Universal’s Dark Universe should have been a contender. An ambitious sequence intended to reboot the studio’s cherished monster films, which include Dracula and Frankenstein, it was conceived as a spooky rival to the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
Tom Cruise – normally a reliable draw – was parachuted in for the high-octane 2017 resurrection of The Mummy, a film that scared up only poor notices and a loss of somewhere between $65 million and $100 million. The Los Angeles Times called the film, which co-starred Russell Crowe as Dr Jekyll (and Mr Hyde), one of the “costliest box office flops of all time”.
Enter Leigh Whannell, one of the creators of the Saw franchise. The Australian film-maker’s 2020 revision of The Invisible Man was a low-budget marvel that turned the HG Wells story on its head.
A stalker nightmare starring Elisabeth Moss as a woman who believes she’s being pursued and gaslit by her tech-chief-executive ex-boyfriend, the film grossed almost $145 million against a production budget of $7 million in 2020, just before the pandemic closed cinemas.
Now the innovative writer and director looks as if he could repeat the trick with Wolf Man, a clever reimagining of Universal’s biggest hit of 1941, The Wolf Man.
He laughs at the idea that he has succeeded where many Dark Universe architects stumbled.
“There are film-makers who have a lot of control over their own career, like Christopher Nolan or Steven Spielberg,” Whannell says.
“They have the luxury of choice. For most film-makers, a lot of movies that happen are accidents. There are so many different things that can prevent a movie from happening: the head of the studio changes or the rights holder suddenly decides they don’t like you any more.
“If I’m being honest – I know I’m not supposed to be honest in interviews – the movies that I’ve made are completely accidental. I never intended to make Invisible Man. I was aware of that character when it was suggested to me.
“And the first thing I thought when I was offered the Wolf Man was, ‘I just did a monster movie; maybe it’s not the right thing to do’. And then suddenly it’s happening and you’re making it. That’s the movies. It feels very chaotic.”
The 1940s black-and-white original is a seminal horror that helped codify everything we know about lycanthropy, the supernatural phenomenon of humans turning into wolves or werewolves.
Directed by George Waggner and starring the characterful Lon Chaney jnr as the Wolf Man, the film tells the Gothic story of a man cursed to transform during full moons after being bitten by a werewolf. The film’s make-up, created by Jack Pierce, inspired generations of Halloween costumes.
And the silver-bullet death, though dating to the Grimm brothers and earlier, was popularised here. Sequels and crossovers followed, culminating in the cluttered House of Dracula (1945), a monster mash featuring Chaney jnr’s werewolf, Dracula (John Carradine) and Frankenstein’s Monster (Glenn Strange).
That original film, essentially the last in Universal’s classic horror run, couldn’t be further from Whannell’s elegant, idea-driven Wolf Man.
The writer-director here redefines the title character as a family man, Blake (Christopher Abbott), who is travelling with his high-powered wife (Julia Garner) and daughter Ginger (Matilda Firth) back to the isolated Oregon farmstead where he grew up.
Attacked by a hastily glimpsed wild animal, the family barricade themselves inside the ancestral home – only to discover that the injured Blake has been infected by whatever lurks outside.
“I write all the films that I direct,” says Whannell, who is married to the screenwriter and actor Corbett Tuck. “I don’t think I’m qualified to direct somebody else’s script. I wrote this with my wife. There’s a lot of work there to build a screenplay.
“I cannot start that journey thinking this is just a surface-level movie with a bunch of shocks and jump scares to pick the ticket price from the pockets of the audience.
“I’m not cynical about movies. I love movies so much. And the movies that I love the most really move me in some way. It doesn’t necessarily mean they have to make me cry, but I can be moved by something thrilling or funny.
“So I start out thinking, ‘What’s the molten core of this story?’ And, for me, this film wasn’t about one thing: it was about family, parenting and illness and how disease can take your family members away from you and that we are only on this earth for a short time.”
In that spirit, and with commendable rigour, Wolf Man takes place over one fateful night as the main character succumbs to his infection. Abbott channels neurological disorder and panic during the powerful sequence in which he realises he’s losing the ability to speak.
The scene is unlikely to be confused with the loud, expensive, special-effects-heavy 2010 version starring Benicio Del Toro (which joined The Mummy on that 2012 Los Angeles Times list of most ruinous flops ever).
“During pre-production Chris Abbott talked about a family member suffering from Alzheimer’s,” Whannell says. “He had that experience of somebody you knew very well who can no longer recognise you. We talked about that a lot, and he was close to that. It was another way to remove the film from all those past werewolves and into a completely different framework.
“I wanted to slow down the transformation and look at it internally. I wanted the sound and the visuals to reflect a sensory assault.”
In the late 1990s Whannell was a film critic and reporter for Recovery, an Australian Saturday-morning alternative music TV show. In 2001 he was cast as the ill-fated hacker Axel in the Wachowskis’ Matrix Reloaded. He met his frequent writing partner and collaborator James Wan while studying film at Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology.
“In the world of entertainment you meet actors or directors who are brimming with self-belief. I’m not one of them,” he says, laughing.
“I read an article about Bob Dylan recently and how he believes it was his destiny to be Bob Dylan. Even growing up in a tiny suburb in Minnesota, he knew he was destined for greatness.
“I was growing up in the suburbs of Melbourne. I loved movies, but I did not think that Hollywood was my destiny. My parents and their friends weren’t doing glamorous jobs. They were blue-collar people. Everything I have experienced is a bonus prize.”
Bonuses don’t come much bigger than Saw. Inspired by the shoestring wonder The Blair Witch Project (as well as by their own challenging bank balances), Whannell and Wan wrote a low-budget horror set in one room.
The late Los Angeles-based producer Gregg Hoffman remortgaged his office for the $1 million production budget, with Whannell starring alongside Cary Elwes and with Wan assuming duties behind the camera.
Ten movies (and counting) later, the billion-dollar Saw franchise has inspired a theme-park ride, a video game, millions of Funko characters and thousands of articles pondering the “torture porn” aspects of the sequence’s elaborate traps.
“I remember I was watching The Sopranos. It was a show I loved, and the character starts talking about Saw. I was particularly incensed when the character mentioned James Wan but not me,” Whannell says, jokingly. “I was, like, ‘Come on, I’m The Sopranos fan! I don’t even know if James watches this show’.
“But it was bizarre. We could do a separate interview about the craziness of watching pop culture embrace something you’ve created. They take it into their livingroom and it’s theirs now.”
Whannell and Wan have continued to collaborate on the successful Insidious film series; a sixth spin-off movie, Threads, is due to open in August. The pair continue as executive producers of Saw; the 11th instalment of the franchise is in pre-production.
As solo artists, their careers are radically different: while Wan has gravitated towards the hugeness of DC’s Aquaman and Fast and Furious 7, Whannell has made a splash with such low-budget, high-concept genre hits as Upgrade.
“James always had that ambition to make those big movies,” Whannell says. “Me focusing on a smaller canvas right now is not necessarily deliberate. The type of movie I’m making warrants that.
“The Exorcist takes place in a house. A lot of The Shining is in a bedroom. The recent horror movies I’ve seen and loved, like Longlegs, are psychological. We’re very much with the Maika Monroe character for every step of that journey. It feels very intimate. The best horror movies are.”
Wolf Man opens in cinemas today
