The Wolfman

“I didn’t know you hunted monsters.”

“Sometimes, monsters hunt you.”

On the surface, these lines are B-movie fare at its best; in Universal’s The Wolfman, they’re a glaring reveal of how far the horror genre has fallen from its Edenesque beginnings…and a step in the right direction in finding its way home.

The story in The Wolfman remains virtually the same as the 1941 original, even upping the creepy factor a little with leading man Benicio del Toro’s uncanny resemblance to Lon Chaney, the first lycanthrope to become a household name. Del Toro plays Lawrence Talbot, a prodigal son who returns home to investigate the suspicious circumstances behind his brother’s violent death per the request of his brother’s fiancée, Gwen Conliffe (Emily Blunt). Anthony Hopkins rounds out the beleaguered family triangle as Sir John Talbot, father of Lawrence and overall troubled soul.

It quickly becomes clear that there are strange happenings afoot and Lawrence starts putting clues together, eventually finding himself at a Gypsy camp on the night of a full moon where, of course, violent mayhem ensues. (Listen up, Hollywood – if Drag Me To Hell has taught us nothing else, it’s that Gypsies = The Awesome. Like the drunken Indian present in every cinematic bar fight, all movies from here on out should have at least one Gypsy.) Lawrence gets gnawed on in the bacchanalian orgy of gore and his fate for the rest of the movie is pretty much sealed.

The rest of the film is, without spoiling it, a classic “monster movie” with some stunning CG transformation effects as well as good old school makeup. The Wolfman still walks upright like his pre-color forefather and only hits all fours when he needs some extra speed to ensure a good mauling (and there’s a lot of mauling – the body count is higher than all of Universal’s classic creature films put together).

All this makes it a decent movie – but there are a few extra pieces that, in my opinion, make it great (or, at least, very good). The greatest of these is…love.

The best horror films had, at their very core, love: Frankenstein. The Phantom of the Opera. The Exorcist. Be it unrequited or sacrificial, horror films need love to work; when you take it out of the equation you get, at best, slasher films and at worst, torture porn – a sub-genre of film for which its fans should be ashamed of themselves. In The Wolfman, it is Gwen’s love for Lawrence that ultimately redeems him and the film.

All that brings us back to the quote that kicked us off. In good horror, you don’t need to hunt monsters. You don’t need to try to upgrade the very worst of the human experience and bring it to life onscreen. The downfall of modern horror is its unyielding desire to go further and faster than all films previous in an attempt to horrify and disgust the audience. No longer do you cheer for the hero but rather the inventive ways in which the faceless victims die. No longer are the villains conflicted characters longing for salvation – they’ve become mindless and soulless killing machines.

Let’s get back to our monsters hunting us for a change. It’s the reason why we close the closet at night and don’t look under the bed when the lights are out. It’s the reason why I still can’t jump in an ocean once the sun goes down (thanks, Jaws!) nor hang out in a graveyard after dark as that’s obviously Ground Zero for the zombie apocalypse to come. And, thanks to The Wolfman, it’s the reason I won’t be strolling across any foggy English moors in the foreseeable future.

by Erick Bieger