What if someone you loved became something else? From Blumhouse and visionary writer-director Leigh Whannell, the creators of the chilling modern monster tale The Invisible Man, comes a terrifying new lupine nightmare: Wolf Man.
Golden Globe nominee Christopher Abbott (Poor Things, It Comes at Night) stars as 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 (Emmy winner Julia Garner; Ozark, Inventing Anna), fraying, Blake persuades Charlotte to take a break from the city and visit the property with
their young daughter, Ginger (Matila Firth ; Hullraisers, Coma).
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 unrecognizable, and Charlotte will be forced to decide whether the terror within their house is more lethal than the danger without.
As Wolf Man releases in Australian cinemas on January 16, Nick L’Barrow spoke with the film’s co-writer and director, Leigh Whannell, about the devastating true story that led to this unique look at an iconic character, and about the time Nick got ‘Invisible Man’d’ while watching one of Leigh’s movies!
Nick: Leigh, it’s great to chat to you again. Thank you so much for taking the time.
Leigh Whannell: No worries!
Nick: Wolf Man is so much more than just a ‘horror’ film. You’re dealing with a lot of personal themes here. What makes horror such an interesting vehicle to explore those themes?
Leigh Whannell: I think it’s just such a malleable genre because it’s expressing such extreme things. You can wrap it around a lot of things. It’s a great metaphor. It’s very cathartic, you know? If there’s something that’s distressing you in the world, or in your own life, it’s really easy to exorcise it through a horror movie.
You can take it to it’s very extreme, and suddenly the metaphorically bloodthirsty banker who’s kicking people out of their homes becomes a literal vampire! You can nuclearize these monsters in our real life and make them into real monsters. I think that’s what makes it such a malleable genre.
Nick: I find so many great movies or stories start with a question, rather than a premise. I look back at something like Saw and think ‘What are the extreme lengths someone would go to in order to teach someone to value their life?’ is such an interesting question to explore. What were the questions you were exploring when you were writing Wolf Man?
Leigh Whannell: For me, it’s about a lot of things. It was about a degenerative illness, and the fear of life, what do you do when somebody you love is suffering so much? We all choose people in our life. We have our family, but then we have our chosen family, people we marry, our best friends, and you assume that generally everything is going to be fine. But what do you do in a marriage when your partner is suddenly suffering from a disease?
And I’ve seen that happen. I had a couple that was close to me, they’d been married for a long time. They’d raised two kids, and suddenly, the wife was diagnosed with ALS. And it was the slow-motion nightmare of slowly losing her ability to walk and then speak. By the end, ALS is a disease that robs you of your ability to communicate. Mentally, you’re there. You can listen, you can look around, but you can’t respond. And it’s just horrible, the cruelty of these diseases.
So, that’s what I was thinking about. What does a family do when this happens? And of course, in a horror movie, you can ramp it up to 11, and a little more. It’s horror movie, but I think I’m still talking about those other things.
Nick: How did your process of exploring those themes, and the characters themselves, change when you put the time constraint of setting the film, for the majority, over one night?
Leigh Whannell: Yeah, it does change. I mean, when you write a movie, you make a movie. You’re watching the movie in your head, and it changes things. There’s a rhythm to it. So, if you’re making a movie that takes place over weeks or months, the rhythm is different because you’re assuming a lot has happened that the audience isn’t seeing. We don’t need to see every moment of this character’s life.
What you’re doing as a screenwriter is cherry picking the moments that are important out of these characters lives. With a movie like this, that sort of unfolds in real time. It is more compacted, and just sort of need to keep your eye on it. No rhythm is wrong or right, you just need to listen to what the movie wants to be.
For some reason, this movie was telling me that it wanted to be more immediate. It wanted to happen in one night. It wasn’t something it wanted to deal with the next morning. And I was co-writing it with my wife [Corbett Tuck], she agreed. She liked the immediacy of one location, one night. It’s a very stripped down version of this tale.
Nick: The way you chose to portray Blake’s transformation from his perspective was incredible! It’s so unique and creative. I’m curious to know how you landed on that visual and auditory experience to convey that.
Leigh Whannell: Usually when I write a film, I start off asking myself what I can do that hasn’t been done before. It sounds quite highfalutin! But I also think when you’re making art, whether it’s a film or if you’re writing a book, whatever it is, I think you should be asking yourself these big questions. Am I offering something people haven’t seen before? And it doesn’t necessarily mean you have to reinvent the form of cinema, but it means that I need a launching pad of originality.
I’m working with this character that is very well known. This is an iconic character that stretches back a long way. I just said to myself, ‘What’s the unique way we haven’t seen before in other versions of this character?”
I remember pacing around my office one day and suddenly having an image of a husband-and-wife couple, where the husband could not understand his wife anymore. He no longer could discern human language. It just sounded like garbled gibberish to him, the way animals hear us. They don’t speak English; they just hear our speech the same way we just hear sheep with these bleats of sound.
And that became really fascinating to me… and terrifying. If I could no longer understand what my family were saying to me, that would be terrifying. As soon as I had that idea, I started building the film out.
Nick: They way you transition in one shot between Charlotte and Blake’s perspective is amazing. Were you able to do that practically on set?
Leigh Whannell: Yeah! I mean it took a long time of planning. Stefan Duscio, the cinematographer that I work with – this is our third film together – we really speak the same language. We know each other so well. So, we usually start out a film thinking about what the visual language of that movie is going to be, right? You get to invent a new one for each movie.
Stefan is very good at keeping the integrity of the visual idea. He never wants to do gymnastics with the camera that aren’t earned. It all has to be about story. He’s not interested in using the latest equipment to zip the camera around the room for no reason. He wants everything to be true to the drama.
We had a lot of back and forth about what we can do that actually reflects the story we’re telling. We tried out different cameras with infrared lenses, but in the end we ended up doing something really practical. It was as simple as changing the lighting within the scene as we move the camera around. So, it was a very simple thing! And it’s funny, because it seems to have the best effect on an audience.
Nick: I’ll wrap on this Leigh, and I have to set this question up with a little story. When I saw The Invisible Man in cinemas, during the incredibly tense attic scene, I was watching the film through my fingers, basically shitting myself scared…
Leigh Whannell: [laughs]
Nick: … and then I accidentally hit the chair recliner button, and it moved my chair, and I jumped so hard in my seat…
Leigh Whannell: [laughs] You Invisible Man’d yourself!
Nick: [laughs] I genuinely Invisible Man’d myself! And then the paint reveal scare happened and I was just so scared! But it made me curious, as a filmmaker, what’s important to nail – the lead up to scare, or the scare itself?
Leigh Whannell: I think one needs the other! The big scares won’t work without that build up. I think I enjoy the build up more. That rising tension. Because you can make people squirm more. If I’m watching the audience watch my film, I’m more interested in seeing how they react on the build-up. Like you said, I’m waiting for something to happen.
People’s body language on edge is pretty fascinating. We know what the body language is when the big jump scare happens, people jolt in their seats, and it’s fun. I’ve seen people sit on the floor, crawl under their chairs, pull hoodies over their faces. I’ve seen people lean into their partner’s arms! Oftentimes when we do these screenings, we’ll record the audience with a little night vision camera, and it’s fascinating to see what people do with their bodies.
So, I’m going to go with the build being more satisfying for me than the big scare. I love it.
Thank you so much to Leigh for his time, and to Universal Pictures for organising the interview. Wolf Man is in cinemas January 16.
