“It’s the most personal film I’ve made.” Leigh Whannell on Wolf Man

Leigh Whannell talks to us about modernising Wolf Man for today’s audiences, the success of his previous film The Invisible Man and whether he’ll be making any other Wolf Man movies.

Written and directed by The Invisible Man‘s Leigh Whannell, Wolf Man follows Blake, a San Francisco husband and father, who inherits his remote childhood home in rural Oregon after his own father vanishes and is presumed dead. With his marriage to his high-powered wife, Charlotte, fraying, Blake persuades Charlotte to take a break from the city and visit the property with their young daughter, Ginger. But as the family approaches the farmhouse in the dead of night, they’re attacked by an unseen animal and, in a desperate escape, barricade themselves inside the home as the creature prowls the perimeter. As the night stretches on, however, Blake begins to behave strangely, transforming into something unrecognisable, and Charlotte will be forced to decide whether the terror within their house is more lethal than the danger without…

We spoke to Whanell (pictured above with cast members Christopher Abbott and Julia Garner) about taking on another of Universal’s classic monsters, how he wrote this movie during COVID and whether we’ll be seeing anymore Wolf Man movies…

What drew you to the character of Wolf Man?

The thing that drew me in was really the idea I had about how to approach it. It wasn’t the character in and of itself. Although I love the character – I love all the classic monsters. I’m a fan of these classic monsters, but it wasn’t like somebody suggested Wolf Man and I instantly signed on the dotted line. I had to think about what my way into it would be. If I’m going to spend a year or two of my life writing this film and directing it, I need to have that fuel, that passion.

So I was pacing around thinking about my approach, and then I hit upon the idea of perspective changes and making the film a sensory assault in terms of sound design and visuals. That became the way in for me, that was the hook, and after that I was like, ‘all right, I want to make this movie’.

Did you look to any other werewolf movies for inspiration?

Not really. I mean, I thought about the incredible makeup that Rick Baker did in An American Werewolf in London. That towers over other werewolf transformations as far as I’m concerned. It was in my mind, but I was thinking, ‘all right, don’t compete with that. Reinvent it. Reinvent this transformation’.

So it was almost the opposite – instead of looking to the other transformations, I was looking at them as a guide in how not to do it. It had been done well, so why repeat it?

(Find out more about the look of Wolf Man in the featurette below…)

What makes your Wolf Man stand out from other werewolf movies?

I wanted the film to be really emotional. I wanted to make it a real family story about these relationships disintegrating and the tragedy of not being able to communicate with someone you love anymore. It was very close to home. For me, it’s the most personal film I’ve made.

The Invisible Man, to me, had a very clear theme, but I had never personally suffered from the type of stalking and domestic abuse that I depicted in the film. It felt like a female-centric story, that particular story, and I was a surrogate. I was writing the film for those people and trying to get into their heads. I was doing my research, and I was talking to women at domestic violence shelters about their experience, and I was trying to absorb as much as I could.

With this movie, the first draft was written during COVID. There were no in-person research interviews happening. We were all trapped at home and felt very isolated and uncertain. So everything I was pouring into the movie was very personal to me. It’s everything about parenting and about fear of illness and fear of what’s going to happen to your kids, and fear of losing touch with them – I put all those anxieties in there.

What’s great about horror movies is you can pour your anxieties into them. If you’re writing a rom-com, there’s not much use pouring all your worst fears into it. But with a horror movie, you can expunge all that stuff down on paper. It’s very cathartic.

Leigh Whannell wanted to make Wolf Man a real family story.

How did you update your Wolf Man movie to appeal to modern audiences?

It’s interesting because I do feel like the film reflects COVID and what happened, or how I was feeling during COVID. I would say it’s indirectly talking about that time, rather than directly talking about it. But I wanted it to be that modern and that current. The things that I wanted to talk about in this movie were things that were affecting me right then. So I felt like if I modernised this, hopefully, that would appeal to the audience.

I noticed that happened with The Invisible Man. I could have made a film set in the 1800s and designed the film around that Gothic look and that original feeling of The Invisible Man, but I decided to go the other way and completely modernise it and make it feel like it’s about tech. It was a tech nightmare and the audience seemed to respond well to it, so I was encouraged by that. That response encouraged me to do that again with Wolf Man, to be like, don’t feel like you’re enslaved by this history. Just pull it into your modern experience right now.

The movie mainly takes place over a single night. What made you decide to go down that route?

It just felt right to me. When you’re writing a screenplay and designing it, you’re sort of designing a maze and you’re starting at one end, and you’re going through this labyrinth trying to find your way to the end. And you keep bumping into these dead ends, brick walls. It can be a frustrating process. You know the ending is out there somewhere, but you go around, taking left turns, right turns, banging into these dead ends.

It’s a long process for me, certainly. Maybe other writers just vomit it out and I’m envious of that writing. But I like to walk through the labyrinth and find my way to the end before I start actually typing the words. I want to sit there with my notebook and figure out what my map is. As I was walking through that, I found that the film wanted to be more immediate than stretching it out over weeks or months. It just felt like a downhill slide into a nightmare that took place over one night.

One night felt most visceral, and it also felt like it stripped the whole thing back down to its essence, which I wanted to do as well. I didn’t want to deal with too much lore. I wanted it to be more mysterious and more immediate than that.

Wolf Man mainly takes place over just one night…

Is Wolf Man part of a larger narrative or are you planning for it to be one self contained story?

For now, one story. When I write films, most of the time, I’m obsessive about endings. As a screenwriter, that is the Holy Grail – the great ending. I saw Seven again the other night as they’d re-released it in IMAX classic and the ending just…

I’ve seen that film many times, but it just blew me away again, seeing it on the big screen and a great ending like that is the top of the mountain for me. That is everything.

So for me, when I write a movie, if I manage to come up with an ending that I like, I don’t think about more movies. I’m not thinking, ‘okay, now where is it gonna go?’ Because, to me, an ending is that full stop. It is the end of a sentence. So for this movie, I just felt like, ‘okay, great, I ended the movie in the right spot’. That’s the end of that story.

 Wolf Man will be released in cinemas on 17 January 2025