By MICHAEL GINGOLD
At this past weekend’s New York Comic-Con, one of the highlights of an extensive Blumhouse panel was the unveiling of the new trailer (which you can see below) for WOLF MAN. The second reimagining of a Universal horror classic–following THE INVISIBLE MAN–from the company and director Leigh Whannell, it arrives in theaters January 17 from Universal, and RUE MORGUE got some one-on-one time with Whannell following the NYCC presentation.
Scripted by Whannell and Corbett Tuck, WOLF MAN stars Christopher Abbott as Blake, who is traveling with his wife Charlotte (Julia Garner) and young daughter Ginger (Matilda Firth) to his newly inherited house in the woods late one night. They get into an accident, and are attacked by a mysterious beast that wounds Blake. Once they arrive at the isolated home, they discover that the creature has followed them–and Blake begins a transformation that threatens to make him as dangerous as the monster outside.
As opposed to traditional werewolfilms in which a full transformation is brought on by a full moon, WOLF MAN presents a man-to-monster transition that is more gradual and progressive. “I didn’t want to out-Rick Baker Rick Baker,” Whannell says, “or to take the Lon Chaney Jr. character [from the 1941 classic WOLF MAN] and plunk him down in 2024. I feel the best way to add to this lineage of classic monsters is to put your own little mark on it. At the end of time, they’ll look back and there will have been so many hundreds of iterations of Dracula and the Wolf Man–stage plays, cartoons, comic books, movies. Each person has taken a stab at it, and the question is going to be, what was your version? And my thought was, OK, just slow it all down.
“Without spoiling anything, I felt like disease–degenerative disease–was the best theme to wrap this movie around,” he continues. “Because that’s a real-life horror story. The easiest way into a genre film, for me, is to think about a true horror that people actually experience and base the story on that. In the case of THE INVISIBLE MAN, it was domestic violence. I went to women’s shelters and talked to the counselors about women who’d been victims and what they go through. For this movie, the real-life horror that most neatly connected to the wolf man for me was these diseases–Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, cancer. People you’ve known your whole life can just disappear in front of your eyes.”
Whannell didn’t conduct the same kind of research for this side of WOLF MAN that he did for THE INVISIBLE MAN, as this particular theme hit close to home for him. “I actually, unfortunately, have experienced it in my own life, up close. I didn’t need to talk to doctors; I’d seen a couple of people I know go through it. With those degenerative diseases, you really see the body come apart, and it’s a horrible way to go. I don’t want to exploit that stuff, but horror movies are so good for cathartically exorcizing something that upsets you. It could be a war, you know what I mean? It’s been said that during the Vietnam War, horror films exploded, and the drive-in movies during that time got so brutal. I believe the public, in the U.S. especially, were so affected by the carnage they were seeing on the nightly news from the Vietnam War that they were exorcizing it through those movies. Horror is so great at that; it’s a perfect genre for metaphor, and that’s how I deal with stuff that’s upsetting me, by putting it all in a movie.”
As the synopsis and even the title suggest, WOLF MAN’s lycanthrope holds onto his humanity, at least for a while, as the change slowly overtakes him. “It’s about the struggle between the human and animal sides,” Whannell says. “One scary thing for me is seeing the world through the eyes of an animal. Sometimes I’ll look at a spider and think, imagine being a spider, just for two minutes. That’s just neurons and instincts firing; they’re not thinking about something they saw last Wednesday. Maybe I dwell on this stuff on an unhealthy level, but once I creep myself out or start considering an idea like that, that’s when I know I’m onto something, and I’m like, OK, let’s go there with this. Because these diseases like Alzheimer’s don’t happen overnight; they take a long time. It starts off with, ‘Where are my car keys?’ or forgetting your uncle’s name, and then it gets worse and worse and worse. It’s a slow process, so I wanted to depict that.”
When it came to physically depicting the bestial overtaking Blake, Whannell turned to makeup and prosthetics creator Arjen Tuiten. Although his résumé emphasizes character work (including Oscar-nominated contributions to MALEFICENT and WONDER) over creature creation, Whannell found him to be absolutely the right artist for this project. “Everyone I talked to [about doing the werewolf effects] was talented, there’s no doubt,” Whannell says. “I interviewed people who had made creatures I grew up on; part of me wanted to run to those people, not so much to work with them, but just to ask them questions. What made Arjen right was that he is such an artist. I was looking for something very specific, and the way he talked about it, the way he viewed it, he was very…he’s not a fanboy, in the truest sense of the word. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that–I’m a movie fan myself–but Arjen doesn’t approach it like that. He might as well be making a sculpture for a museum. He’s very serious about what he does, and I knew that was the right attitude for this particular movie. No one cares more than Arjen; I’ve seen him get really upset when he doesn’t get something perfect. That’s what made him the right guy.”
Now that he has put his personal stamp on a pair of fright favorites, Whannell reveals he has no particular plans to tackle more in the near future. “I’ve always loved Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde!” he says. “But right now, after finishing this movie, I’m feeling like, let’s do the Creature from the Black Lagoon, but the Black Lagoon is Positano [laughs]. Let’s go to the Amalfi Coast. I’m thinking more about where we would shoot the movie; New Zealand’s fantastic, but we were outdoors at night, and it wasn’t exactly comfortable. That’s why the next one has to be in a tropical setting!”
