has called it the darkest thing he has written, which from the man who made "The Witch" is a real claim.

Then there is the language. The characters speak Middle English, reconstructed with help from Oxford scholars, which means a wide Christmas release is asking a multiplex crowd to read subtitles through a werewolf attack. Eggers has played in this register before, softer in "The Northman" and harder in "The Lighthouse," where half the pleasure was not quite catching every word. Here he is betting that a 13th-century howl needs no translation.

A few facts the trailer does not bother to spell out. "Werwulf" shot across the UK, at Sky Studios Elstree and on location in Surrey, Devon and the Forest of Dean, and it wrapped in January. Focus first teased footage at CinemaCon in April. This is the first look the rest of us get.

The release date is the real gamble. December 25 is prestige real estate, the slot studios hold for awards plays and four-quadrant crowd-pleasers. Dropping a brutal, subtitled creature feature into it reads as either total confidence after "Nosferatu" cleared the bar commercially, or a dare. Eggers movies have crept steadily from the art house toward the center of the room without sanding off the weird parts. "Werwulf" is the test of how far that can go before something gives.

Is it good? No idea. It is a trailer, cut by people who are very good at making two minutes feel like an event. What I can say is that it does the one thing a teaser for this director has to do, which is convince you that someone with a specific, slightly deranged vision is in control of every frame. That has been a safe bet four features running. We find out on Christmas Day whether the fifth holds.