The Wolf Man does one thing no werewolf movie has done before

This article contains Spoilers About “The Wolf Man”.

Aging is the ultimate body horror, because it is the long, slow road to death that every living being, bar none, must experience. This process, as with most body horror, is expressed primarily physically. After all, most people would say that they are still as mentally young as they were before, as they watch their bodies have trouble performing the way they used to; It’s very common to see a post on social media by a 30-year-old lamenting their newfound back problems or some similar ailment. A person’s awareness of the passage of time may make it seem as if years have passed in the blink of an eye, but the slow aging process allows most people to make physical transformation easier, as it happens almost imperceptibly.

However, this perception is greatly challenged when something happens that changes our status quo. In my own experience, I used to roll my eyes at social media posts about people experiencing the onset of various aches and pains, mistakenly believing that I had never encountered such things. The truth is that I was and still am, my chronic health issues (including but not limited to a liver transplant) have changed the way I see and interact with the world from an extraordinarily young age. I can no longer relate to such “relatable” content because I no longer see the same world that most people see.

“The Wolf Man” directed by Lee Whannell It is a film full of themes Body horror, illness, transformation, realization, and ultimately deathtells the story of poor Blake Lovell (Christopher Abbott) being afflicted with “hill fever,” which may or may not be supernatural. Blake’s ordeal boils down to a long, harrowing night, as his wife, Charlotte (Julia Garner), and daughter, Ginger (Matilda Firth), watch helplessly transform into an inhuman creature. While the film has most of the basic elements of a body horror film, it does do one thing that no other body horror film, let alone a werewolf film, has attempted to do on the same scale before: it shows us what it’s like for Blake to . To undergo this change mentally, emotionally as well as physically. This angle is not only integral to Whannell’s interests as a filmmaker, but it makes “The Wolf Man” a uniquely terrifying and tragic experience.

In the October 4, 1985 episode of the “The Twilight Zone” revival series, Wes Craven He directed a segment called “Wordplay” written by Rockne S. O’Bannon. In the film, an ordinary salesman inexplicably begins hearing strange words instead of others, and soon everyone around him begins speaking a completely different language. The story is a great metaphor for feeling out of phase with everyone around you and emphasizes the isolating terror of not being able to understand or understand. The clip concludes with some hope for the character, making the story serve as a parable for those who must learn to live with some form of disability.

“Wolf Man” takes this concept further, showing that Blake’s infection ensures that he has no coping or learning mechanism that would allow him to continue coexisting with humans. As the disease reshapes Blake’s body, enhancing some of his senses such as sight and hearing, his ability to speak disappears. At the same time, he is no longer able to understand his wife and daughter, which leads to anxiety and frustration on both sides. Part of the problem is that Blake, Charlotte, and Ginger were already having communication problems even before Blake was scratched by a werewolf, with Whannell and co-writer Corbett Tuck using the couple’s marital problems and their separate issues raising their daughter as evidence of this. How weak is our ability to communicate with others even when all our abilities are available to us. The note of tragic grace regarding this subject comes when Blake, who was a writer, makes a final attempt to communicate with his wife by writing on a piece of paper. He writes “dying” trying to describe his present state, and Charlotte refutes it (for his sake and her own denial), reassuring him that he is only ill. Even when the words are still available to them, the couple cannot come together.

George Wagner and Curt Siodmak’s “The Wolf Man,” after which Whannell’s film was named and inspired, fully established the werewolf as a tragic figure, following Stuart Walker’s “Werewolf of London” six years earlier. This tone comes from the fact that the werewolf is a cursed figure, forced to either live a double life or have a dual personality, depending on the interpretation. throughout Many werewolf movies have been made After those first two Universal Pictures entries (not to mention TV shows, books, and other media), artists usually give the werewolf some minor relief from their plight. This usually occurs in the form of some kind of trance after their transformation and can be seen in films as diverse as “An American Werewolf in London”, “The Howling”, “Wolf” and “Ginger Snaps” (the latter also being a film about a slow and permanent transformation rather than a magical transformation back and forth). until David Cronenberg’s remake of “The Fly” Closer to the body horror genre than Wolf Man is, the film sees its titular creature enjoying a period of virility before his decline.

In contrast, Whannell’s “Wolf Man” is afforded no such privileges. Instead, the film adheres almost entirely to its conception of the werewolf curse as a natural disease, following in the footsteps of The Fly. However, it goes into sci-fi territory a little further than that film did, at least in the way it depicts Blake as becoming something completely inhuman rather than a combination of human and animal. In the way that Blake gradually finds himself separated from the human world around him in every possible way, his transformation resembles not only Larry Talbot or Seth Brundle but also similar to astronaut Dave Bowman (from “2001: A Space Odyssey”) and Lucy (from “Lucy “), characters whose humanity and identity have been divided completely enough to become an entirely new being. Where such transformations in sci-fi films like these can be seen as more transcendent than tragic, Whannell applies this concept to the lens of horror, emphasizing how such a complete loss of one’s humanity can be as frightening as it is liberating.

All of Lee Whannell’s films, whether as screenwriter or director, concern the theme of perception. This is usually due to the fact that most of Whannell’s scripts involve narrative development, and these twists tend to be about things that the hero (and thus the audience) sees or does not see until it is too late. The development in “Wolf Man” is not narrative, but structural. Whannell presents dueling perspectives – the world outside Blake versus the world within – which, in effect, allow for a double transformation to occur. In the real world, Blake transforms into a wolf creature before the eyes of Charlotte and Ginger, while Charlotte and Ginger transform into some kind of ghost-like demons in Blake’s eyes.

This shift in perspective, especially when added to the breakdown in communication that Blake experiences, illustrates exactly what the experience of becoming a werewolf might be like. It is not that Blake begins to have animal thoughts and instincts, but rather that his human personality changes completely due to the distorted information fed to his senses. Like someone trapped in Jigsaw’s trap from “Saw,” like someone stranded in “Insidious,” or like someone at the mercy of their attacker (be it an AI program like STEM in “Upgrade” or an evil and powerful former partner in “The Invisible Man.” “, Blake’s reality is dictated by his werewolf illness.

In addition to this shift in perspective that heightens the horror and tragedy of the werewolf character, it fully realizes the dissonance inherent in the Wolf Man’s character. He, she, or he, is stuck between two worlds while belonging to neither, which is a Lovecraftian thing it shouldn’t be, to borrow the title of a song from Metallica. It is easy to pity, or even laugh at, the werewolf, the eternal fool of horror cinema. It becomes less easy when you realize that we all go through our cursed, irreversible metamorphosis, sooner or later. As Whannell’s film says, death happens to everyone; The trick is how you respond to this change.

“The Wolf Man” is in theaters everywhere.