Wolf Man (2025)
Directed by Leigh Whannell
With his marriage fraying, Blake persuades his wife Charlotte to take a break from the city and visit his remote childhood home in rural Oregon. As they arrive at the farmhouse in the dead of night, they're attacked by an unseen animal and barricade themselves inside the home as the creature prowls the perimeter. But as the night stretches on, Blake begins to behave strangely, transforming into something unrecognizable.
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55 films that influenced Wolf Man
What critics say influenced Wolf Man
Director
George Waggner
Critics invoke Waggner by name, and compare Wolf Man to 1 of Waggner’s films.
Visuals
On Waggner, rather than any one film
While I enjoyed George Waggner and Joe Johnston’s films, Waggner’s film works more as an emotional tragedy…
…and Curt Siodmak’s The Wolf Man (1941)…
Don’t expect it to crack the Mount Rushmore of canidae films where firmly sit atop ‘An American Werewolf in London,’ ‘Ginger Snaps,’ ‘The Wolf Man’ (1941), and ‘The Howling.’
…a reboot/reinterpretation of Curt Siodmak’s iconic 1941 chiller The Wolf Man…
…this Wolf Man inherits daddy issues from both its predecessors, the 1941 classic starring Lon Chaney and the 2010 version starring Benicio del Toro.
The infanticidal aspect of Curt Siodmak’s script for the 1941 film is also present, and brazenly played up, in the 2010 remake…
Whannell’s take on the material pulls less from The Wolf Man (1941) and more from Cronenberg’s The Fly insofar as the mechanisms of Blake’s lycanthropy…
Director
David Cronenberg
Critics invoke Cronenberg by name, and compare Wolf Man to 1 of Cronenberg’s films.
Visuals
On Cronenberg, rather than any one film
…the Cronenberg-lite body horror…
There are well-placed scares and Cronenberg-like gore…
A valid comparison would be to David Cronenberg’s The Fly, even if Wolf Man doesn’t go to that level of grotesque it grounds its uncanny bodily transformation in human relations…
I was influenced by films that use body horror as tragedy. Movies such as David Cronenberg’s The Fly and Julia Ducournau’s Raw.
…a neat nod to David Cronenberg’s The Fly…
The body horror will undoubtedly draw comparisons to David Cronenberg’s 1986 masterpiece “The Fly,”…
Whannell’s feature nicks a page from David Cronenberg’s The Fly (1986), imagining lycanthropy as gnarly-ass infection that warps its host into a repulsive, feral hybrid of man and beast.
There were parts of this movie where I thought significantly more of the iconic Cronenberg body horror film The Fly than any other werewolf film I have ever seen.
Although the prosthetics here are technically impressive, the overall wolf design is so torn between paying homage to Lon Chaney Jr’s original and avoiding any similarity to the pinnacle of the genre, An American Werewolf in London (1981), that the result looks oddly like one of those deep-sea blobfish.
Anyone who goes back long enough to remember the eye-opening thrills at the time of the visceral transformations in Joe Dante’s The Howling or John Landis’ An American Werewolf in London — Rob Bottin and Rick Baker really were groundbreaking effects wizards back in 1981 — might judge the latest iteration to be low on fresh juice.
Aside from An American Werewolf in London (1981), there really is no classic werewolf film.
…through unconnected features from 1935’s Werewolf of London and the Lon Chaney, Jr.-starring Universal Monsters Wolf Man franchise to An American Werewolf in London, Teen Wolf and more…
…we don’t get to see a big show-stopping effects sequence a la An American Werewolf in London, but the makeup impresses nonetheless…
Don’t expect it to crack the Mount Rushmore of canidae films where firmly sit atop ‘An American Werewolf in London,’ ‘Ginger Snaps,’ ‘The Wolf Man’ (1941), and ‘The Howling.’
After such high-profile flops as 2010’s The Wolfman and 2017’s The Mummy…
…because of the commercial failure of 2017’s The Mummy—we’ll always have the bungled IMAX trailer with a downright Lynchian audio mix…
Universal’s Dark Universe, a planned Marvel-style franchise premised around the studio’s stable of classic monsters, was pronounced dead on arrival after the release of 2017’s frightful bore, The Mummy.
…an overstuffed Mummy (with Tom Cruise for some reason)…
…the project was shelved after the disastrous reception to Tom Cruise’s “The Mummy.”
(Remember The Mummy? No, the other one. No, the Tom Cruise one.)
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If you found Joe Johnston’s failed 2010 vehicle for Benicio del Toro, The Wolfman, bogged down by Gothic melodrama, fussy folklore and CGI excess, then the comparatively bare-bones storytelling of Universal’s latest return to the monster movie hall of fame, Wolf Man, might be more to your taste.
For being a husband and father, Abbott’s character stands in marked contrast to Chaney’s hangdog loner from 1941’s The Wolf Man. But the attention the film pays to fatherhood—and its setting at the home of Blake’s father—is consistent with earlier takes on the story. The infanticidal aspect of Curt Siodmak’s script for the 1941 film is also present, and brazenly played up, in the 2010 remake, while writer-actor Paul Naschy’s long-running series of werewolf films always emphasized Waldemar Daninsky’s doomed lineage.
Meanwhile, Joe Johnston’s 2010 attempt at a period Gothic remake of Siodmak’s feature has been entirely forgotten…
“Wolf Man” is preferable to Universal’s last attempt to resurrect this old franchise, 2010’s ghastly “The Wolfman.”
Joe Johnston’s “The Wolfman” — a $150 million Benicio del Toro vehicle…
After such high-profile flops as 2010’s The Wolfman and 2017’s The Mummy…
Ari Aster would probably jot down on a piece of toilet paper on his way out of a repertory screening of “Ginger Snaps.”
The 21st century has given us only two truly great “straight” entries, Dog Soldiers and Ginger Snaps, both made more than two decades ago.
Don’t expect it to crack the Mount Rushmore of canidae films where firmly sit atop ‘An American Werewolf in London,’ ‘Ginger Snaps,’ ‘The Wolf Man’ (1941), and ‘The Howling.’
Even the most beloved – Ginger Snaps (2000), The Howling (1981) and Silver Bullet (1985) – have their detractors.
His daughter Ginger, presumably named after werewolf movie Ginger Snaps…
I suspect this character’s name is a nod to Ginger Snaps, a wonderful werewolf film…
Don’t expect it to crack the Mount Rushmore of canidae films where firmly sit atop ‘An American Werewolf in London,’ ‘Ginger Snaps,’ ‘The Wolf Man’ (1941), and ‘The Howling.’
I’m aware of the other werewolf movies during the Great Lycan Renaissance of 1981 (Wolfen, The Howling)…
Even the most beloved – Ginger Snaps (2000), The Howling (1981) and Silver Bullet (1985) – have their detractors.
Before you can say “Jordan Peterson meets The Howling”…
Anyone who goes back long enough to remember the eye-opening thrills at the time of the visceral transformations in Joe Dante’s The Howling or John Landis’ An American Werewolf in London — Rob Bottin and Rick Baker really were groundbreaking effects wizards back in 1981 — might judge the latest iteration to be low on fresh juice.
Wolf Man joins Nosferatu among 2025's re-imaginings of films whose age is perhaps better measured in centuries than decades.
…as with Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu, there’s stranger men hanging around my local bus-station on a Sunday night for sure…
Outside of Nosferatu, the multiplex is bare of horror offerings, so strong grosses seem assured.
…though it’s definitely way more accessible than something like the new Nosferatu…
…it would have had to contend with offerings like A Complete Unknown (2024) and Nosferatu (2024) – both of which saw critical and commercial success.
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Wolf Man has hints of The Shining and David Cronenberg’s The Fly in its portrayal of the frightening men sometimes lurking inside seemingly tranquil personas.
With Garner dressed in a checkered shirt and turtleneck, eyes wide and hands gripped around the handle of a knife, the uniform of Shelley Duvall in The Shining (1980)…
We’ve seen films like this (The Shining, for example) where a family is hunted by their patriarch.
…a father and husband who — like the caretaker of Kubrick’s haunted hotel — goes feral on his family in woodland isolation.
Stanley Kubrick famously shot the indoor scenes of his lavish costume drama Barry Lyndon by candlelight.
…have been pleasingly familiar since Stuart Walker’s Werewolf of London (1935)…
…through unconnected features from 1935’s Werewolf of London and the Lon Chaney, Jr.-starring Universal Monsters Wolf Man franchise to An American Werewolf in London, Teen Wolf and more…
…consistent with the original The Wolf Man and its kin, such as Werewolf of London (1935) and I Was a Teenage Werewolf (1957)…