The invisible Man director Leigh Whannell returns with another refreshing take on one of the classic Universal monsters in next year’s Wolf Man. Following the release of a new trailer for the horror outing, the filmmaker sat down with Discussing Film to discuss how he will bring something new to the classic tale of the werewolf, and how he will reinterpret the myth for a modern audience.
“We’ve all seen a man transform into a beast under the moonlight. It’s a shared image of our collective cultural consciousness. To me, the horrors of Wolf Man lie in the infection. In modernizing the werewolf, I didn’t want to make it about a curse or anything mystical. In our post-pandemic world, the proximity to people in our own homes who can be ill with a dangerous sickness is what was most interesting to me. So, I don’t want people to walk in expecting the usual or a coalso mplete homage. You can take all these classic monsters and wrap them around different concepts to modernize them. In this way, Wolf Man has much more of an infection angle.”
Taking inspiration from the COVID pandemic, Whannell’s Wolf Man will treat the horrifying transformation more like an infection or disease. Which should conjure memories of David Cronenberg’s seminal remake of The Fly and could result in Wolf Man being another horror movie classic from Whannell and Blumhouse.
Wolf Man Is Inspired by the Isolation Caused by the COVID Pandemic
Leigh Whannell also revealed how heavily the real-life pandemic will play into Wolf Man. And it seems that the answer is pretty damn heavily, with the movie centering on an isolated family frightened by the danger both inside and outside their home.
“I remember the first distinct image I had for The Invisible Man, which was of a woman being dragged around a kitchen floor by nothing. There was an unseen force. That was the first thing that popped into my head, and I sort of built the film around that. For Wolf Man, for some reason, the image of this remote, mountainous region was in my head. The first draft was written in 2020 during the COVID lockdown, and I remember I would walk my dog every night and it was like 28 Days Later. The streets were just so empty and quiet. A very specific vibe crept in, and I wanted to reflect that isolation in the script.”
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Directed by Leigh Whannell and written by Whannell and Corbett Tuck, Wolf Man is due to be released next year on January 17, 2025. Based on “The Wolf Man” by Curt Siodmak, the horror outing stars Christopher Abbott, Julia Garner, Matilda Firth, Sam Jaeger, Benedict Hardie, Ben Prendergast, Zac Chandler, Beatriz Romilly, & Milo Cawthorne. You can check out the official synopsis for Wolf Man below.
“Golden Globe nominee Christopher Abbott (Poor Things, It Comes at Night) 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 (Emmy winner Julia Garner; Ozark, Inventing Anna), fraying, Blake persuades Charlotte to take a break from the city and visit the property with their young daughter, Ginger (Matlida Firth; Hullraisers, Coma).
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.”