The Wolfman
February 12, 2010
I will say this for The Wolfman: it is an unabashedly, unapologetically old school Universal horror movie. The movie wears its Victorian Gothic aspirations on its sleeve, and even its title screen is carved into a tombstone. A tombstone that is, naturally, dripping blood.
So too are its themes and central conflicts a throwback to those old horror films (the original Universal Wolf Man was released in 1941) which were themselves a throwback to Gothic horror of the late 19th century. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the mob scenes, where men bearing torches, guns and hunting dogs walk in silhouetted lines across hilltops and through forests in pursuit of the beast. There’s a hell of a lot of Victorian horror that’s all about the bad old days of primeval horror making one last violent stab in the modern age, about the individual dividing and conquering before succumbing to the mob, and that is something this new version of The Wolfman understands well.
But as starry-eyed as I am for such horror conventions, I wonder if they’re not a liability to new filmmakers who take a whack at them. For instance, I haven’t mentioned anything about the plot yet—because if you’re stepping foot into this theater in the first place, there’s a better-than-even chance you already know exactly how it’s going to go down. Lycanthropy, in the classic mold, is a tragic curse as much as anything else. The horror is not just in what the werewolf does to others, but what the werewolf does to the werewolf himself. So you know how it ends.
And, in fact, you pretty much know how it starts, too: actor Lawrence Talbot (Benicio Del Toro, at turns seething or wooden) returns to his family’s rural estate in England upon hearing of his brother’s grisly death at the hands of some savage beast. Talbot is reluctant to return, as the old homefront brings back uncomfortable memories of a cold father (Anthony Hopkins) and a beautiful mother who took her own life in Lawrence’s youth. It’s a place of bad memories, one Lawrence hoped to escape forever, but his mourning sister-in-law (Emily Blunt) is the first to tell him that no one escapes that house.
The rest you should be able to fill in yourself, which is where The Wolfman’s problem lies. “Origin” or “discovery” stories have an esteemed place in modern fiction, and when they relay something truly new—the world of wizards in Harry Potter, for instance—they are potent indeed. But when we’re dealing with the umpteenth rendition of werewolfism, it ultimately amounts to list-making: this version does react to silver and fire, is not in control of itself, et cetera. The movie’s second half moves past this into the actual plot of the thing and does contain some surprises, but by then you already feel the tracks of this particular thrill ride underneath you. A little too well.
To The Wolfman’s credit, it is considerably more organic about the “discovery” of a phenomenon we’ve seen rendered dozens of times on the big screen than one might guess, and it knows—as the best werewolf movies do—that the transformation scenes are “the money shot.” Special effects and makeup wizard Rick Baker manages to make the more-man-than-wolf werewolf not look ridiculous, which is something I would not have thought possible.
But there is absolutely nothing here that any fan of werewolf movies has not seen before.
A friend once defined horror as “like a joke, but the punchline is the worst thing you can think of,” and that is largely true: you build tension and convince the audience you’re going one way before you jerk them into far worse territory than they could have imagined. The Wolfman, as beholden to its predecessors as it is an attempt to honor them, cannot break free of its bonds and give us anything new.
