Werewolf Man does one thing that no Werewolf movie has ever done

This article contains spoilers for “Wolf Man”.

Aging is the ultimate horror of the body because it is the long, slow road to death that every living being must experience. This process, like most body horror, is primarily physical. After all, most people will say they are as young mentally as they ever were while they watch their bodies have trouble functioning as they once did; It's very common to see a post on social media of a 30-year-old lamenting his newly discovered back problems or some similar ailment. One's perception of the passage of time may seem like the years have passed in a flash, but the slow process of aging allows most people to ease the physical transition as it happens almost imperceptibly.

However, this perception is sharply challenged when something happens to change our status quo. In my experience, I tend to roll my eyes at those social media posts of people experiencing various pains, mistakenly believing that I haven't experienced such things. The truth was that I have, 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 “comparable” content because I no longer see the same world as most people.

“The Wolf Man” by Leigh Winnell is a film filled with themes body horror, disease, transformation, perception and finally deathtells the story of poor Blake Lovell (Christopher Abbott) who contracts “mountain fever,” which may or may not be supernatural. Blake's ordeal is compressed into one long, harrowing night, during which his wife Charlotte (Julie Garner) and daughter Ginger (Matilda Firth) watch helplessly as he transforms into an inhuman creature. While the film contains most of the premise elements of a body horror transformation horror film, it does one thing that no other body horror film, let alone a werewolf film, has attempted on the same scale before: it shows what it looks like for Blake. experience these changes mentally and emotionally as well as physically. This angle is not only part of Whannell's interest as a filmmaker, but it makes The Wolfman a uniquely terrifying and tragic experience.

For the October 4, 1985 episode of The Twilight Zone revival Wes Craven directed a segment called “Wordplay” written by Rockn S. O'Bannon. In it, the average salesman inexplicably starts hearing strange words instead of others, and pretty soon everyone around him starts speaking a completely different language. The story is a fantastic metaphor for feeling out of phase 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 hero, making the story a parable for those who have to learn to live with a disability.

“The Wolfman” takes this concept into horrifying territory, showing that the infection Blake suffers from ensures that there will be no coping or learning mechanism that allows him to continue to exist alongside humans. When the disease transforms Blake's body, enhancing some of his senses such as sight and hearing, his ability to speak is lost. At the same time, he is no longer able to understand his wife and daughter, which causes concern and disappointment on both sides. Part of the problem is that Blake, Charlotte, and Ginger already had communication issues even before Blake was scratched by a werewolf, while Vinella and co-writer Corbett Tuck capitalized on the couple's marital problems and separate issues with raising their daughter. how weak our ability to relate to other people is even when we have access to all our faculties. The tragic mercy of this theme comes when Blake, formerly a writer, makes one last attempt to communicate with his wife by writing on a pad of paper. He writes “dying” in an attempt to describe his current state, and Charlotte refutes it (as well as her own denial) by assuring her that he's just sick. Even when they still have words available, the couple can't get together.

George Wagner and Curt Siodmak's The Wolf Man, after which Whannell's film is named and inspired, fully establishes the werewolf as a tragic figure after Stuart Walker's Werewolf of London, made six years earlier. This tone stems from the fact that the werewolf is a cursed figure, a being who, depending on the interpretation, is forced to either live a dual life or be a dual personality. Throughout the many werewolf movies made after those first two Universal Pictures entries (not to mention the TV shows, books, and other media), the artists have generally given the werewolf little respite from their plight. This usually happens as a kind of euphoria after their transformation, and can be seen in films as diverse as “An American Werewolf in London”, “Howling”, “The Wolf” and “Ginger Snaps” (the latter also being a film about slow, steady transformation, not magical , there and back). Even A remake of David Cronenberg's The Fly the closest the film comes to the brand of body horror in The Wolf Man, its titular creature enjoys a period of manhood before his degeneration.

In contrast, Vanel's film “The Wolfman” is not given such advantages. Instead, the film commits itself almost entirely to its concept of the werewolf curse as a natural disease, following in the footsteps of The Fly. However, it even goes a little further into sci-fi territory than this film, at least in the way it portrays Blake as becoming something completely inhuman rather than a human-animal hybrid. In the way Blake gradually separates himself from the human world around him in every possible way, his transformation is not only similar to Larry Talbot or Seth Brundle, but also to astronaut Dave Bowman (from “2001: A Space Odyssey”). and Lucy (from “Lucy”), characters whose humanity and identity have been dissected carefully enough to become a whole new being entirely. Where such transformations in sci-fi films like these can be seen as more transcendent than tragic, Vannell applies the concept to the lens of horror, highlighting how such a complete loss of humanity can be as frightening as it is liberating.

All of Leigh Wannell's films, whether as a screenwriter or director, deal with the theme of perception. This is usually due to the fact that most of Whannell's scripts involve narrative twists, and those twists usually involve things that the main character (and therefore the audience) either sees or doesn't see until it's too late. The twist in “Wolfman” is not narrative, but structural. Wannell offers dueling perspectives, the world outside Blake as opposed to the world inside, which actually allows for a double transformation to take place. Blake turns into a wolf creature in front of Charlotte and Ginger in the real world, while Charlotte and Ginger turn into some kind of demons of excitement in Blake's eyes.

This shift in perspective, especially when coupled with the communication breakdown Blake suffers from, perfectly articulates what it might be like to turn into a werewolf. It's not that Blake begins to develop the thoughts and instincts of an animal, but that the distorted information has so completely altered his human personality that his senses feed on him. Like someone trapped by Jigsaw from Saw, someone stuck further away from Insidious, or someone at the mercy of an abuser (whether it's an AI program like STEM in “Upgrade,” or an evil and powerful ex in “The Invisible Man”), Blake's reality is dictated by his werewolf disease.

In addition to this shift in perspective, which heightens the horror and tragedy of the werewolf character, it is also fully aware of the dissonance inherent in the character of the Werewolf. He or she or it is a being caught between two worlds while belonging to neither, a Lovecraftian thing that shouldn't be, to borrow a song title from Metallica. It's easy to pity or even laugh at him, the eternal beauty of horror cinema, the werewolf. It's a little easier when you realize that we all experience our own irreversible, cursed transformation sooner or later. As Vanel's film says, everyone dies; the trick is how you respond to these changes.

“The Wolf Man” is in theaters everywhere.