The horror genre has always been more of a mirror than a window. Horror writers channel the things that haunt us by offering them up in forms that reflect familiar aspects of humanity. Often at the movies, these reflections come in the form of regular people getting torn to shreds by forces they can’t understand. More recently, though, nearly every horror movie has taken up the mantle of metaphor, shaping the terror at its heart as a stand-in for some recognizable trauma or tragedy in everyday life. If Blumhouse’s messy new remake Wolf Man is any indication of the kind of horror we’re going to get in 2025, though, it may be time that Hollywood revived a simpler kind of scary.
When talking about a movie called Wolf Man, I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say the film will include a man who starts the movie human and ends it as something decidedly more wolf-ish. In this movie, that man is Blake (Christopher Abbott). Blake grew up in rural Oregon, with an ex-military dad who took him hunting, taught him survival skills, and in an effort to keep him safe, was frighteningly intense all the time. Flash forward to the modern day, and Blake lives in New York City with his distant, overworked journalist wife, Charlotte (Julia Garner), and their daughter, Ginger (Matilda Firth), who he’s intent on keeping safe without scarring her the way his dad scarred him. I’ll bet you can put the pieces together about how that goes.
The family’s fortunes shift when Blake receives a letter explaining that his dad, who has been missing for several years, has finally been gone long enough for the state to declare him legally dead. This prompts Blake to suggest a family trip to Oregon to clean out his father’s house, and hopefully bring the family closer together.
When the movie cuts to a gorgeously careening aerial shot of pine trees and mountains, then the three-person family in a car on a winding road, it’s an instant and unmistakable evocation of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. At first glance, this seems like a clever bit of foreshadowing about the movie’s central metaphor. The dangers of the Oregon woods (and the forest’s lychanthropic residents) will slowly transform Blake, figuratively and literally, into the abusive father he was always scared he’d be, just like the Overlook Hotel twisted Jack Torrance toward his darkest impulses.
But that’s not what happens at all. Instead, the family is ambushed on their drive up by a wolf man who infects Blake with the transformative disease. The rest of the movie takes place over one very long night, as he slowly morphs into a wolf, all while the family is trapped inside Blake’s childhood home and hounded by the wolf man that attacked them initially.
Blake rushes around the house trying to prepare it, survival instincts kicking in, while his wife and daughter cower, glimpsing the stalking hybrid monster through the windows as he tests for weak points in the house’s defenses. As each second slips by, Blake descends into a slightly wolf-ier state, hearing the footfalls of spiders like a pounding bass drum, seeing in the dark, and losing his ability to speak without even realizing it, all while his family grows more and more afraid of him.
This pandemonium is when the movie is at its absolute best. Director and co-writer Leigh Whannell (Upgrade, The Invisible Man) moves us through the tiny house with impeccable rhythm and style, making each slow pan across a shadowy room feel like anything could be waiting around the corner, and each window seem like the wolf could be peering through it.
Even better is how Whannell communicates Blake’s transformation. Rather than overloading the movie with lycanthrope lore, or worrying about the specifics of this type of werewolf or that, Whannell is clearly more interested in the physical transformation and the horror it evokes. The makeup of Blake’s dislocated jaw and graphic wounds gets worse and more stomach-churning by the minute, all while presenting a disgusting but significantly more human version of werewolves than most movies manage. It’s realistically visceral and exceptionally gross.
All of this positive momentum is cut short when a crushingly obvious plot reveal makes Wolf Man’s theme painfully literal, and robs its metaphors of any nuance at all. It’s possible to imagine a defter version of the film that could pull this idea off by cleverly showing how Blake, mid-transformation, threatens or frightens his family, paralleling what his dad did to him. But if that’s what the movie is aiming for, it’s way off the mark. Whannell and co-writer/spouse Corbett Tuck communicate these ideas about as intelligently as the garbled muttering that Blake assumes passes for human speech after he’s become more wolf than man.
The frustratingly straightforward direction they choose for the story sucks the air out of Wolf Man, draining it of tension and confusing everything that comes after. Once Blake’s transformation is complete, the movie loses its focus, completely failing to communicate whether Ginger and Charlotte are in danger from Blake or not.
That ambiguity might be intentional for Whannell and Tuck, but for any sense of mystery to come through, we’d need some sense of both terror and empathy, neither of which the movie musters. In part, that’s due to Wolf Man’s astoundingly wooden performances, particularly from Julia Garner. More than once, Whannell’s camera lingers on her totally expressionless face, seemingly desperate for the audience to intuit some kind of meaning from her blank expression, but nothing comes out.
What’s more surprising is that Whannell’s direction can’t muster up any scares in this final section of the movie. In his previous feature, The Invisible Man, he managed the tension wonderfully, with some of the most interesting and terrifying set-pieces in recent memory. And while the earlier sections of Wolf Man aren’t exactly inventive with their horror, they’re undeniably tense. But by the time Blake is on all fours, chasing his family through the woods (the one real promise of a movie called Wolf Man), the movie is so twisted up in its own metaphor that it can’t muster up a single ounce of terror for the one thing we all came to see: a werewolf.
If horror movies are mirrors, then classics like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and Halloween, or new greats like Barbarian, are the funhouse variety; they show us entirely different things depending on the angle we see them from. We’re positive it’s us in the reflection, we just have to work out how or why. So-called elevated horror like Hereditary — a subgenre that existed long before the term was coined, from Carnival of Souls to The Shining and many more — is more like a vanity mirror. The version of humanity glimpsed in these movies is realistic and harsh. They reflect our flaws, but amplified and so unmistakably large that we can notice nothing else.
None of this is to say that horror movies built around central metaphors are bad, or shouldn’t be made at all. They’re just two sides of the horror coin that have fallen out of balance in recent years. But it’s important that Hollywood doesn’t lose track of the fact that it would be crazy if a guy turned into a wolf, and that this kind of monstrous transformation is a perfectly scary idea for a movie all on its own. After all, people will see themselves in it no matter what. Why not show them something disgusting, hairy, and snarling at the same time?
Wolf Man opens in theaters on Jan. 17.
