‘Wolf Man’ Drags a Classic Movie Monster, Grunting and Snarling, Into the Present

“There are things you have to come to terms with up here,” says a woodsman in a remote outpost of rural Oregon. He’s speaking of accepting limitations (no cell service, lack of community) while subtextually issuing a warning about what’s to come—though it sounds more like the set-up for a clumsily humanist play than, say, a dire prediction from an old Romani woman at the outset of a monster movie. But for a 2025 edition of the Wolf Man, called simply Wolf Man, it will have to do, at least until Robert Eggers comes to terms with his own werewolf movie, recently announced for Christmas 2026 as his follow-up to Nosferatu.

The Universal Monsters—that’d be those oft-revived classic monster-movie mainstays Dracula, Frankenstein’s Monster, the Wolf Man, the Invisible Man, the Mummy, and the Creature from the Black Lagoon—aren’t really known for coming to terms with things, per se. But what separates them from garden variety creatures is their grasping, walking-upright humanity; the relatability of their desire, no matter how dark. In retrospect, it’s understandable that mashing modern versions of these monster characters together in an interconnected, Marvel-style franchise briefly known as the “Dark Universe” didn’t take off, despite the old 1940s sequels already proving them ripe for crossovers; movie superheroes, at least, are typically discouraged from pursuing baser desires, and it’s hard to picture a Universal Monster that successfully, convincingly resists them.

Within this group, the Wolf Man (usually the alter ego of human Lawrence Talbot, played repeatedly by Lon Chaney Jr. and once by Benicio del Toro) stands out, because his version of those desires is rawer, less easy to articulate. Frankenstein’s Monster wants some kind of love or acceptance. Dracula less sympathetically craves blood, but that’s mixed together with, you know, more erotic stuff on a symbolic level. The original Invisible Man is a crazy bastard who craves power; hell, that’s hardly the stuff of monsters at all. The Wolf Man, though, is like an animal, only arguably more ravenous; an animal with a human’s ambition for more, perhaps. In Lon Chaney’s subsequent appearances as the character, his “normal” side mainly wants to get rid of his curse, while the beast (as Anthony Hopkins memorably intones in the 2010 Del Toro version) wants to run free.

This makes the Wolf Man a particularly tricky target for Leigh Whannell’s apparent mission to both update and domesticate the Universal Monsters—which may have been supplanted now that unexpected golden boy Eggers appears to be doing the same in a more old-timey key. And that’s not to say that Whannell’s take on The Invisible Man, released five years ago, neutered its title character. If anything, it followed the old James Whale film, where the Invisible Man starts the movie already mad with plans for world domination. Whannell’s version, an abusive creep with or without his fancy invisibility suit, mainly wants to dominate his ex-girlfriend Cecilia (Elisabeth Moss), who must figure out how to escape his expertly monstrous, eventually deadly gaslighting. (In a brilliant touch, we never see the non-invisible version of the guy lay a hand on Ceclia, although the movie nonetheless tacitly rejects any ambiguity about his abuse.)

By reorienting the movie squarely into Cecilia’s point of view, Whannell made it clear that his humans wouldn’t just be traumatized cardboard in the monsters’ wake; maybe he wouldn’t want to make lovable monsters at all. His Wolf Man re-do more self-consciously seeks a kind of both-sides approach, though not with the gender-war toxicity that might imply. Blake (Christopher Abbott) grew up with a strict, seemingly survivalist-minded father in the Oregon wilderness, and has made it out to the opposite coast, where as an adult he’s married to Charlotte (Julia Garner) and father to pre-teen Ginger (Matilda Firth). Both relationships burble with tension: Semi-generic resentfulness between the couple, origin evocatively unspecified, and an abiding fear from Blake that he’ll lose his temper and prove himself unworthy of his loving daughter. (There’s a sense, never directly confirmed, that perhaps Blake redirects some anger towards Charlotte, in order to spare Ginger the best he can.)

When Blake inherits his father’s Oregon farm, he hauls the family west to clear it out, and maybe clear their heads. Almost immediately, he’s attacked by some kind of mysterious unseen creature in the surrounding forest, sustains a gash on his arm, and begins to change. It looks like werewolf boilerplate, only Whannell strips most of the signifiers away: There’s no full moon, no silver bullets, not even any proper howling. In keeping with the survivalist remoteness, the creature’s growl sounds more like mountain-man muttering. The movie wrings a lot of uneasy suspense over whether Blake’s transformation will ultimately help him defend his family or turn him against them.

Whannell’s Invisible Man has some of the B-movie glee you might expect from the man who worked on the Saw and Insidious series, flirting with bad taste by appropriating misguided domestic-violence thrillers like Sleeping with the Enemy. The presence of a “real” monster makes it easier to give in to the movie’s battle-royale nastiness between the righteous wronged woman and her evil abuser, a clever metaphor (among many) for the potential invisibility of intimate abuse. His Wolf Man, a project he jumped into after another filmmaking team abandoned their pitch, is a more somber affair; it’s as if the whole second half of the movie takes place during a protracted version of a transformation sequence that most werewolf movies would handle in three minutes flat.

At times, that makes Wolf Man just as unsettling as its more excitingly staged companion. One of its most disturbing conceits visualizes Blake’s humanity falling away with a sort of wolf-o-vision, which heightens colors into an eerie, garish glow, while scrambling human speech incomprehensibly. This is where the divided points of view come in: We see Charlotte and Ginger’s heartfelt pleas and pledges of support reaching a seemingly uncomprehending Blake, and then we see and hear it from his side, where nothing penetrates his animal haze. Much of the movie is about Blake succumbing to this sort of superhero sickness, his powers all curse and involuntarily surrendered responsibility. Is the loud thumping that he hears, only to realize it’s just the sound of a spider crawling up a wall, a sidelong nod to the world’s favorite creature-y superhero? Probably not, but it’s a great, creepy moment.

The comparisons are inevitable, so let’s get to them: Whannell fails to replicate the tidiness of Invisible Man’s domestic metaphor here. Has all of Blake’s effort to not repeat his father’s mistakes—seemingly successful, for the most part, though the movie leaves some of that opaque—left him subconsciously yearning for a beastly outlet? Is this mixed in with anxieties over protecting a family in a post-COVID era, hence the desire to decamp for more desolate environs and the framing of lycanthropy as an infection? Is Blake’s generational trauma and/or toxic masculinity simply an unavoidable transformation once it gets going, a sort of self-fulfilling Greek tragedy that locks into motion as soon as you try to defy it? It’s all a resounding maybe; Invisible Man was more on the hell-yes tip. That was aided by Elisabeth Moss’s go-for-broke intensity, which Abbott and Garner do not mirror or mimic. If anything, they both underreact to some of the horrors in front of them, as if they’ve already accepted their fate deep down, which makes the whole thing harder still to read. It certainly didn’t help the movie at the box office, where it underperformed expectations and seems destined to be overshadowed by the eventual Eggers version of this story (set in the 13th century, natch).

Yet some of this is well outside Whannell’s control; maybe expecting a this-is-that metaphorror show is a bad habit we ought to break. Wolf Man has plenty of visceral power: Blake’s greatest fear is letting down his daughter, and she watches him transform into something else in slow motion, pleading for the return of the father she loves. In other words, it’s a #GirlDad nightmare, and for this Father of a Daughter™, it’s a vivid one, all the more powerful for the way it nods at contemporary domestic anxieties without becoming a simple stand-in for them. And even without Whannell in sleek deranged-entertainer mode, there are still memorable visual touches, like the way a beast lurks in the woods quietly announces itself via a puff of visible breath—or is it general body heat radiating in the clammy forest air?

He also makes his flashes of gore genuinely expressive in a way that few contemporary horror filmmakers have mastered. His Wolf Man may lack the gothic grandeur of its predecessors from 1941 and 2010, but again he’s come up with a way to let a Universal Monster loose in confined contemporary spaces without losing its elemental freakiness. The Eggers version will almost certainly be beautifully crafted; his Nosferatu was one of 2024’s best, horror or otherwise. But Whannell deserves some credit for attempting, however briefly, to bring these monsters into the here and now.