WOLF MAN Director on How His Movie was Inspired by Denis Villeneuve's SICARIO and PRISONERS
Wolf Man writer and director Leigh Whannell recently opened up his upcoming Universal Monster horror movie, and shared some insight into how it was influenced by director Denis Villeneuve's Prisoners and Sicario.
While talking to SFX Magazine, Whannell said: "I'm a big fan of gothic horror movies. I love what Tim Burton did with Sleepy Hollow, and I love what Guillermo del Toro does. There's such beauty to those gothic elements, like fog and cemeteries on a hill backlit by the Moon.
"From a production design element, I love all that stuff, but I think I love it more as a viewer. I'm the guy to watch that stuff, but I'm not the right guy to make it.
“When it comes time for me to make a monster, my mind immediately wants to place that monster in the real world and take a very grounded approach: we're not dealing with a fairy tale here, we're not dealing with a folk tale, we're dealing with something that could really happen."
I’ve always liked the fantasy elements of the universal monster horror movies, but Whannell is obviously trying to do something else and bring a real kind of fear to the story.
Christopher Abbott (Poor Things, It Comes at Night) stars as Blake, a San Francisco husband and father, “who inherits his remote childhood home in rural Oregon after his own father vanishes and is presumed dead.
“With his marriage to his high-powered wife, Charlotte (Julia Garner; Ozark, Inventing Anna), fraying, Blake persuades Charlotte to take a break from the city and visit the property with their young daughter, Ginger (Matlida Firth; Hullraisers, Coma).
“But as the family approaches the farmhouse in the dead of night, they’re attacked by an unseen animal and, in a desperate escape, barricade themselves inside the home as the creature prowls the perimeter.
“As the night stretches on, however, Blake begins to behave strangely, transforming into something unrecognizable, and Charlotte will be forced to decide whether the terror within their house is more lethal than the danger without.”
Wolf Man is set to be released in January 2025.