Australian Leigh Whannell has been behind some of Hollywood’s biggest horror hits over the past two decades. He wrote Saw and Insidious and directed 2020’s The Invisible Man. Yet his latest project, remaking a beloved classic, is perhaps his biggest challenge to date.
Wolf Man, which he directed and co-wrote with wife Corbett Tuck, updates legendary 1941 horror film The Wolf Man. It features rising star Chris Abbott as Blake, a young father who returns to his family farm in rural Oregon with his wife Charlotte (the Emmy-winning Julia Garner) and daughter, Ginger (Matilda Firth), following the death of his father. Things take a dangerous turn when the family is attacked by an unseen animal, and Blake begins to make a frightening transformation.
“I loved working with Chris and Julia – both of them are so supernaturally talented,” Whannell tells Broadsheet. “Chris has such a raw nerve and he has no ego, so I knew he’d do things as Wolf Man that maybe other actors wouldn’t do.”
Shooting took place in New Zealand, with the landscapes around Queenstown doubling for the eerie woods of Oregon and farmhouse shots completed at a studio in Wellington. “If I had visited Wellington as a tourist, [I’d] see the sites … but when you shoot a film, you go deeper than that,” Whannell says. “You get to know the locals. They’re working on the crew. They’re with you every day. So, it’s almost like this deep dive on a city.”
One of the things that sets this version of Wolf Man apart is a perspective Whannell calls “Wolf Vision”, which puts viewers into the lead character’s head. “The first idea I had was this idea of the camera crossing between the worlds,” he says. “That sustained me throughout the whole process because [I knew], this is gonna be something different people haven’t seen.”
Unusually, Abbott’s Wolf Man costume also uses no digital effects. Whannell, a self-professed ’80s horror junkie, was attracted to the idea of making a scary flick unlike any he’s seen, while also honouring the genre’s heritage in this way. “The Fly is a movie I grew up watching in the VHS era,” he says. “It’s still my favourite David Cronenberg movie. I feel like Wolf Man is a tragedy and The Fly is too.
“The film is about losing people in our family, which is gonna happen to all of us. I would love people to come out of the theatre having been through the ringer, fear-wise, feeling very emotional about their family and their lives.”
Wolf Man is in cinemas now.
