Dracula. The Frankenstein Monster. The Invisible Man. The Mummy.
And oh yes, don’t forget the Wolf Man.
These classic monsters have grown and morphed over the decades to transcend any single interpretation of them, even while they’ve scared audiences again and again across multiple generations. Heck, we just got another Dracula – albeit in Nosferatu form – from Robert Eggers, Guillermo del Toro is making a new Frankenstein, and now we have writer-director Leigh Whannell’s take on the Wolf Man.
But just how does a filmmaker like Whannell make modern audiences care about another werewolf movie, let alone the Wolf Man as a character? How do any of these filmmakers, as Whannell says, make the classic monsters scary and relevant again?
Well, grab your torches, pick your wolfsbane, and ready your stakes – and your ability to read into the metaphors behind monster stories – because we spoke to Whannell about the influences of classic monster movies on his work, how to revive beloved creatures like the Wolf Man in 2025, and why you should care!
While werewolf movies go back as far as the Silent Era, the first cinematic werewolf film as we know the genre today came with 1934’s Werewolf of London. Starring Henry Hull as a botanist turned lycanthrope, the Universal Pictures production features a fairly human-like werewolf, or at least a less hairy Wolf Man than Lon Chaney, Jr.’s version of the monster which would follow in 1941’s The Wolf Man.
Chaney, Jr. stars as Lawrence “Larry” Talbot, a big old lovable lug of a guy who has the misfortune of being bitten by Bela Lugosi and turning into a werewolf. This more sympathetic take on the Wolf Man character was a hit, and Talbot would return for several monster mash sequels alongside his fellow creatures. Indeed, it was this version of the traditional Wolf Man character that has proved to be the most enduring in the decades since.
What is the approach I can take that recontextualizes this character?
“
But still, Leigh Whannell knew that he needed more than just a guy covered in fur if he was going to update this particular monster.
“I watched that original movie,” recalls the filmmaker. “I had seen it a long time ago, but I re-watched it, and I was thinking, ‘I don't want to adapt this story to the letter. I need to think about where my film sits in that pantheon.’ It's a long history of this character. And what I needed to figure out was, ‘What is the approach I can take that recontextualizes this character?’ It's not that I want to wildly change it. I want to give fans of this character what they're looking for.”
Getting Back to the (Hairy) Core
Whannell does have a track record when it comes to figuring out not just what audiences want, but also how to bring something new to an age-old tale. His big Hollywood breakthrough was as the writer and creator of the first Saw film along with his friend James Wan. That of course led to a series of horror outings, including writing and directing 2020’s The Invisible Man, which starred Elisabeth Moss and brought a modern edge of thematic relevance to the classic tale.
So when it came to updating the Wolf Man, the filmmaker knew he needed not just a fright factor to the film, but he also had to give audiences a reason to care about yet another version of this story.
“The biggest service I can do to fans of the Wolf Man, or any monster, is to make it scary and relevant,” says Whannell. “That's what they want, right? You're not there for a history lesson, you're not there to see someone pay homage to your favorite character. That's all window dressing.”
And with that window dressing comes the danger of the character becoming a bit too familiar, and therefore a bit too safe. The next thing you know, you’re in Leslie Nielsen/Dracula: Dead and Loving It territory. These are monsters, after all.
“To me, what you need to do is go back to that core, core thing, because these characters have been around so long, they've been diluted by pop culture,” he says. “Dracula is a campy character in some ways, the approach. ‘I want to drink your blood,’ right? Until you see a filmmaker like Robert Eggers come along, or Francis Coppola. These people, they don't approach it that way. They take the source material very seriously. That's what you need to do, I think, for modern audiences if you want people to resonate with the movie.”
Look no further than Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu, a remake of a Silent Era film which became one of the buzziest movies of this past holiday season and has turned out to be a big box office success for Focus Features.
Finding the Wolf in the Man
In Whannell's film, Christopher Abbott and Julia Garner star as married couple Blake and Charlotte. Upon moving with their young daughter to the family farmhouse in rural Oregon, Blake is attacked by a... well, you know how this goes. Or do you?
“I was slowing everything down, trying to see things from inside the wolf, because that was the thing I felt I hadn't seen, I hope,” the director says of his approach to depicting a werewolf. “My biggest wish for this movie is that people walk out of it, hopefully they're scared, and maybe they're emotional about it, but also, I want them to walk out and be like, ‘Oh, I hadn't seen that take on the Wolf Man before.’”
Of course, there are certain – well, let’s call them tropes – that are essential to an iconic character or mythology like the Wolf Man. For Whannell, the transformation scene wasn’t just something that had to be included, but it was also an opportunity to mine some of the thematic elements that he was going for with his film.
“The idea of transformation, is it this idea that you're changing into something uncontrollable?” he says. “That's the core of the Wolf Man character. All the Wolf Man movies and werewolf movies I've loved, from American Werewolf in London to The Howling, it's all about this idea that you lose control. American Werewolf in London uses it to comedic effect. He wakes up at the zoo, he's naked, he's stealing these balloons. But if you strip away the humor, it's an idea that he wakes up and he doesn't know what he did.”
And so Whannell drills down on that idea, but instead of playing it for laughs, he uses the notion of a character not knowing what he did as a way of addressing a real-world if even scarier concept than that of a Wolf Man.
“I was using the audience's understanding of that, but instead of having someone wake up, I wanted it to be a slow-motion descent that maybe you weren't coming back from,” explains Whannell. “Because illness to me, a degenerative illness that steals your loved ones away, that was really what was sitting underneath this version of it for me.”
Honoring Monsters Past
Of course, you can’t forge a new future for the classic monsters without recognizing the accomplishments of the ghouls, vamps, and stitched-together freaks who came before. From the pantheon of the Universal Monsters to remakes of other iconic creature features, today’s filmmakers have a wealth of inspirations to pull from. And certainly, make-up legend Rick Baker's work on American Werewolf in London is one of the major hallmarks of monster cinema.
“It is a standard setter, and it might be the high watermark of practical effects ever, arguably,” says Whannell. “It was so great, I felt like there's no use competing with this. It's better to reinvent it than to imitate it.”
It is a standard setter, and it might be the high watermark of practical effects ever, arguably.
“
The director also has much praise for John Carpenter’s The Thing, which he rates as the best horror remake of all time, and David Cronenberg’s 1986 body-horror masterpiece The Fly is a close second for him. Perhaps not surprisingly, both films are all about horrific transformations.
“I just love what David Cronenberg did with The Fly, and I hadn't seen the originals of those movies at the time I first saw those movies,” he says. “So for me, The Thing was an original. I wasn't thinking about the older version. In the later years, I see them, you kind of catch up on your horror history, but I grew up on those.”
And then of course this conversation would be incomplete if we didn’t touch on the new Nosferatu, which is a remake not just of the 1922 German Expressionist classic but also of Werner Herzog’s 1979 iteration… both of which are adaptations of Dracula.
“I loved what Robert Eggers did with that,” says Whannell. “It's always good when the source material has a lot of distance. Like The Thing, I felt like the original movie, it was in black and white, the effects were much creakier. There was a lot of room for John Carpenter to re-establish it in the time. Remakes, as the years have gone by, remakes seem to be happening with shorter and shorter windows. They'll remake a film from 10 years ago or whatever, and it's like, ‘Whoa.’ I feel like there was enough distance with The Fly and The Thing to really do that. And certainly with Nosferatu, I mean, it's a silent film, so what better movie? Because now, he's playing with elements they weren't playing with. Now, he's able to give it a whole different language.”
But what do you think of Hollywood’s most recent stabs at the classic monsters? Let’s discuss in the comments!
Interview by Tom Jorgensen
