Transforming the Werewolf: How Blumhouse’s Latest Horror Film ‘Wolf Man’ Reimagines the Classic Monster

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 (Matlida 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. 

Whannell is no stranger to breathing terrifying new life into classic movie monsters, with her first project the 2020 hit horror film, The Invisible Man.  “What Leigh Whannell was able to accomplish with The Invisible Man was astonishing,” producer Jason Blum says. “He took an intimate moment about a heroine struggling to get away from abuse and expanded her horror into a terrifying journey for the audience. When Universal asked us what Blumhouse’s take would be on Wolf Man, I knew that Leigh should be the captain. His unparalleled ability at extracting terror from relatable moments allows him to show horror that is not fantastical, but tactile and immediate.”

The film co-stars Sam Jaeger (The Handmaid’s Tale), Ben Prendergast (The Sojourn Audio Drama) and Benedict Hardie (The Invisible Man), with newcomer Zac Chandler, Beatriz Romilly (Shortland Street) and Milo Cawthorne (Shortland Street). 

Tales of werewolves, or wolf men, have been prevalent across all of human history, and has integrated into pop culture beginning with the 1941 Universal classic The Wolf Man. “These classic monsters have endured for a reason,” Whannell says. “They are as iconic and as famous as Michael Jordan, Marilyn Monroe, Charlie Chaplin, Winston Churchill, all these faces throughout history. The Mummy, Dracula, The Invisible Man and The Wolf Man are on the Mount Rushmore of pop culture. Something about them is just too fascinating, creepy and mysterious to go away.”

Whannell feels that effective horror should be grounded in the real world, so he developed the story, along with screenwriter Corbett Tuck, around husband and father Blake Lovell, who is struggling with his past. As the film progresses, we see the character transform both physically and emotionally, threatening himself and his family.  “I started thinking about seeing the Wolf Man changing from the Wolf Man’s perspective,” Whannell says. “A lot of the wolf man history has been about this curse, and that a full moon can bring it out in you. I wanted to do with this character what David Cronenberg did with The Fly. He drilled down to the essence of a previous film that could be considered quite comical. Same with John Carpenter’s The Thing. These movies take their monsters seriously and have no room for winking or poking fun.”

The goal of Wolf Man, for Whannell, has always been to take a peek at the beating heart of the characters he’s creating, and to understand true terror. “You make the movie when you write it,” Whannell says. “Shooting is all interpretive art. I listened to a lot of music when I was writing, finding an emotional way into the story. I asked myself, ‘What gives me goosebumps? What makes me cry?’ Through those feelings, you find the movie. My approach is to strip out the window dressing and to find the core of what’s scary about these characters. If you do it right with a horror film, you can dig deep into someone’s subconscious.”

Watch the horror unfold as Wolf Man arrives in Philippine cinemas on January 15, 2025.  Follow Universal Pictures PH (FB), UniversalPicturesPH (IG), and UniversalPicsPH (TikTok) for the latest updates.

Watch the Wolf Man trailer here: