Leigh Whannell Unpacks Wolf Man’s Horrific Influences

After Invisible Man and Abigail, Universal’s got another modern take on one of its classic monsters hitting theaters. While it’s taken some time to craft Leigh Whannell’s Wolf Man, it’s getting here in about a month, and a new behind the scenes video digs into the film’s many inspirations.

In the featurette, Whannell readily admits to using the film to explore “infection and transformation,” themes that have been at the heart of werewolf stories. But his spin has some extra weight: he wrote the script in 2020 during the early pandemic days, so the film can’t help but also be about how sicknesses elicit feelings of “isolation, dread, and anxiety.” Blake, our eventual Wolf Man played by Christopher Abbott, gets attacked by a werewolf and gradually morphs into the monster as his wife Charlotte (Julia Garner) and daughter Ginger (Matilda Firth) can only watch as it happens…at least until it’s time for them to spend the rest of the night running away from him.

On a simliar note, the director considers Wolf Man a tribute to two of his favorite 80s body horror films, The Thing and The Fly. Those movies also explore the fear of someone becoming (or being near) something uncontrollable and dangerous. It’s a slightly different track for Whannell, who’s been in the horror game ever since the original Saw, but moves like Insidious and Upgrade focus on the terror of demonic posessions or evil, manipulative beingse. He very much likes using horror to “really dig deep into someone’s subconscious,” and with Wolf Man, he’s aiming to provide an “aural assault” and deliver “something horrific and visceral” to audiences.

We’ll see if his bite is as scary as his bark seems when Wolf Man hits theaters on January 17, 2025.

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