Horror director Leigh Whannell says Wolf Man is a ‘tragedy’

Charles Perrault and the Grimm Brothers popularised the story of Little Red Riding Hood but there are echoes of its elements stretching back millennia.

The story of young girl who ventured off the path in the woods and was nearly devoured by a devious wolf has contained within it a morality tale about obedience with the threat of violence and rape if you dare deviate from the orthodoxy.

The wolf figure has often been a monster standing in for some other fear, a singular manifestation of our primal fears of the predators in the dark.

The werewolf is a potent folkloric symbol, a combination of the untameable in both nature and in humans. The very existence of it in the cultural imagination instils dread and terror, even if you don’t really believe there’s a literal monster stalking the nights of the full moon.

But what if the story of the wolfman is not a horror story but a tragedy?

Wolf Man is released in cinemas today, drawn from the stable of Universal Studios’ classic monster movies of the early 20th century.

The updated story follows Blake (Christopher Abbott), a thirtysomething San Francisco writer whose only job at the moment is to be a stay-at-home dad to daughter Ginger (Matilda Firth). His wife, Charlotte (Julia Garner), is a busy journalist, and Blake feels as if the family is no longer as connected as they need to be.

Blake tells his daughter that it’s his job to protect her, a parenting philosophy pounded into him by his severe, survivalist father Grady (Sam Jaeger), who years ago disappeared when his dad went off into the Oregon woods looking for a mythical creature.

When Grady is officially declared dead by the state, Blake inherits the isolated house he grew up in. In a move that defies all logic, Blake proposes the family drives up to spend some quality time together away from the city while they pack up the house.

Anyone who has ever seen a horror movie knows a trip into the woods is not going to end well. Blake is scratched by a fearsome creature haunting the family, and before he long, he begins to transform.

While many previous iterations of the wolfman story, whether in a Scooby Doo cartoon or a 2010 movie starring Benicio del Toro, have used the term “wolfman”, Australian director Leigh Whannell deliberately left it as Wolf Man, two words.

“It sounded better to me, and also the movie is about changing and transformation,” Whannell told The Nightly. “The human left in the person, how much is human, how is much animal?”

Whannell is known for co-creating the Saw franchise (10 films and counting) with James Wan, but he was widely acclaimed for his 2020 reboot of The Invisible Man, a clever use of a classic monster to illustrate the horrors of domestic violence, stalking and coercive control.

After the success of The Invisible Man, Whannell was approached by Universal and Blumhouse for his interest in taking on Wolf Man. But it wasn’t until he and co-screenwriter and wife, Corbett Tuck, cracked the idea that he got excited.

Whannell wanted to strip the story down to its core. He did away with most of the mystical elements of the folk stories (silver bullet, premonitions) and took it to “that germ of an idea of somebody changing, being a threat and having no control”.

Wolf Man is a grim tale. Blake didn’t ask for what happened to him and that he became a danger to his family is his worst nightmare.

“I wanted the audience the empathise with him and be afraid of him,” Whannell explains. “It’s a double-sided thing because the Wolf Man story to me is a tragedy. You can depict a tragic monster and the audience’s heart will sink and go out to this guy, but also be afraid of what he’s going to do.

“If you can do that simultaneously, that would be the greatest accomplishment for me.”

The only way that works is if the audience bonded to that character while he is still a human, and one of the things about Blake is he was terrified of his father and he never wanted to be that to his child.

“It’s a family story,” Whannell said. “An authentic story of a marriage, a father-daughter-relationship. I’m a father myself and those are conversations you have with your kids.

“Chris (Abbott) isn’t a father but he’s such a great actor that, just through talking to me, he takes everything in and picks it up. You want to establish these people as real people. A great horror movie like The Exorcist, off the top of my head, they do that.

“You spend all this time with the family getting to know them. It’s a slow build, I always want the audience to know who the people are.”

There is a duality at play in Wolf Man. Blake ended up being both, but you only care about him because he was a man first.

Wolf Man is in cinemas