The Wolfman
Why is it so hard to tell a werewolf story?
This 2010 movie pitched up on Netflix and against my better judgement I started watching it. You’d think with Benecio del Toro and Anthony Hopkins in the lead roles, you would come up with something better than this Gothic yawn. It lost me with the Romani camp scene and I couldn’t even bring myself to see it through to the end.
Werewolf movies in general seem to be a tough call. Other than An American Werewolf in London there haven’t been very many good lycanthrope movies. A number of actors have tried their hand, even Jack Nicholson, but they all came up short of Lon Chaney’s classic role way back in 1941. I don’t know if this was the first werewolf movie, but certainly the most memorable, directed by George Waggner with the screenplay by Curt Siodmak.
Joe Johnston more or less followed the same script with the “twist” you expect, so not much of a twist in the end. The Indian man servant, Sir John’s tinted spectacles and obsession with the moon, all told you where this story was headed, which made you wonder how his eldest son Lawrence could be so daft. I guess he had to be bitten to find out. It’s too bad Johnston didn’t go with the same campy feeling as John Landis, as he appeared to borrow his pub scene from the 1981 movie.
What Landis got right was that he didn’t take the scenario too seriously, or so it seemed. There was a whole Jewish subtext that I didn’t pick up initially, but read about years later. The pain and suffering that Naughton’s character, David Kessler, went through in his incredible transformation scene, which won Rick Baker an Oscar for Makeup in 1982, was a reflection of the characterization many Jews experienced first hand, and has been written about extensively.
Still Landis wanted to have fun with the story, if for no other reason than to satisfy his producers back home in Hollywood. This film was shot almost entirely in the UK. He provided a fair set of chills, and most importantly created a romance that held up through the duration of the movie. David Naughton and Griffin Dunne had done nothing of note to that point. Naughton was probably best known for Dr. Pepper commercials. Landis took quite a risk on these two and it paid off in spades. The young actors had excellent comic timing, particularly Dunne, whose scenes as David’s ever-decaying dead friend were priceless. I don’t know how many times I watched this movie during the midnight showings at the Royal Park Cinema in Gainesville. It never grew old.
You knew what was coming but it was terrifying nonetheless, largely because Landis did a good job of setting up the romance between Naughton and Jenny Agutter, the most recognizable face of the lot, with a filmography that dated back to Walkabout and Logan’s Run. She played the nurse who took David in after his horrifying encounters on the moors.
In Wolfman, we get Emily Blunt, who just stands around looking sullen. She was betrothed to Lawrence’s brother, who was the first victim and had been mangled beyond recognition one moonlit evening, looking more like a cadaver cut up by Victorian medical students to reveal his inner workings.
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The movie just got progressively worse. The town of course suspected the “gypsies” of harboring the murderous beast. Meanwhile there was something lurking in the woods that soon laid waste to a dozen or more persons, leaving Lawrence scarred for life. Why the Romanis didn’t kill him is anyone’s guess, but the fortune teller Maleva, played by Geraldine Chaplin, said that only a loved one could release the poor man from this dreaded curse.
This was all Werewolf 101. You’d think Universal would try something a little more compelling given they spent 150 million USD on this flick. Instead, this is no better than the 1994 film with Jack Nicholson, simply entitled Wolf. At least Jack had some fun with the role and there were a lot of interesting twists.
That movie had an unusual backstory. Columbia Pictures paid for the movie rights to Jim Harrison’s 1971 novel about a young man reconnecting with his Michigan youth, in which he tracked the elusive gray wolves that lived in the Upper Peninsula woodlands. Harrison had scored big with his novella Legends of the Fall, which was also made into a movie that year, starring Anthony Hopkins no less. Wolf was more about exploring the nature of man than it was lycanthropes but no matter, Harrison was willing to rework the narrative into a werewolf movie to satisfy producers and earn himself a hefty paycheck. The results were better than your average wolfman, thanks to Mike Nichols, but still not great.
At least Harrison was onto something in the script, as he dispensed with the usual tropes and made his wolfman far more captivating. This is a malleable character that dates back to Persian times. Ishtar had turned her former lover into a wolf, and one can find similar lycanthropes throughout Greek and Roman literature. He is constantly evolving. You don’t have to follow any rules but sadly we are more often stuck with this Victorian idea of a “werewolf” that most movie studios continue to insist upon.
Probably one of the more inventive examples in the last few decades was The Howling, released the same year as American Werewolf. It too has become a cult classic. John Sayles wrote the screenplay for Joe Dante. This oddly prescient film seemed to prefigure Richard Ramirez, aka “The Night Stalker,” as the movie followed a television news anchor, played by Dee Wallace, as she tracked down a brutal serial killer, only to discover a colony of werewolves in the wooded hills outside LA. The film was so popular it spun off numerous sequels of degrading quality. Eight no less, including this particularly bad reboot in 2011. I guess you could call it Children of the Wolf.
What made the OG interesting was the subtext that these vicious killers were possessed by a demonic spirit, a very popular theme in the 70s and 80s. Also, Dante and Sayles didn’t play by any rules. They wanted the film to be entertaining and have something you could take with you after you finished your big tub of popcorn. They discarded all the Victorian tropes in favor of contemporary themes that played well to an audience yearning for the next campy horror film. This wasn’t long after the first Halloween (1978) and Friday the 13th (1980) that scored big on minimal budgets with no-name actors.
It was these no-name actors that made these films feel fresh. We see it again today in Obsession, proving that what you need most is an intriguing story not a Hollywood star to carry your film.
That’s why I don’t hold out much hope for Werwulf, which as the title suggests takes us back to 14th century England to tell its nocturnal tale of fiendish delights. It looks compelling enough and appears to dig deep into lycanthrope mythology but I think will run into the same problems so many of these lavish monster movies have of taking their subject matter far too seriously. Although it would be fun to see this movie for this scene with Willem Dafoe alone.
