WOLF MAN
OUT 17 JAN
HAVING REINVENTED THE INVISIBLE MAN, LEIGH WHANNELL IS NOW TACKLING A HAIRIER MONSTER. EMPIRE GOES FERAL ON SET...
WORDS AMON WARMANN
LEIGH WHANNELL WAS ADRIFT. FOR years he’d worked and worked —significantly on the Saw and Insidious franchises, as writer, director and actor —before making 2018’s action sci-fi Upgrade. But after his modern revamp of 2020’s The Invisible Man —and the small matter of a global pandemic —he had hit a wall.
“I have a young family, so that discombobulation of Covid kind of joined forces with this blank slate, and it led to a form of creative paralysis where you’re not quite sure what’s the right idea to go with,” he tells Empire. “It was a strange time.”
Enter: Wolf Man. While he was in artistic limbo, Blumhouse approached Whannell to see if he was keen to modernise another Universal monster, this one much hairier and more visible than his last. But the filmmaker was hesitant. “At first I thought, ‘Well, I just did Invisible Man. I don’t think I want to do Wolf Man.’” Ultimately, though, that resistance didn’t last. “I came up with an idea of how I would do Wolf Man, and it took hold. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. At the risk of sounding pretentious, the projects choose you a lot of the time.”
There have been many werewolf movies over the years, not least George Waggner’s original The Wolf Man in 1941, all of them building on supernatural-horror tropes in their own way. If Whannell was going to take on the challenge, he would strive for something truly innovative. And the idea that he proposed was a bold twist.
“My thought was — ‘What if I slowed [the transformation] down? And what if the person who was transforming didn’t know it was happening ?’ I couldn’t stop thinking about this idea that you were seeing the change from the perspective of the person who’s changing.”