Wolf Man: Leigh Whannell and Jason Blum on Making Body Horror That Can Stand Next to The Fly
Exclusive: Director Leigh Whannell and producer Jason Blum open up about reimagining the Wolf Man in Blumhouse’s latest dive into the Universal Monsters sandbox.
The Wolf Man has always held a special place in Jason Blum’s heart. While, gun to his head, Dracula was his absolute favorite Universal Monster growing up, Lon Chaney Jr.’s depiction of poor, cursed Larry Talbot was pretty close behind. To this day, the filmmaker reminisces about watching the 1941 original with his mother.
Perhaps that was one reason that when Blumhouse Productions first began entertaining the idea of reimagining some of the classic Universal Monsters for the 21st century, the Wolf Man remained high on the list.
“It’s a project I’ve been passionate about for a very long time, since even before we did Invisible Man with Leigh [Whannell],” Blum says when stopping by the Den of Geek Studio at New York Comic Con. “I always thought if The Invisible Man worked, I’d love to try and tackle The Wolf Man and try to do with The Wolf Man what Leigh did with The Invisible Man. And I would describe that as taking the monster and [not] making it a four-quadrant movie for everybody, but returning it to its roots, which is like a straight horror movie.”
The producer describes that ultimate vision, which will finally bare its teeth next January, as incredibly scary and viscerally bloody. Also like The Invisible Man, it will have one of the most interesting horror writer-directors of this century attached: Leigh Whannell. Once a respected genre writer who co-created both the Saw and Insidious franchises, alongside director and sometime-co-writer James Wan, Whannell really broke out when he stepped behind the camera to helm instant cult classics Upgrade and The Invisible Man, both of which featured Blum as a producer.
So while Whannell’s road to Wolf Man was a little more quizzical—his introduction to the character was Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948)—the helmer eventually saw a chance to reinvent the concept similar to what he did with H.G. Wells’ Invisible Man by leaning into the tragedy naturally inherent in the werewolf archetype.
“I knew I had to come up with a version that not only interested me, but a take that justified the movie’s existence,” Whannell tells us. “I didn’t just want to pay homage to this character. If I want to bask in the glory of this character, I can just watch The Wolf Man movie. If I’m going to go to the trouble of actually making a film, I think I have to say something new.”
Intriguingly, the movies that most influenced that approach were less the Universal Monster canon and more several ‘80s horror movies that became iconic in their own right by radically remaking (and some might argue improving on) older classics: David Cronenberg’s redo of The Fly in 1986 and John Carpenter’s twist on The Thing from Another World, 1982’s simply retitled The Thing.
“Obviously they were remaking these movies in a different time,” Whannell considers. “[The originals] were black and white, but they brought a really modern sensibility to [the new versions]. They justified their existence. So in this I was thinking, ‘What am I going to do?’ and without giving anything away, I came up with a way of internalizing it. Rather than watching someone transform, you’re actually experiencing the transformation from within the character.”
The setup of the movie is, indeed, a bit like The Fly in that good people are forced to watch a loved one transform into something… other. In this case, it is a young family composed of father Blake (Christopher Abbott), mother Charlotte (Julia Garner), and young child Ginger (Matilda Firth). After the pair are attacked by a seemingly wild beast, they are forced to hide in a remote cabin while daddy tries to recover from the bite wounds on his arm. But to say the infection gets worse would be an understatement.
“I want this to be a movie where there’s not necessarily a bad guy, you know what I mean?” Whannell says. “If you think of Cronenberg’s version of The Fly, you have empathy for the monster. At no point are you like, ‘This person is evil.’ It’s empathy. He has a disease.”
The concept is the realization of a monster classic Blum has chased for some time. Likewise, it’s proof that he can still re-tinker some of the Universal Monsters for modern audience sensibilities.
“I’ve looked at all the Universal Monster movies but I don’t really want the responsibility of ‘Blumhouse is going to do all the Monster movies,’” Blum says. “Because I don’t really know what we would do with it. It’s kind of a case-by-case basis.” For example, before settling on Whannell’s Wolf Man, the producer spent quite a bit of time ruminating on Bride of Frankenstein.
Says Blum, “We worked on Bride of Frankenstein for a little bit, but I could never figure out a path to making it. It was always sort of funny or always sort of campy, and I could never get a path to making it like a straight horror movie, and so we didn’t tackle it.” But with Wolf Man, he and Whannell found a less-trodden road that felt right—and perhaps eerily familiar to families who have endured the last several years.
“The family in this movie is kind of underwater, they’re stressed like a lot of modern families these days,” says Whannell. “I know from myself, especially during COVID and post-COVID, being a parent just became extra tough, and it’s getting harder. It’s relentless. I wanted to present that side of family life, the difficult part of it, because it is tough every single day to be in a long term relationship, to raise kids… and then someone is suddenly sick, the way disease just suddenly appears in our life.”
Whannell admits that some monster fans may not initially like the idea of having those real-world implications in their creature feature, however Whannell is a firm believer—as with The Invisible Man four years ago—in being able to do both. You can make a metaphor for families enduring tragedy and illness, and you can make a monster flick where Whannell is at last able to indulge in all the yesteryear glories of prosthetic makeup, in this case courtesy of Academy Award-nominated makeup artist Arjen Tuiten (Pan’s Labyrinth, Babylon).
Says Whannell, “I love that I got to make a creature feature and really prioritize practical makeup effects. I spent a lot of time interviewing people and researching who was going to be the person for this. We talked to a lot of really talented makeup artists, but in the end, I chose Arjen Tuiten… He’s from Holland but he came to the U.S. when he was 16 and was a protégé of Dick Smith [The Exorcist], and then he worked for Rick Baker [American Werewolf in London], and then he worked for Stan Winston [Aliens]. His makeup school was all the best. It was nuts, and he really just treats it like an art. So it was really fun to dive in with him and think a lot about what prosthetic makeup looks like on camera. I never really had done that before on a huge scale.”
The director knows some fans are intrigued that his Wolf Man is keeping the werewolf’s final form secret until release, however he notes, “I can say that you can trust in Arjen. This guy’s an artist, he’s brilliant, and he loves The Wolf Man like you do. So for any fans out there wondering what we’ve done with this movie, rest assured we have done everything possible to create something horrendous and horrific, but also empathetic and memorable. In a perfect world, this would go down in history with Jeff Goldblum in The Fly or Rick Baker’s work in American Werewolf.”
While we have yet to see what the final design is—though we’re promised something “grounded” and perhaps less “Transylvanian” or heightened like Baker’s own Wolf Man remake design from about 15 years ago—it is in service of a monster movie intent on both protecting and reintroducing the Wolf Man for the next generation.
“What is it about those characters that has staying power?” Whannell posits. “I mean, for something to last that long, for Romeo and Juliet to still be a thing, that’s an incredible piece of writing that kids today know exactly what Romeo and Juliet is. So I’m always thinking about what causes that and I think in the case of the Universal Monsters, it’s their durability.” A werewolf can be a father you love, or a husband you still recognize… as well as a snarling, blood-drenched monster trying to break down the door. Family life must always transform.
Wolf Man opens only in theaters on Jan. 17, 2025.
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David Crow is the movies editor at Den of Geek. He has long been proud of his geek credentials. Raised on cinema classics that ranged from…