Wolf Man Does One Thing No Werewolf Movie Has Done Before

This article contains spoilers for “The Wolf Man”.

Aging is the ultimate body horror, because it is the long, slow road to death that every living being must experience, without exception. This process, like most body horror, is expressed primarily physically. After all, most people will say that they are mentally as young as they have ever been, as they observe how their bodies are having difficulty functioning as they used to; It’s very common to see a social media post from someone in their 30s lamenting about their new back problems or a similar illness. A person’s perception of the passage of time can make it seem like the years have passed in a flash, but the slow process of aging allows most people to ease the physical transition because it occurs almost imperceptibly .

Yet this perception is radically challenged when something happens that changes our status quo. In my own experience, I used to roll my eyes at these social media posts about people experiencing the onset of various aches and pains, mistakenly believing that I hadn’t experienced any such things. The truth was that I did and still do: my chronic health issues (including but not limited to a liver transplant) changed the way I saw and interacted with the world from an unusually young age. I can no longer relate to such “relevant” content because I no longer see the same world as most people.

Leigh Whannell’s “Wolf Man” is a film steeped in themes of body horror, illness, transformation, perception and, ultimately, death, telling the story of poor Blake Lovell (Christopher Abbott) infected with a “fever of the hills” which may or may not be supernatural. Blake’s ordeal boils down to one long, harrowing night, during which his wife Charlotte (Julia Garner) and daughter Ginger (Matilda Firth) watch helplessly as he transforms into an inhuman creature. Although the film contains most of the prerequisite elements of a body transformation horror film, it does one thing that no other body horror film, let alone a werewolf film, has attempted to do. the same scale before: he shows us what Blake looks like. undergo this change mentally and emotionally as well as physically. This angle is not only integral to Whannell’s interests as a filmmaker, but it makes “Wolf Man” a particularly terrifying and tragic experience.

For the October 4, 1985 episode of the revival series “The Twilight Zone”, Wes Craven directed a segment called “Wordplay”, written by Rockne S. O’Bannon. In it, an average salesman inexplicably begins to hear strange words in place of others, and soon everyone around him begins speaking a completely different language. The story is a fantastic metaphor for feeling out of step with everyone around you and highlights the isolating horror of not being able to understand or be understood. The segment ends with some hope for the character, making the story a parable for those who must learn to live with some form of disability.

“Wolf Man” takes this concept further into horrific territory, showing that the infection Blake suffers from ensures that there will be no coping or learning mechanisms to allow him to continue to coexist with humans. As the disease reshapes Blake’s body, improving some of his senses like his sight and hearing, his ability to speak disappears. At the same time, he can no longer understand his wife and daughter, which causes concern and frustration on both sides. Part of the problem is that Blake, Charlotte and Ginger already had communication problems even before Blake was scratched by a werewolf, with Whannell and co-writer Corbett Tuck using the couple’s marital problems and their separate issues to elevate their daughter as proof of how tenuous our ability to communicate with others is, even when all our faculties are at our disposal. The tragic grace note regarding this theme comes when Blake, who was a writer, makes a final attempt to communicate with his wife by writing on a pad of paper. He writes “dying”, trying to describe his current state, and Charlotte refutes this (for his sake as well as her own denial), reassuring him that he is just sick. Even when the words are still available, the couple cannot bring themselves together.

George Waggner and Curt Siodmak’s “The Wolf Man”, from which Whannell’s film takes its name and which inspired it, fully established the werewolf as a tragic figure, following Stuart’s “Werewolf of London” Walker made six years earlier. This tone comes from the fact that the werewolf is a cursed figure, a being forced to either live a double life or have a split personality, depending on the interpretation. Across the many werewolf films made after these first two Universal Pictures entries (not to mention television shows, books, and other media), artists have generally given the werewolf a slight reprieve in his spell. This usually occurs as a sort of euphoria after their transformation and can be seen in films as diverse as “An American Werewolf in London”, “The Howling”, “Wolf” and “Ginger Snaps”. (the latter also being a film about slow, permanent transformation rather than a magical coming and going). Even David Cronenberg’s remake of “The Fly,” the film that comes closest to the body horror of “Wolf Man,” sees its titular creature experiencing a period of virility before his degeneration.

In contrast, Whannell’s “Wolf Man” enjoys no such advantages. Instead, the film commits almost entirely to its conception of the werewolf curse as a natural disease, following in the footsteps of “The Fly.” Yet it goes even a bit further into sci-fi territory than that film, at least in the way it depicts Blake as becoming something entirely non-human rather than a hybrid of human and animal . In the way Blake gradually finds himself separated from the human world around him in every possible way, his transformation is not only akin to that of Larry Talbot or Seth Brundle, but is also analogous to that of the astronaut Dave Bowman (from “2001: A Space Odyssey”). and Lucy (from “Lucy”), characters whose humanity and identity are broken down enough to fully become an entirely new being. While such transformations in sci-fi films like these can be seen as more transcendent than tragic, Whannell applies the concept to a horror lens, emphasizing how such a complete loss of one’s humanity could be as frightening and liberating.

All of Leigh Whannell’s films, whether as writer or director, address the theme of perception. This is usually because most of Whannell’s storylines involve a narrative twist, and these twists tend to concern things that a protagonist (and, therefore, the audience) sees or does not see until ‘it’s too late. The twist in “Wolf Man” is not narrative, but structural. Whannell presents dueling perspectives – the world outside Blake versus the one within – which, in effect, allows for a double transformation. Blake, in the real world, transforms into a wolf creature before Charlotte and Ginger’s eyes, while Charlotte and Ginger transform into some sort of wraith-like demons in Blake’s eyes.

This change in perspective, especially when added to the breakdown in communication that Blake suffers, fully expresses what it might be like to experience being transformed into a werewolf. It’s not that Blake begins to have the thoughts and instincts of an animal, but rather that his human personality is so completely altered by the distorted information his senses feed him. Like someone trapped in Jigsaw in “Saw”, like someone stuck in the Farthest in “Insidious”, or like someone at the mercy of an attacker (whether a program AI like STEM in “Upgrade” or a vicious and powerful ex in “The Invisible Man”), Blake’s reality is dictated to him by the werewolf’s illness.

In addition to this shift in perspective amplifying the terror and tragedy of the werewolf character, it also fully realizes the dissonance inherent in the Wolf Man character. He, or she, or it, is a being caught between two worlds while belonging to neither of them, a Lovecraftian thing that shouldn’t be, to borrow the title of a Metallica song. It’s easy to pity, even laugh, at the werewolf, the eternal asshole of horror cinema. It’s a little less easy once you realize that sooner or later we all go through our own irreversible and cursed transformation. As Whannell’s film says, dying happens to everyone; the problem lies in how you react to this change.

“Wolf Man” is in theaters around the world.