As taglines go, the one for Leigh Whannell’s Wolf Man — “What if someone you loved became something else?” — is a doozy. Having deftly reconfigured Universal’s classic The Invisible Man in 2020 as an Elizabeth Moss led commentary on the horrors of gaslighting, the Aussie filmmaker and co-creator of both Saw and Insidious is retooling the studio’s 1941 lycanthropic creature feature as a clawed parable on toxic masculinity and the dissolution of the family unit with Christopher Abbott (Poor Things) and Julia Garner (Ozark). Check out the foreboding new trailer below:
Switching Wales for Oregon and wolf-headed walking sticks for a slightly more visceral catalytic werewolf encounter, it looks like Whannell is going to make good on his promise of “straight-up, pure horror” here with a folk-inflected genre movie barbed with some gnarly looking body horror elements. From its torchlit woodlands to the rural Oregonian farmhouse Abbott’s Blake and his brood are holed up in, the stage is set for tightly coiled tension and eye-darting paranoia — and when we see Blake’s deeply gashed arm and glimpses of an inhuman metamorphosis afoot, the promise of a real pulse-raiser is plain to see. We barely even get a moment’s look at Abbott in full lycanthrope mode (those Universal Halloween Horror Nights suggestions of a long-haired, old-man looking beast seem to have been accurate however), but already the core idea — of the threat within versus the threat outwith for Blake’s wife and daughter — feels like a super fresh take on the Wolf Man mythos.
Here’s the official synopsis: “Christopher Abbott 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 (Garner), fraying, Blake persuades Charlotte to take a break from the city and visit the property with their young daughter, Ginger (Matilda Firth). 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.”
Don’t mind us — we’ll just be right here howling at the moon until Wolf Man arrives in UK cinemas on 17 January, 2025. Awooooo!