Yahoo Movies 'Werewolves get a bad rap in horror for being goofy and unscary'
The Wolf Man has been reinvented by Leigh Whannell, though it continues a trend of werewolf movies being criticised for not being scary enough.
While there have been a million takes on Dracula and Frankenstein, the Wolf Man is one of the original crown jewels of the Universal Monsters that has been long overdue for a reinvention. And it seems like, with the recently released Wolf Man (2025) and the newly announced Robert Eggers project, Werewulf, we are entering our werewolf era.
Werewolves can be accused of being goofy, with make up designs that depreciate quickly, and unscary. There are a handful of truly phenomenal werewolf horror films whose gore, performances and thematic depth have made them horror staples: Rick Baker’s creature design in An American Werewolf in London (1981) still inspires filmmakers, Canadian teen horror Ginger Snaps (2000) interweaves puberty and lycanthropy, Dog Soldiers (2002) pits the military against the supernatural, and I will bat for Jack Nicholson and James Spader going corporate werewolf in Wolf (1991) any day of the week.
But it’s only accused of goofiness because of how closely it parallels the melodrama, also known as the weepies, or the emotionally exaggerated genre of films that were designed to appeal to female audiences. While the melodrama privileges female characters and their relationship, The Wolf Man is doing the exact same thing for male characters, just with more hair and worse dental hygiene.
The 1941 original starred Lon Chaney Jr as Larry Talbot, a disappointing son to his aristocratic father (and a pest to local women). Larry is looked down upon by his dad, who sees him as unworthy of his inheritance, and doesn’t believe him when Larry claims that he has been turning into a werewolf and murdering local people. At the end of that film, Larry dies, murdered by his own father, who is left to deal with the consequences of his own actions offscreen. Daddy issues central.
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Chaney Jr. played Larry in four more films, but never got a proper sequel. Instead, the make-up got progressively worse, the actor got older, with the years of hard drinking and smoking increasingly evident, and the Wolf Man was all but retired. The goofy, sad sack monster who had a cult following of his own, and was lovingly homaged in Monster Squad (1987), the decidedly unhorror Alvin and the Chipmunks Meet the Wolfman (2000), and House of the Wolf Man (2009).
Larry was resurrected for the nu gothic revival of the early aughts, under a different name, as a CGI monstrosity in whatever the hell was going on in Van Helsing (2009), and as a passion project for Oscar winning-actor Benicio del Toro. Let’s get it out of the way: The Wolfman (2010) is not good, but it is well-intentioned in how it expands in the fraught, fractured relationship between a father and a son.
Larry is renamed Lawrence (a move in the right direction) and the violence is amped up. More hair! More throat-ripping! More blood! The Wolfman was trying overtime to convince us all that werewolves were, in fact, really scary and not a man in furry socks half squatting in the woods.
The father, played by a scenery glutton Anthony Hopkins, is also a werewolf, and Daddy Wolf and Baby Wolf have it out in a smorgasbord of special effects. The film was plagued with production issues, and flopped at the box office. That was the last time we saw Larry – sorry, Lawrence – Talbot.
Aside from the fact that the main character is named Larry (there are some names that will never be scary, and Larry is one of them), the Wolf Man is a reluctant monster, whose main conflict outside of the annoyance of turning into a bloodthirsty man-wolf hybrid every full moon is the fact that his father will never be proud of him.
Having already reinvented a classic Universal horror through the perspective of a domestic violence victim stalked by her tech-bro husband in The Invisible Man (2020), writer-director Leigh Whannell was tapped to do the same for Larry Talbot. Whannell's take fully embraces the daddy issues as its central idea, and stretches it out in slow motion.
We don’t spend much time with Blake’s (Christopher Abbott) experience as the son of a terse father, but rather with him as a father himself, trying very hard to not imitate his own upbringing. Written by Whannell and his partner Corbett Tuck during lockdown, Wolf Man (2025) contains the story in a single location, an isolated, run-down cabin in the Oregonian woods. While it might not excel in scares (or give its werewolves that much extra hair), it succeeds as a horror melodrama.
The Wolf Man works at its best when it focuses on its lead character, lost and angry, trying its best, but its best never being enough. The tragedy of The Wolf Man is that of a disappointed parent and a disappointed child.
Larry/Lawrence/Blake are reluctant monsters, who take no enjoyment in their transformation. But Wolf Man updates this dynamic to give the tragic monster some respite. Even as he loses the grip on his humanity, becoming more sphinx wolf than man, Blake’s connection with his daughter Ginger (if you know, you know) is the heart of the film. As the Wolf Man always does, he must die. But at least neither he or his daughter are disappointed in each other.
The Wolf Man is out in cinemas now.
