Leigh Whannell on the Post-COVID Horror of ‘Wolf Man’
Writer-director Leigh Whannell’s “The Invisible Man” was one of the best films of 2020, a thoughtful and terrifying thriller about domestic abuse that earned comparison with the work of horror masters like John Carpenter and Wes Craven. Understandably, the studio and production company behind the movie — Universal and Blumhouse, respectively — wanted something similar from Whannell for his next film. The director himself wasn’t so sure.
“I was a bit wary of leaping 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 apprehensive — but his prospective employers weren’t willing to give up easily. “They were very clever. They basically said, ‘If you were to do it, what would be your take? No commitment, just what you would do.’ And of course, I started thinking about it as an exercise.”
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Once Whannell came up with the idea of a story told from dual perspectives — that of a man turning into a werewolf and the wife traumatized by his transformation — he knew he was hooked. “I really locked into that idea,” he said. “Making a movie is a year or two of your life, and I need a core idea that’s going to get me out of bed every morning, that’s going to sustain that passion. Once I had that idea of shifting perspectives, I was like, ‘I think I want to make this. I want to see that on screen. I want to get it out of my system.”
The movie that ultimately grew out of that idea, “Wolf Man,” is a very different kind of horror film from “The Invisible Man,” more claustrophobic and tragic. While it’s more stripped down than “The Invisible Man” in terms of its number of characters and sets — most of it is simply a family falling apart in a remote location, à la “The Shining” — it’s more ambitious on a thematic and conceptual level, with Whannell stuffing every emotion he felt in the challenging year after “The Invisible Man” into the movie.
“The first draft of this was written during COVID that first year,” Whannell said of the screenplay that he co-wrote with his wife Corbett Tuck. “It was such an unsettling time. I had young kids who couldn’t understand why we couldn’t leave the house. It was so discombobulating for my wife and I, and it really took a lot out of me. During that time I was having a lot of conversations with my friends and we were all struggling to find meaning in that time. So I was pouring that into the movie.”
While Whannell felt that “The Invisible Man” was “on rails 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 disease. It felt like it was about many things rather than one thing, and obviously with a movie that’s about one thing, the communication lines between the movie and the audience and the critics are much clearer. I went into this thinking, ‘Is this too messy?'”
Ultimately, however, Whannell trusted his instincts. “That’s how I felt during that time,” he said. “I felt very messy. I would wake up in the morning for that whole year of 2020 and I’m wearing the same sweatpants for a year. I was losing myself and I felt messy, I felt discombobulated. So I just put that into the movie.” That said, “Wolf Man” does have a strong narrative framework to contain its abundance of ideas, and, for that, Whannell looked not so much to earlier werewolf movies 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 film that was without a bad guy or a villain. It was an allegory for disease.” Like “The Fly,” “Wolf Man” finds its power in a depiction of a monster who is also the victim, which gives it the kind of emotional charge Whannell is always looking for. “‘The Fly’ was an allegory for disease, and I felt like that’s what my ‘Wolf Man’ story was. I have to find the emotional call for me, because scaring people is very mechanical. The emotional bedrock underneath is the thing that’s provoking feeling in me. And I trust that.”
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