Interviews
Leigh Whannell on Shaking Up ‘Wolf Man’ Lore and Challenges of Making a Werewolf Movie [Interview]
Director Leigh Whannell is back with Wolf Man, a new interpretation of Universal’s classic monster that’s out in theaters today. The horror filmmaker takes a vastly different approach to the werewolf mythos, treating lycanthropy as a disease that yields no shortage of body horror.
Wolf Man doesn’t feature one transformation sequence; instead, it plays out over the course of the film and is handled completely via practical effects. Bloody Disgusting spoke with Whannell about the challenges of making a werewolf movie, tracking the multiple stages of transformation, and the film’s unexpected sources of inspiration.
In Wolf Man, the trouble starts when Blake (Christopher Abbott) travels back to his childhood home with his wife Charlotte (Julia Garner) and daughter, Ginger (Matilda Firth), with a strange creature driving them off the road and leaving them vulnerable to attack. Eagle-eyed viewers will spot “Pierce” and “1941” plastered across Blake’s moving rental truck, an Easter egg referencing the original Universal Monsters film and its legendary makeup effects designer, Jack Pierce.
“You want to do it but not to a degree where you’re suddenly making a pastiche, an homage to something. There’s a place for that type of movie,” Whannell told Bloody Disgusting about his conservative use of Easter eggs in his latest horror movie. Instead, this hat tip is employed as an acknowledgment of the past and Whannell’s intentional lore departure.
He explains, “Like in Invisible Man, I felt like that one little scene where you see the guy covered in the bandages, it’s just a little nod to be like, ‘This existed, and I’m aware that I’m standing on the shoulders of these giants.'”
Due to Blake’s horrific affliction, this take on the Wolf Man bears more in common with The Fly than a traditional werewolf movie, but the unexpected reference points don’t end there. The animalistic nature of the beast and the isolated Pacific Northwest setting also evoke cryptozoology. It turns out that legendary cryptids like Bigfoot did influence Whannell’s interpretation of the classic character, at least in terms of the setting and Blake’s upbringing.
Whannell explains, “Actually, I did think about that. The thing about Bigfoot that I was drawn to with this is these isolated communities that have a story they tell, and they really believe in that story, these rituals. We, as humans, develop our own rituals within communities. You do that everywhere, it doesn’t have to be supernatural. But I love the idea of this isolated mountain community with their own set of rules that they keep from the outside world. That was very much part of this, trying to establish that.”
Christopher Abbott as Blake in Wolf Man, directed by Leigh Whannell
Unlike most werewolf movies, the full moon doesn’t trigger lycanthropy at all. Instead of one memorable transformation under the moonlight, Wolf Man treats lycanthropy as a brutal disease that sets about rearranging Blake’s DNA, splicing it with something inhuman. In other words, Blake’s transformation is ongoing and happening in stages. Considering that Blake is constantly trying to battle against his gruesome illness and maintain his humanity, the transformation isn’t fluid or easy.
“Well it was twofold,” Whannell says of tracking the multiple stages of progression. “One was just the physical transformation, so we had that mapped out. On my office wall during pre-production we had this map of stage 1, stage 2, stage 3, and so you would see the physical changes. Then with Chris, he was really keeping track of the emotional stuff. He would slip in and out of certain things. He would slip in little movements that maybe people spot early on, little things he would do like just a movement of the head or a tic, and I love that. I love seeing that. I mean, mentioning The Fly, when you go back and watch that film, you see in Jeff Goldblum’s performance these little tics. It’s just the start of the journey, but that, to me, is the most fascinating part, the start of the journey. It’s also horrific. In real life, if someone is suffering from Parkinson’s disease, that first tremor, before it gets overwhelming, is nightmarish. So that’s what I was speaking to.”
Compared to his monster counterparts, the werewolf isn’t as prolific in horror as, say, vampires or zombies. While that’s likely owed a lot to the monster’s reliance on practical effects to sell its effectiveness, Whannell found the established lycan rules trickiest to maneuver around when it came to making his werewolf feature.
He tells us, “For me, it was dealing with the lore of this person turning into a wolf when the full moon comes out, and now they’re human again. The back and forth. I felt like I wanted my story to be more contained than that. Corbett [Tuck], my wife, and I co-wrote the film, and we both talked about wanting the film to feel more immediate than that. Some people may say, ‘Oh, there’s not enough meat on the bone; we’re not stretching it out enough,’ but we wrote the first draft during COVID. I felt very cut off from society, and everything felt very unsettled, and so, to write a hellish story that unfolds in one night felt right for that time.”
Leigh Whannell’s Wolf Man is now playing in theaters nationwide.
(from left) Director of Photography Stefan Duscio and Director Leigh Whannell on the set of WOLF MAN.
Interviews
‘Rubberhead’ Director Nick Taylor on FX Maverick Steve Johnson, Practical Effects, and Seven-Year Journey
Horror journalist, producer, and podcast host Nick Taylor moves into the director’s seat for his feature debut with illuminating documentary Rubberhead: The Life & Monsters of Steve Johnson.
It chronicles the wild life and career of SFX maverick Steve Johnson, based on the multi-volume book series Rubberhead: Sex, Drugs and Special FX, and those familiar likely already know Rubberhead isn’t your standard horror documentary.
Johnson is responsible for so many memorable movie monsters, having worked on Fright Night, Poltergeist II, An American Werewolf in London, A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master and Night of the Demons, to name a few. He’s also extremely candid in ways that feel atypical in this industry, open about his failures as much as his successes.
“It was a natural progression for sure,” Nick Taylor tells Bloody Disgusting of his transition into filmmaking ahead of Rubberhead‘s world premiere next week at the Fantasia Film Festival on July 23. “I think with my podcast, I got adept at interviewing people and pulling creative lessons out of them, which was the point of my podcast. I wanted this movie to be sort of a creativity pill for artists where if they’re starting a project or feel creatively stuck, they could watch this movie and be inspired and get actual practical creative lessons.”
Taylor’s background in PR and marketing also organically led him down this path.
He charts the course from book promo to documentary director: “But also Bloody Disgusting had a lot to do with this movie because in the very beginning when I first met Steve, I was helping him promote his book and I said, ‘Hey, I got a marketing background and a journalism background. Let me help you promote this book. I’ll just pitch stories from your life to the media, and we’ll see what happens.’ And John Squires wrote an article about Steve making Slimer under the influence of tons and tons of cocaine, and that went fairly viral.”
“For a week, it was story time with Steve,” Taylor continues. “He would tell me a story from his life, and every story was about a major movie, a major director, lots of drugs and alcohol and insanity. I would write them up, and I think John published about three or four of them. So huge shout out to John Squires because that was really great. So yeah, there were definitely a lot of outgrowths of my journalism background that definitely contributed to this movie.”
Rubberhead condenses the multi-book series into a cohesive feature film with a breezy runtime, sparking the obvious question as to how Taylor approached condensing Johnson’s life down to an under 2-hour documentary film.
“That was one of the more difficult parts of all of this, because we had enough for a series or an epically long six-hour fan documentary,” he answers. “But from day one, I did not want to make a fan documentary. I love them. They’re a lot of fun, but I did want the movie to stand on its own two feet as a character-driven portrait of an artist and a time period and a technology, that being practical effects. I did want to be objective. I didn’t want to make this too long. I wanted to make it re-watchable. So I think we just really had to focus on what the narratives were that we wanted to tell. So there were some basically almost cliché archetypical mythic narratives present in Steve’s life. We could have made this way longer, but we wanted to keep it short. But luckily that’s why you have special features.”
Johnson quickly proves to be an engaging subject thanks to his self-effacing wit and frank self-reflections; expect no shortage of stories about how drugs factored into the height of his career or the failures it wrought.
That rare quality was an asset for Rubberhead, Taylor confirms. “He does not shy away from anything about the drugs, the addiction, the bridges burned, the mistakes made, the lessons learned. He just is honest about all of it. He’s had a lot of time for reflection, and he’s done a lot of reflection, so he doesn’t shy away from any of it, which is huge because it’s very refreshing. I don’t think a lot of people are that way, at least in this industry from what I can see. So I think it was hugely beneficial. We wanted to lean into that, and we wanted to make this sort of a gonzo Hunter S. Thompson sort of wild tale through Steve’s overall life.“
Condensing his life into this doc was a slow and steady process for Taylor, too. “It’s been almost seven years. It’s been a labor of love. We’ve been as indie as it gets. We would shoot what we could when we could, and then we would edit when we could. Then after a while it all came together.”
In a way, making Rubberhead brings Taylor’s horror fandom full circle. It turns out that the very film that sparked his interest in the genre and practical effects also comes with an amusing Steve Johnson anecdote.
Taylor explains, “My gateway for sure was Beetlejuice. I saw that at a very young age; I think I was four or five. I felt somebody had shown me, my soul. I get a little emotional thinking about it. There was something about that movie that felt so strange and unusual, but also felt so familiar. It was spooky, but it was fun, and it was lighthearted, and it had humor, but it also had this macabre celebration to it that I just really got into as a kid. I felt somebody had shown me my own soul. And funny story, Steve got fired from Beetlejuice because Tim Burton gave him his hand-drawn designs and Steve’s like, ‘Oh my God, these look like kids did them. This is not what you want. I know what you want. I’m going to redesign these for you.’ And Tim Burton was like, ‘Yeah, no, you’re not.’ So yeah, funny story.”
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