“These classic monsters have endured for a reason,” visionary writer-director Leigh Whannell says of Wolf Man . “They are as iconic and as famous as Michael Jordan, Marilyn Monroe, Charlie Chaplin, Winston Churchill, all these faces throughout history. The Mummy, Dracula, The Invisible Man and The Wolf Man are on the Mount Rushmore of pop culture. Something about them is just too fascinating, creepy and mysterious to go away.”
From Blumhouse and visionary writer-director Leigh Whannell, the creators of the chilling modern monster tale The Invisible Man, comes a terrifying new lupine nightmare: Wolf Man, questioning: “What if someone you loved became something else?”
Perhaps no filmmaker has been more daring and visionary in reimagining a Universal classic monster character than writer-director Leigh Whannell, whose 2020 Blumhouse hit The Invisible Man transformed the 19th century H.G. Wells novel and 20th century horror movie into a terrifying 21st century allegory for gaslighting and domestic abuse. And no filmmaker, it’s fair to say, was better equipped to reinvent the hairiest of potential monster-movie adaptations: the Wolf Man.
“When Universal asked us what Blumhouse’s take would be on Wolf Man, I knew that Leigh should be the captain. His unparalleled ability at extracting terror from relatable moments allows him to show horror that is not fantastical, but tactile and immediate,” producer Jason Blum says.
Ancient tales of werewolves, or wolf men, date far back almost as old as humanity itself, rising out of ancient lore, recorded as early as 2100 BC. The tales of lycanthropy— the transformation of a man into a wolf—became so ingrained in European folklore that they inspired werewolf trials in Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries, dying out around the same time that America’s famed Salem witch trials began. Werewolves would later appear in Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula and his short story, Dracula’s Guest.
Werewolves & Wolf Men have rich, fascinating histories in folklore and pop culture
The wolf man made his first film appearance in 1935, with Werewolf of London, and then became immortalized in pop culture beginning with the 1941 Universal classic starring Lon Chaney, Jr. The Wolf Man. In the decades since, the character has prowled through almost every decade and film genre, morphing from malevolent terror (1981’s The Howling) to body horror (1981’s An American Werewolf in London) to middlebrow comedy (1985’s Teen Wolf), and from romantic hero (1994’s Wolf starring Jack Nicholson) to tortured tween sex symbol (2008’s Twilight and subsequent franchise).
Christopher Abbott stars as Blake, a San Francisco husband and father, who inherits his remote childhood home in rural Oregon after his own father vanishes and is presumed dead. With his marriage to his high-powered wife, Charlotte (Julia Garner), fraying, Blake persuades Charlotte to take a break from the city and visit the property with their young daughter, Ginger (Matlida Firth). But as the family approaches the farmhouse in the dead of night, they’re attacked by an unseen animal and, in a desperate escape, barricade themselves inside the home as the creature prowls the perimeter. As the night stretches on, however, Blake begins to behave strangely, transforming into something unrecognizable, and Charlotte will be forced to decide whether the terror within their house is more lethal than the danger without.
When Blumhouse first approached Whannell about reimagining the Wolf Man for a new generation, he was intrigued but unsure he wanted to take this particular journey.
“My first answer was, ‘No. I just did The Invisible Man. I don’t want to follow that up with Wolf Man,’” Whannell says. “But then I thought of an angle that I could take it in. I had to walk around the block and find my way into it. In the past, the character of the werewolf has been wrapped around this big transformation, like the famous scene from An American Werewolf in London. That Wolf Man was superbly designed by Rick Baker and is the watermark for practical effects. It’s impossible to top what he did. So much so, that I thought that we should not try to improve upon that, but to take it in a completely different direction.”
That direction anchored the film and the characters in a grounded, real world. As Whannell and fellow screenwriter Corbett Tuck developed the script, the story evolved into the tale of Blake Lovell, a husband and father struggling with a turbulent past. The broken product of a survivalist father and a beloved mother grappling with ALS, Blake thought he had put a cruel childhood to rest. Now raising a daughter in the San Francisco Bay area with journalist Charlotte, the wife from whom he has grown distant, Blake is tortured by long-buried secrets that threaten his chosen family.
When Blake learns that his father has died and bequeathed him the Lovell farm, he and Charlotte decide to take a break from the city hustle and recalibrate in central Oregon. The night they arrive, however, they stumble upon a diseased creature—neither man nor animal—who threatens to tear apart their tenuous hold on one another.
As the night progresses, Blake begins to transform into something unrecognizable. But unlike in every previous incarnation of the Wolf Man, Whannell decided that we, the audience, would change with him. “I started thinking about seeing the Wolf Man changing from the Wolf Man’s perspective,” Whannell says. “A lot of the wolf man history has been about this curse, and that a full moon can bring it out in you. I wanted to do with this character what David Cronenberg did with The Fly. He drilled down to the essence of a previous film that could be considered quite comical. Same with John Carpenter’s The Thing. These movies take their monsters seriously and have no room for winking or poking fun.”
By allowing the audience to experience Blake’s transformation both from Blake’s perspective and the perspective of his wife and daughter, the film, Whannell realized, could have husband and wife within two separate spaces, with only the audience simultaneously seeing both sides. “One would live in the human world, and one in the animal one,” Whannell says. “Once I saw this couple as no longer having the ability to communicate, this was my tipping point. Blake would be listening to his wife speak and literally not understand what she was saying. I loved the idea of mixing dialogue from one of the characters in a way where you couldn’t understand the other.”
As always, Whannell’s goal is to understand the root emotional truths of the characters he is creating, and then to build the horror on the foundation of those truths. The terror becomes real to the audience because although we have not encountered an actual invisible man or a wolf man in our lives, we recognize the man within the monster. “You make the movie when you write it,” Whannell says. “Shooting is all interpretive art. I listened to a lot of music when I was writing, finding an emotional way into the story. I asked myself, ‘What gives me goosebumps? What makes me cry?’ Through those feelings, you find the movie. My approach is to strip out the window dressing and to find the core of what’s scary about these characters. If you do it right with a horror film, you can dig deep into someone’s subconscious.”
To do it right, though, Whannell needed a cast that could deliver that emotional truth. He found them in Christopher Abbott, Julia Garner and Matilda Firth. “This is a situation that is very heightened,” Whannell says. “You’re using prosthetic makeup. Many elements could be ludicrous if we didn’t handle them with care. Every time I would watch Christopher, Julia and Matilda in the scenes, they brought so much of themselves. That is what you have to do in these moments of humanity. You have to breathe life into these words.”
Abbott was drawn to the role by Whannell’s interpretation of the marital breakdown between Blake and Charlotte. “You watch them start to try to reconnect, and as the events of the film happen, their connection is taken away,” Abbott says. “Blake loses the ability to communicate. That’s the tragedy. Everyone can relate to having issues and not connecting well with a partner. What if that’s taken away from you? For example, with an actual illness.”
Abbott knew that he would be spending hours in the makeup chair as he prepared to play the Wolf Man, but his main concern was that Blake’s humanity continue to shine through. He was relieved that the makeup team ensured that their work wouldn’t inhibit his. “I could still act through the prosthetics,” Abbott says. “They didn’t shackle my performance. My face would move in different ways when I was wearing them. I would look in the mirror and play with it. The prosthetics did a lot of the work. An idea can only go so far, but when you have physical limitations, they force you to make a choice.”
Abbott and Whannell discussed at length how Blake would evolve, or rather, devolve, over the course of the film. “Leigh and I talked a lot about illnesses from Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s,” Abbott says. “In terms of the transformation, it was letting go of the reality of what it is to be a healthy human and stripping that away.” It helped, too, that Blake’s transformation was done practically, with makeup and prosthetics, rather than with VFX. “The fact that it was happening on the day, and our crew was experiencing it with us—viscerally, in real time—reminded us that we were making something special,” Abbott says.
Garner found herself riveted by the script and drawn to this story of love and loss. “It’s about connection and grief,” Garner says. “When somebody’s in front of you and they’re slowly disappearing, it’s not a sudden death, but a slow process. Early on, Leigh discussed wanting to connect and then having that person not be there anymore. When we started prepping, I told him that I wanted it to feel that the audience was going through the seven stages of grief in one night. When Blake is going through the physical stages, Charlotte is going through the mental ones.”
Wolf Man, Garner says, is, at its emotional core, an exploration of a family that is breaking apart, even though none of them wants it to. “They want to stay connected,” Garner says. “There are certain events that keep them from reconnecting, but they’re fighting for that family unit. It is about connection, but it is also about grief. When somebody’s slowly disappearing in front of you, it’s not a sudden death. It’s this slow process.”
Creating that intense bond between Garner, known as “Julie” to her friends, and Abbott was aided by the fact that they had a little-know shared history. “A long time ago, Julie and I did our first independent feature together,” Abbott says. “To come around and do this again was fantastic. Julie brings pure emotionality to this part. For a good chunk of the film, the audience sees the events through her character’s eyes.”
Creating Wolf Man’s World
To create Wolf Man’s physical environments, director Leigh Whannell hired acclaimed Australian production designer Ruby Mathers. This film marks Mathers’ first foray into the genre of horror. “This was a script that I felt I hadn’t read before,” Mathers says. “There was a classic-horror element to it but, at the same time, there was a realism and subtext in the script that drew me to it. Having seen Leigh’s previous movies, I thought, ‘I want to work with that guy.’”
Wolf Man is the third collaboration between director Leigh Whannell and fellow Australian cinematographer Stefan Duscio, having previously made The Invisible Man and Upgrade together. Duscio was also the director of photography for the 2014 comedy The Mule, which co-written by Whannell. “Stefan is my conjoined twin, creatively,” Whannell says. “He loves movies. He talks the talk, and he walks the walk. He’s dug into this world, and I relate to that level of obsession. We can talk for hours about how movies are made and our heroes in film.”
The duo’s collective goal is to operate at the level of their cinematic idols. “We don’t want to imitate them, but we want to create something that gets close to what they’ve done,” Whannell says. “I’m the one who comes up with the crazy idea and has no idea how to do it. Stefan breaks it down into engineering and discovers how we’re going to achieve this with lights and lenses. Somehow, in the middle, between engineering and creativity, we create a Venn diagram of something visceral, horrifying and sad.” Duscio admires that Whannell writes for both sound and vision. “Leigh’s thoughtful about how he wants to use those elements in the screenplay and in the final movie,” Duscio says. “The Invisible Man became about suggesting someone was there all the time and getting you into the psychological headspace of Elisabeth Moss’ character. These unmotivated camera moves became the film’s hallmark, the opposite of what you want to do as a camera person. You want to stay locked to your lead actor. We deliberately panned into these empty corners of the room to suggest he could be there at any time. Right from the outset, Leigh asked what we could do in Wolf Man to put us in Blake’s psychological headspace.” They would come to call it “Wolf Vision.”
While Whannell was writing Wolf Man, he became fascinated by this idea that, in-camera, you could switch between the human world and the animal one. “I always like to use the camera as an extra character,” Whannell says. “With Invisible Man, I felt like the character knew more than the protagonist did. With Wolf Man, I liked this idea that the camera could switch between the two worlds in a way that humans couldn’t. The characters of Blake and Charlotte couldn’t see through the wall of their respective worlds, but the camera could. The camera could cross over, and therefore the audience gets to see that crossover.”
As Blake’s senses becomes more finely attuned to darkness, he begins to perceive everything around him more sharply. The production team called it “Wolf Vision.” “Blake can now see in the dark,” Duscio says. “His aural senses become incredibly heightened. He can hear everything. We’ve latched onto that with both hands to show what the world is like from Blake’s mind.”
Whannell and Duscio wanted the film to reinvent how we see the night. “Blake is starting to see more into the night,” Duscio says. “This was not an effect for effect’s sake but is embedded within the character of Blake and within Christopher Abbott’s performance.”
Brought to life by hair and makeup designer Jane O’kane (The Meg, The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power) and two-time Oscar-nominated prosthetic designer Arjen Tuiten (Pan’s Labyrinth, Maleficent: Mistress of Evil), the Wolf Man’s signature look had to reflect unique stages of Blake’s transformation. From myriad lenses and canine teeth to deteriorating skin and wounds that refuse to heal, the transformation marks Blake’s gradual loss of humanity.
Director Leigh Whannell wanted the film to honor the original makeup artists of the 1941 Universal classic, The Wolf Man, starring Lon Chaney, Jr., whose makeup was designed by the legendary Jack P. Pierce. “If you think about that look that was created for the Boris Karloff’s Frankenstein in 1931 or Lon Chaney’s Wolf Man in 1941, those were things that audiences had never seen,” Whannell says. “Those images have lasted because they’re so striking. Anybody dealing with monsters today lives in the shadow of these artists. Every makeup artist whose name is etched into the Hall of Fame—from Rick Baker and Rob Bottin to Stan Winston and Jack Pierce, all these artists have created something brilliant that sticks in your mind.”
It was critical to Leigh Whannell that Wolf Man might stand out for its use of effects. “I love practical effects and the artists who create them,” Whannell says. “These effects were important because, first and foremost, I wanted them to feel real. CGI is beautiful and can be employed in great ways, but it’s all about how you deploy that artform. Here, I felt that the best way to represent it was more practical. I needed this film to exist as if we were making a monstrous version of A Marriage Story, right in front of you.”
Whannell had never taken a character through such a dramatic physical transformation. “When you’re working in supernatural horror, a lot of the horror is implied,” Whannell says. “It’s what you can’t see that’s scary. I wanted to make my own version of a creature feature. This film is my tribute to the ‘80s movies I loved growing up—ones that were driven by practical effects and told horror stories that were creative in their use of bodily morphing. In The Thing and The Fly, CGI was not yet an option.”
Whannell leaned into the premise that Blake doesn’t realize he’s morphing. As his skin begins to scale and his extremities elongate, our hero grows in confusion. “Blake loses his ability to understand what human beings are saying,” Whannell says. “Blake’s vision changes, then the physical changes begin, and his vision begins to alter. His skin morphs: his fingernails and teeth come out. It’s a tribute to body horror. That’s one of the great sub-genres of horror that I love. Our bodies are the source of all our pain, as well as our joy.”
At Blake transforms into the Wolf Man, his hearing changes. His hearing becomes so acute that he can hear an insect walking. The audience, seeing the world from Blake’s perspective, gets to hear it, too. “Blake is hearing things at this totally different pitch, and that’s a dream from a sound-design perspective,” Whannell says. “This allowed us to throw out the rule book of how human beings hear the world and surround the audience with a different plane.”
To create the film’s critical sound design, Whannell turned to two acclaimed sound design artists who have worked with him on every one of his films: P.K. Hooker (M3GAN, Five Nights at Freddy’s) and Will Files (Alien: Romulus, The Batman). “I wanted Wolf Man to be an aural assault,” Whannell says. “I wanted to enter another world through sound, because a lot of the experience of becoming a Wolf Man is experienced through hearing. I wanted to give audiences something bigger than watching a film at home.”
Because Blake’s transformation changes both how he sees and how he hears, the film’s cinematography and sound design needed to work in tandem in every scene. That matters in every film, of course, but in Wolf Man it is the joint composer of terror. “There’s a sequence where Charlotte and Ginger are hiding in the barn and the Wolf Man enters,” cinematographer Stefan Duscio says. “That was a sequence where we utilized both Wolf Vision and sound to create a thrilling sequence. Charlotte and Ginger can hear only silence and can see only blackness. But when we rotate around to the Wolf Man’s perspective, he can see, and hear, everything about the way they’re moving.”
Leigh Whannell is an Australian filmmaker and actor. He has written multiple films that were directed by his friend James Wan, including Saw (2004), Dead Silence (2007), Insidious (2010), and Insidious: Chapter 2 (2013). Whannell made his directorial debut with Insidious: Chapter 3 (2015), and has since directed two more films, Upgrade (2018) and The Invisible Man (2020). Read more
