The Wolf Man does something no other werewolf movie has done before

This article contains spoilers for The Wolf Man.

Aging is the body’s greatest horror, for it is the long, slow road to death that every living being, except no one else, must experience. This process, like most body horror, is primarily manifested physically. After all, most people will say that they are mentally as young as ever, while they watch their body experience problems that work the way it used to; it’s very common to see a post on social media written by a 30-something bemoaning his new back problems or something. A person may feel like the years fly by in an instant, but the slow process of aging allows most people to ease into the physical transition as it happens almost imperceptibly.

Yet this perception is sharply challenged when something happens to change our status quo. In my own experience, I have rolled my eyes at​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​a-G. The truth is that I have and still have – my chronic health issues (including but not limited to a liver transplant) have changed the way I see and interact with the world from an unusually young age. I can no longer relate to this kind of “appropriate” content because I no longer see the world that most people see.

The Wolf Man by Lee Vanello it is a film steeped in themes body horror, illness, transformation, perception and ultimately deathfollowing poor Blake Lowell (Christopher Abbott) who contracts “hill fever” which may or may not be supernatural. Blake’s ordeal boils down to one long, agonizing night, during which his wife Charlotte (Julia Garner) and daughter Ginger (Matilda Firth) watch helplessly as he transforms into an inhuman being. While the film contains most of the essential elements of a body transformation horror film, it does one thing that no other body horror film, let alone a werewolf film, has attempted on the same scale before: it shows us that what it’s like for Blake to go through this change mentally and emotionally as well as physically. Not only is this angle integral to Whannell’s interests as a director, but it also makes The Wolf Man a uniquely terrifying and tragic experience.

For the October 4, 1985 Twilight Zone revival episode. Wes Craven staged a segment called “Wordplay” written by Rock C. O’Bannon. In it, an average salesman inexplicably begins to hear strange words instead of others, and soon enough, everyone around him begins to speak a completely different language. The story is a fantastic metaphor for feeling out of touch with everyone around you, and highlights the isolating horror of not being able to understand or be understood. The segment ends with some hope for the character, making the story a parable for those who must learn to live with some form of disability.

The Werewolf takes this concept further into horrific territory by revealing that the infection Blake suffers ensures that there will be no coping or learning mechanism that will allow him to continue to coexist with humans. When the disease remakes Blake’s body, amplifying some of his senses, such as sight and hearing, his ability to speak disappears. At the same time, he can no longer understand his wife and daughter, which causes anxiety and frustration on both sides. Part of the problem is that Blake, Charlotte, and Ginger already had communication issues before Blake got scratched by the werewolf, and Whannell and co-writer Corbett Tuck used the couple’s marital problems and their separate struggles raising their daughter as evidence of how weak our ability to communicate is. with other people, even when all our abilities are available to us. The tragic sophistication of this theme emerges when Blake, who used to be a writer, makes one last attempt to communicate with his wife by writing on a piece of paper. He writes “dying” in an attempt to describe his current state, and Charlotte refutes it (for his sake as well as her own denial) by reassuring him that he’s just sick. Even if the words are still available, the couple cannot get together.

George Wagner and Kurt Siodmak’s The Wolf Man, after which Whannell’s film is named and inspired, fully established the ghoul as a tragic figure after Stewart Walker’s Werewolf of London, made six years earlier. This tone comes from the fact that the werewolf is a cursed figure, a creature forced to either live a double life or have a dual personality, depending on the interpretation. Through many films about werewolves have been made after those first two Universal Pictures entries (not to mention TV shows, books, and other media), the artists usually gave the werewolf a little respite from their plight. This usually takes the form of some kind of euphoria following their transformation and can be seen in films as diverse as An American Werewolf in London, Howl, The Wolf, and Red Snappers (the latter also being a film about slow, permanent transformation , not magical, rotating). Even A remake of David Cronenberg’s The Flies the film that comes closest to The Wolf Man’s brand of body horror shows its titular creature enjoying a period of manhood before his degeneration.

In contrast, Vanello’s Werewolf has no such advantages. Instead, the film sticks almost entirely to its concept of the werewolf curse as a natural disease, following in the footsteps of The Fly. However, it even ventures a little further into sci-fi territory than this film, at least in the way it portrays Blake as something completely inhuman, rather than a human-animal hybrid. As Blake gradually finds himself separated from the human world in every possible way, his transformation resembles not only Larry Talbot or Seth Brundle, but astronaut Dave Bowman (from 2001: A Space Odyssey). and Lucy (from “Lucy”), characters whose humanity and personality are fractured thoroughly enough to become entirely new beings entirely. Where such transformations in sci-fi films like these might be seen as more transcendent than tragic, Whannell applies the concept to a horror lens, emphasizing that such a complete loss of humanity can be as terrifying as it is liberating.

All of Lee Vanello’s films, both as a writer and director, deal with the theme of perception. This is generally because most of Vanello’s scripts have a narrative twist, and those twists tend to involve things that the main character (and thus the audience) either sees or doesn’t see until it’s too much it’s late The twist in The Wolfman is not narrative, but structural. Whannell presents dueling perspectives—the world outside Blake versus that within—which essentially allows for a double transformation to occur. In the real world, Blake turns into a wolf in front of Charlotte and Ginger, and Charlotte and Ginger turn into some sort of demon-like ghosts in Blake’s eyes.

This change in perspective, especially when added to the communication breakdown Blake suffers from, fully articulates what being a werewolf can be like. It’s not that Blake has the thoughts and instincts of an animal, it’s that his human personality has been so completely altered by the distorted information that he is fed by his feelings. As someone trapped by Jigsaw from “Saw,” as someone trapped in the sequel from “Insidious,” or as someone at the mercy of an abuser (whether it’s an AI program like STEM in “Upgrade” or an evil and powerful ex in The Invisible Man), Blake’s reality is dictated to him by his werewolf disease.

In addition to this shift in perspective, which heightens the horror and tragedy of the werewolf character, it also fully realizes the dissonance inherent in the Wolf Man character. He, or she, or it is a being between two worlds but belonging to neither, a Lovecraftian thing that shouldn’t be, to borrow a song title from Metallica. It’s easy to pity, or even laugh at, the werewolf, a perennial staple of horror cinema. It’s a little less simple when you realize that we all undergo our own irreversible, cursed transformation sooner or later. As Vanello’s movie says, death happens to everyone; the trick is how you respond to these changes.

The Wolf Man is in theaters everywhere.