Leigh Whannell on Wolf Man: “It’s not just about infection, it’s about feeling like you’re failing at parenting”

Australian genre king Leigh Whannell has previously proved his mettle for adapting classic Universal horror with his sharp, surprising take on The Invisible Man (2020). Now his New Zealand-shot Wolf Man, co-written with his wife Corbett Tuck, updates another Universal classic, refitting the formula of 1941’s archetypal werewolf movie The Wolf Man – via lupine 80s classic An American Werewolf in London – with menacing sound design, grisly body horror and a smattering of jump scares. 

In Whannell’s film, Blake (Christopher Abbott) drives his business-hotshot wife Charlotte (Julia Garner) and young daughter Ginger (Matilda Firth) from their plush San Francisco apartment to his childhood home in rural Oregon. Blake’s father has finally been declared dead, having gone missing many years ago, and Blake, having to put the house in order, suggests a summer of nature and tranquility. What Blake doesn’t mention is his mysterious, terrifying childhood encounter with an unseen beast in the nearby forest, which looms large like a psychic cloud…

Along with his cyberpunk thriller Upgrade (2018), Whannell has a career studded with franchise horror credits, writing various entries in the Saw and Insidious franchises, and directing Insidious: Chapter 3 in 2015. When we met to discuss Wolf Man, he proved eager to chat about the film’s thematic, tonal and production influences.

Although it’s based on the Universal classic, you’ve said this film is your tribute to the 80s movies you loved growing up with. In what way is it a tribute?  

Leigh Whannell: The use of practical effects, make-up specifically. As a horror fan, I’ve grown up obsessed with prosthetic make-up effects, and these guys who are the masters of that – Stan Winston, Rick Baker, Rob Bottin and Dick Smith – they’re like rock stars to me. I was reading Fangoria, looking at these people as absolute heroes. I grew up in that era where those effects stood out in your mind. This is the first movie I’ve ever made that has relied so heavily on prosthetic make-up effects and special effects make-up. It’s really a tribute to those films that exemplify the best of the make-up – The Thing (1982), An American Werewolf in London (1981), The Exorcist (1973).

Is it something about the texture that marks practical effects above CGI?

It depends what you’re doing. I don’t exclude any tools from the toolbox. CGI is an incredible tool to have. I remember going to see Jurassic Park (1993) when I was a teenager. That was such a groundbreaking thing to see. If you’re creating something larger than life, if you have a spaceship that’s invading earth, I think you can utilise visual effects to paint on that large canvas.

If you’re dealing with somebody’s face, I think that’s best done with make-up, like Colin Farrell in The Penguin (2024). People talk a lot about how he looks. Imagine if that was achieved just putting tracking markers on his face and trying to do it in post.

It would be a nightmare for the filmmakers, the amount of time it would take to track something on to Colin’s face. Even though it’s time consuming, it’s easier to do with special effects make-up than CGI. When I’m doing a werewolf movie, the only choice was make-up, because not only do I think visual effects would look wrong, but it would be too much money and time to do something on that scale of visual effects to track something on to an actor’s face.

You said recently, “You can really dig deep into someone’s subconscious with a horror film.” What did you mean by that?

Horror films are an expression of our fears and anxieties. All human beings are roiling with anxieties. We have personal fears, things we’re afraid of. Anxiety is what has kept us alive. One of the oldest things is that sense of urgency. That’s what kept the cavemen and women from continuing down the line – the sense of danger approaching. It’s this thing we all deal with.

Modern life certainly causes a lot of anxiety at the moment. There’s a lot of turbulence in the world, and I think horror movies are very cathartic for people. You can go into a room with your fellow human beings and you can expunge all this anxiety through the vessel of this horror movie. We bury the things that are really bothering us, and they either come out in our nightmares or in our behaviour. Horror movies can dig through the wall of the version of yourself that you present to the world and get to the fears underneath, and that’s what I love about them.

You were developing this partly during the pandemic – there’s the theme of getting infected and the horrors that come afterwards. How did Covid woes tie in with the work that went into this film?

The first draft of this film was written in 2020, right in the hot zone of that Covid lockdown, when it was first happening, when everybody was locked away, nothing was open, the streets were empty. It was a very disconcerting time. And so my wife and I, who co-wrote it, poured a lot of our anxiety about this time into the script and it’s all there. It’s not directly about Covid, but everything you mentioned: infection, but not just that, the anxiety, the isolation.

It was a very strange time in human history. I remember thinking, “Wow, I bet there’s going to be a bunch of Covid movies that come out,” and I haven’t really seen that yet. But a lot of times, horror movies talk about things indirectly. I think Wolf Man does indirectly talk about Covid. During that time, I was parenting three young kids and it was really tough. I felt that I was failing as a parent because I was struggling to entertain them at home and to keep them interested. So that’s in the script as well. It’s not just about infection, it’s about parenting, feeling like you’re failing at parenting and trying to protect your kids from something.

In Upgrade, The Invisible Man and now Wolf Man, there’s a common theme of bodies being put through extreme transformations. Is there anything particular that interests you about transformations, thematically?

Yes. I think there’s a subconscious fear for me about the body and how it can turn against you. I’ve always had a fear of ill health that, for no reason at all, you’re walking along one day and something goes wrong. Our bodies can betray us. There’s all this machinery going on under our skin that has to work in sync. Our heart has to beat. If this battery in the centre of our chest stops working, we fall down dead. It’s quite a scary thing to think about. It’s just incredible to me that so many interlocking systems can go right. I’m surprised that more things don’t go wrong.

If you think about your average computer and how many times it breaks, isn’t it amazing that human bodies don’t fail more? I’ve always had this fear of disease and illness, something going wrong, and I’ve seen friends go through debilitating illnesses. A close friend was suffering from ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis), and I watched her go through this horrendous transformation. She couldn’t walk, couldn’t talk, and it was a slow-motion nightmare. She was a bubbly, energetic person, and then suddenly she wasn’t. That is something that scares the hell out of me, and it was tragic to watch. When I was writing the film, I’m thinking, “All right, what scares me?” Things like that you have to put into the movie.

There’s the original The Wolf Man and you mentioned An American Werewolf in London. How much did you look at those films?

In a broad sense, I don’t want to repeat those films. This is something that’s been done well – I don’t want to compete with Rick Baker’s transformation. So my entire approach to it became, what’s the way into this character that we haven’t seen before? What’s the thing that gives it a new perspective? And for me, that became all about the shift in perspective and using sound and visual to illustrate the sensory change of a werewolf as opposed to the visual, the bones cracking, etc. I was thinking more about the sensory experience of it all.

How was Heath Ledger’s Joker an inspiration for you?

When I was thinking about the look of the Wolf Man, I was really thinking about what Christopher Nolan and Heath Ledger did with that character, because it would pay homage to the Joker: it was reminiscent of the Joker we know, but it was very much their own version of it. It felt singular, stripped back. It was a less garish or cartoonish version of the Joker than we had seen in the past. When people see the Wolf Man in this movie I want them to have that same feeling – using what they did on that film as a tonal inspiration.

You screened Michael Haneke’s Amour (2012) for your crew. Why?

We did a film festival in New Zealand, the Full Moon Film Club, every Wednesday night. The studio where we were shooting outside Wellington had this beautiful new theatre that we would sit in. I’d make the key crew gather round and I’d show them a movie. It was really fun. I’ve done that before in the past when I’ve directed a movie; I’ll rent out a theatre and I’ll show the crew a film and I’ll talk. This was the first time I’ve ever had a whole film festival, and I loved it. 

One of those movies was Amour. Among all the tonal things I was reaching for, that story of a family just going through that simple tragedy, this is obviously the metaphorical version. It’s a horror movie, and Amour is kind of a horror movie in a different way. It’s a love story and a horror movie. But that was definitely something that I thought: I want this feeling to be part of this soup that we’re making.

You also screened Under the Skin (2013). Why did that appeal?

What I loved about it was that it presented an alien point of view. I’ve never seen a film achieve that before, where the movie truly captures a view of humanity through alien eyes. When I watch that movie, I feel as if I’m seeing our world that I live in – all these things I recognise like streets and cars and shopping malls, everything else – anew. I wanted to capture that feeling of an animal point of view. At some point in the movie, I wanted to feel like we were in Blake’s point of view and that the world was slightly off.

Wolf Man is in cinemas from 17 January.