Writer-director Leigh Whannells”The invisible man” was one of the best films of 2020, a thought-provoking and terrifying thriller about domestic abuse that drew comparisons to the work of horror masters who John Carpenter and Wes Craven. Understandably, the studio and production company behind the film — Universal and Blumhouserespectively — wanted something similar from Whannell for his next film. The director himself was not so sure.
“I was a little wary of jumping into another monster movie,” he told IndieWire. When Universal and Blumhouse asked him if he had any ideas for a new “Wolf Man” movie, he was worried – but his future employers weren’t willing to give up easily. “They were very smart. They basically said, ‘If you were going to do it, what would you take? No commitment, just what you would do.’ And of course I started to think of it as an exercise.”
Once Whannell came up with the idea of a story told from dual perspectives – that of a man who turns into a werewolf and his wife traumatized by his transformation – he knew he was hooked. “I really latched onto that idea,” he said. “Making a film is a year or two of your life, and I need a core idea that will get me out of bed every morning, that will sustain that passion. Once I had the idea of shifting perspectives, I thought: “I think I want to do this. I want to see it on screen. I want to get it out of my system.”
The film that eventually grew out of that idea, “Wolf Man,” is a very different kind of horror from “The Invisible Man,” more claustrophobic and tragic. While it’s more stripped-down than “The Invisible Man” in terms of the number of characters and set pieces — most of it is simply a family falling apart in a remote location, à la “The Shining” — it’s more ambitious thematically and conceptual way. level, where Whannell stuffed all the emotions he felt during the challenging year after “The Invisible Man” into the film.
“The first draft of this was written during the first year of COVID,” Whannell said of the script he co-wrote with his wife, Corbett Tuck. “It was such an anxious time. I had young children who couldn’t understand why we couldn’t leave the house. It was so disturbing to my wife and I, and it really took a lot out of me. During that time I had many conversations with my friends and we were all struggling to find meaning during that time. So I poured that into the film.”
While Whannell felt that “The Invisible Man” was “on track and it was about one thing”, “Wolf Man” became something else. “It was a catharsis for so many things,” he said. “Parenthood, marriage, losing a loved one to illness. It felt like it was about many things rather than one thing, and obviously with a film that’s about one thing, the lines of communication between the film and the audience and the critics are much clearer. I started thinking, ‘Is this too messy?’”
But in the end, Whannell trusted his instincts. “That’s how I felt during that time,” he said. “I felt very messed up. I would wake up in the morning for the whole year of 2020 and I’ve been wearing the same sweatpants for a year. I was losing myself and I felt messed up, I felt discombobulated. So I just put that in the movie.” That said, “Wolf Man” has a strong narrative framework to contain its abundance of ideas, and so Whannell didn’t look as much to previous werewolf films as to another horror classic, David Cronenberg’s “The Fly.”
“I love that movie so much,” Whannell said. “It really showed me a tragic version of a character in a movie that was without a villain or a villain. It was an allegory for illness.” Like “The Fly,” “Wolf Man” finds its power in a depiction of a monster who is also the victim, giving it the kind of emotional charge Whannell always looks for. “‘The Fly’ was an allegory for illness, and me felt that was what my ‘Wolf Man’ story was. I have to find that emotional conversation for me, because scaring people is very mechanical. The emotional bedrock underneath is what stirs emotions in me. And I trust that.”
