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SYFY WIRE Wolf Man

Leigh Whannell on Bringing Real Life Horror to New Wolf Man Movie

Find out how Whannell drew on modern times to create a new interpretation of the classic werewolf story.

By Tara Bennett

For the entirety of Leigh Whannell's screenwriting career, the horror veteran has shown the gift of being able to make audiences cower in terror inside a darkened movie theater, and then, come back for more. 

Whannell is the screenwriting architect of both the Saw and Insidious franchises, and in just the last five years, he's collaborated with Blumhouse Productions and Universal Pictures to write and direct modern interpretations of Universal Monsters classics The Invisible Man (2020) and this weekend's big release, Wolf Man (get tickets here).

This iteration of the werewolf lore is set in modern times, and follows the Lovell family who are struggling to connect. When stay-at-home dad Blake's (Christopher Abbott) father dies, he takes his wife, Charlotte (Julia Garner), and their 10-year-old daughter, Ginger (Matilda Firth) up to their remote family ranch in Oregon to clean up the property and spend the summer together off the grid. Almost immediately, things go very wrong.

At a recent screening in Los Angeles attended by SYFY WIRE, Whannell participated in a Q&A where he revealed that this Wolf Man adaptation came out of his own family's isolation during the COVID lockdowns of 2020, and from paying attention to the personal horror stories that plague humanity every day.

Leigh Whannell on finding Wolf Man's horror metaphor 

Charlotte (Julia Garner) shields Ginger (Matilda Firth) in Wolf Man (2024).

During 2020, Whannell joked that he envied friends who learned how to make sourdough bread while he felt trapped with his kids making the same couch fort again and again. 

"Everyone was isolated and we were in our house," Whannell said of their lockdown in Australia. "I remember walking my dog that year, and it felt like Night of the Living Dead. There's no one on the street. And it was that eerie feeling of isolation that we were putting in [the script], and it felt right. My wife [Corbett Tuck] and I co-wrote the film together, and we were just pouring all that uncertainty and all that dread and all the anxiety of that year, into the script."

Along with the isolation, Whannell said they also wove in several other concurrent themes too. "It felt like it was also about parenting and trying to be a better parent than your parents were, and screwing that up. And about a relationship and a marriage under the strain of modern life. And, it felt like it was about disease."

Whannell said they were inspired by a close friend's battle with ALS (Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis) which took away her mobility and ability to communicate in a long, slow process that was terrifying to watch. "There are horror movies all around us, if we look," he said. "A child losing their mother to cancer is a horror story. So, what we do with these monster movies is kind of literalize this real life stuff. And that's all in there, disease and what it's like to have a family member feel like they don't recognize you anymore. All that stuff is in there."

Leigh Whannell on creating a claustrophobic Wolf Man scenario

Charlotte (Julia Garner) and Ginger (Matilda Firth) look at an injured Blake (Christopher Abbott) appears in Wolf Man (2024).

In making the family farm house the primary set for Wolf Man, Whannell said he was able to have this family confront Blake's transformation in a way that made it entirely personal. 

"I didn't want to deal with the outside world with this particular story," he said. "The stories usually tell you what they want to be and this particular story felt like it wanted to be about one family, isolated, with no way out and kind of trapped, so we stuck to that from the first draft all the way through to the finished film. It didn't really change much in that way."

Whannell is also very proud of the other original angle he brought to this monster story, which is having the camera switch between Blake's perception of the world as he's changing into a monster versus our normal, human perspective.

"The thing that got me excited and made me realize I did want to make this film was thinking what would my angle be on this tale, and it's this idea of the camera being able to switch between worlds," he said. "The first image I had in my head was somebody speaking but you couldn't understand what they were saying, and so I kind of built the whole movie around that image."

Wolf Man is in theaters everywhere January 17. Get tickets at Fandango.

The poster for Wolf Man (2024).

When will Wolf Man stream on Peacock?

The new Wolf Man will stream on Peacock later this year. Check back for more updates!

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