I have to confess that I was never big on horror movies. Perhaps it was due to being traumatized by watching The Fly at the drive-in during a family outing as a preschooler. Maybe that was why my mom subsequently constrained my movie outings to films from Disney when Walt was still running the operation. Anyway, I have never been too excited about the prospect of going to see a film that was designed to scare the bejesus out of me and then calling it fun. This aversion is, of course, not shared by a large segment of the movie-going population. This group has shuddered, howled, and been held transfixed by a variety of films featuring monsters, slashers, vampires, ghosts, zombies, and werewolves all intended to fill them with horror and dread. 

This was driven home to me when I went to see the new Wolfman film with an old college buddy. My friend was eager for the opportunity to satiate his appetite for blood and gore. I was rehearsing the mantra “it’s only a movie.”  OK, I didn’t have to go see this film, but how could I simply pass on seeing a film that features Oscar-winners Benicio Del Toro and Anthony Hopkins as well as rising star and personal favorite Emily Blunt? After all, I have been to, survived, and even enjoyed a few horror films, including John Landis’s An American Werewolf in London. Jenny Agutter may have had a lot to do with that, but werewolves don’t keep me out of the movie theater. 

What was probably more interesting was our different reactions to seeing The Wolfman. I found myself unable to establish a connection to the film. My friend, who was a big fan of the werewolf classic The Wolf Man, had no such difficulty. He felt that it was great that Universal Studios, which had made The Wolf Man in 1941 with Claude Rains, Ralph Bellamy, Warren William, Evelyn Ankers, Bela Lugosi, Maria Ouspenskaya, and Lon Chaney Jr., were dusting off the material, updating it, and putting it before an entirely new audience. He liked that the werewolves in The Wolfman retained a human physiognomy, just as they had in The Wolf Man. The afflicted were not completely transformed into wolves. As I started to research for writing a review of The Wolfman I noticed that Curt Siodmak, the scriptwriter for The Wolf Man, received a credit on The Wolfman. Then I noticed that many of the character names in The Wolfman were the same as in The Wolf Man. I decided that I would not be able to adequately offer a review of the new Wolfman without having seen The Wolf Man, and I could not recall ever having seen it. Fortunately, AMC (American Movie Classics) was more than happy to offer the old classic to me and other film fans that either wanted to be able to compare the new film with the original or simply to revel in seeing an old favorite. 

While the two films share character names, a handful of plot details, a bit of dialogue, and being about werewolves, the new Wolfman is not a remake of The Wolf Man. Though The Wolf Man is set contemporaneously with when it was made, and Wolfman is set fifty years earlier in the late nineteenth century, Wolfman is not a prequel either. The new Wolfman is simply a reimagining of the story, setting it in a new time and updating certain aspects of the story for our time. 

George Waggner’s The Wolf Man begins with Lawrence Talbot (Chaney) returned from America to Talbot Castle—referred to in a written prologue as a place around which werewolves have been reported—as heir to the Talbot estate and fortune due to the death of his elder brother in a hunting accident. The sun is shining, the welcome from his father Sir John Talbot (Claude Rains) is heartfelt, and Lawrence is intrigued by beautiful Gwen Conliffe (Evelyn Ankers), whom he spies using his father’s telescope. The film does little to foreshadow its horror. Joe Johnston’s Wolfman, on the other hand, begins with a short scene in which Ben Talbot (Simon Merrells) is in the woods at night and is attacked. We witness his reaction to what he confronts and hear the bestial assailant. The following scene shows Lawrence Talbot (Benicio Del Toro), who has taken leave from his American theater group touring in London, arriving at his ancestral home after having received a letter from Ben’s fiancée Gwen Conliffe (Emily Blunt), summoning him home to help find his missing brother. The Talbot estate is enveloped in a gloom built on despairing neglect and ubiquitous darkness. While many of the film’s scenes do take place at night, even the daytime scenes—with rare exceptions—seem to be occurring during a near-total solar eclipse. The village in which it is set bears the all too obvious name Blackmoor. It is almost immediately evident that there is estrangement between Lawrence and his father Sir John Talbot (Anthony Hopkins). As opposed to the earlier film coyly withholding where the film is headed and allowing the audience to make an emotional connection with its characters, Joe Johnston has trumpeted the film’s mood of encumbering fear. The characters are so bogged down in the moody atmosphere and the machinations of the film’s plot that one isn’t able to see them as people that one might like, admire, or hate. One should care about Lawrence and feel his anxiety and dread about what he will become during a full moon, but in Wolfman one can feel quite indifferent to his plight and just watch the mayhem unfold. 

The most obvious way that Wolfman has been updated over The Wolf Man is in the vividness of showing the transformation from human to the beast. The earlier film shows Lawrence sensing the itching of an explosive growth of hair before the audience sees this manifest itself. Wolfman shows us structural skeletal changes from human to wolf. The Wolf Man lumbers about as a man befurred like a beast, but Wolfman seems as comfortable on all fours as upright and moves with the lethal speed of a predatory animal. In The Wolf Man, we see the attacks but need to be told about the deadly wounds inflicted by the beast. The Wolfman treats us to savage bites and claw slashes, letting us see the resulting severed limbs and heads. While this gore and blood most certainly should satisfy the appetites of most viewers— and I’m not sure I want to meet any of those who aren’t—the filmmakers have opted to err on the side of less blood relative to the massive wounds inflicted. 

The other updates are more subtle as they address parent-child relationships, gender roles, and ethnic tolerance. The gypsies are blameless in Wolfman but are suspected of being somehow responsible for the attacks that have afflicted Blackmoor. Despite this, hardly any of the gypsy characters have the opportunity to register as more than werewolf fodder. In The Wolf Man, the werewolf that attacks Lawrence is the gypsy Bela (Bela Lugosi), and the gypsy woman Maleva (Maria Ouspenskaya) lurks about throughout, offering insight as a one-woman Greek chorus. Geraldine Chaplin plays the same character in Wolfman, but her fortuneteller is clearly a cameo in which her talents are wasted. The community seems largely indifferent to the gypsies, despite the increasing danger posed by the werewolf attacks. Except for the gypsy woman who moves about totally unfazed, as if she were exempt from werewolf attacks, the women in The Wolf Man are ineffectual victims. Emily Blunt’s Gwen Conliffe in Wolfman is the conduit for gathering knowledge of the werewolf legends, and she, ultimately, becomes the film’s hero. As opposed to The Wolf Man’s relatively healthy relationship between Lawrence and his father Sir John, Wolfman’s relationship between Lawrence and Sir John is dominated by trauma and defined by ambivalence. Alas, the flashback that provides the backstory for the family trauma that continues to haunt the Talbots seems much more intriguing than the main story the film presents here. 

The new Wolfman film isn’t so much a new film as it is a launch of a Wolfman werewolf franchise that seeks to appear to have the bloodlines of the classic film. The film comes loaded with both the prequel noted above and the first of who knows how many sequels. The humanity of the story is definitely wanting, but some filmgoers will be so enthralled and chilled by the special effects that enable the film’s rendering of the werewolves and their violence that any problems with the story will be totally superfluous. Other filmgoers will be so repelled by these same vivid effects that even a stronger and more engaging story will fail to overcome their aversion to all the gore. However for this franchise to establish a deep connection to a new audience, the films will have to find a way to balance character development and atmosphere.