There’s a bad moon on the rise. Tonight, it’s the Harvest Moon, and today the second trailer for the upcoming Robert Eggers film, Werewulf, dropped. The previous trailer also released on a full moon.

The film itself, which takes place in a 14th century English village suffering some dread curse or evil magic, releases on Christmas and yet another full moon. That’s in keeping with the lycanthropy at the heart of the Gothic horror film’s story.

The movie is set circa 1300 in a village haunted by a werewolf, and the language reflects the time period, filled with “thee” and “thou” and so forth. I’m reminded a bit of Eggers’ previous works, obviously, but also of the FromSoftware game, Bloodborne, a game filled with werewolves and dark magic and archaic dialogue. “Foul beast!”

Alongside this trailer, Focus Features released a new Alternate Reality Game, or ARG, for avid fans to solve. Being one such fan, with nerdy ambitions, I set about immediately, signing up on the ARG’s website ( here ) and then watching the clue on the Werewulf Twitter account (below).

This is the first of three such puzzles, with the next two falling on the October and November full moons, all leading up to the film’s Christmas theatrical release.

In any case, here is the clue:

As you can see, when the camera zooms in on the skull there is a series of seven glyphs. I’ve been into glyphs and runes and whatnot recently, sigils and such, and particularly Viking “bindrunes” which are actually magic sigils rather than runes, but that’s neither here nor there.

I could tell these were not bindrunes or Viking, so I set about finding out what they could be, searching through some archaic alphabets until I found the Theban alphabet, or Witches alphabet.

It was still incredibly difficult to match the glyphs on the skull to the Theban glyphs, and I got it wrong a number of times. I did, however, finally get the word. The trick is that in modern English, the word is just six letters long. The clue is on the ARG website, where many words have an extra letter on the end. You’ll need this same extra letter to solve the ARG. It happens to be a repeat letter, as the 5th and 7th glyphs are the same (though it’s not easy to tell that at first).

Spoilers ahead for the answer.

One last clue before we get to the answer itself, which you must input before the full moon sets. The word is thematic. It has to do with the kind of character you might expect to find in a film about werewolves or other monsters. Indeed, it is what you play as in Bloodborne. The answer? You can find it below the following video .

HUNTERE – the word “hunter” with an “e” on the end, just like moone and signe and various other words are spelled on the ARG website and in the trailer. I tried other words like HARVEST with alternate spellings to no avail. At last, I pieced this together. I think it’s likely that Willem Dafoe’s character is the hunter in question, or one of them, come to slay the beast. The film also stars Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Lily-Rose Depp. Eggers’ next movie will be Romeo & Juliet , which sounds like quite the departure, at least from horror, if not old-timey speech.

In any case, this movie looks phenomenal. Quite the Christmas present from Mr. Eggers.