The Wolfman (2010) reimagines the 1941 film as a lavish period piece punctuated with graphic scenes of gore. Every cent of the films’ budget is apparent on screen in the elaborate and highly detailed sets. But what sells the movie is the use of practical effects at a time when CGI was the preferred method of special effects. This gives The Wolfman a visceral quality that backs up its horror.
To the film’s credit it isn’t a paint-by-numbers remake. The filmmakers mine late nineteenth century medical practices for terror. The asylum sequences, though brief, juxtapose the inhumanity of science during that period with the inhumanity of the werewolf myth. The horror of a wolfman is equal to the horror of bedlam. In both instances it is the internal struggle of man that is being grappled with in uncanny and violent measures.
The filmmakers, as a rule, use the setting, both physical and temporal, to create a macabre milieu that externalizes the internal fear and anxieties of the characters. Like the 1941 film, The Wolfman finds the foggy woods and moors an ideal location to act out man’s primal animalistic impulses. The manor house and forests are retained from the original film but decked out with taxidermy and scenes of gut wrenching gore.
The use of gore in The Wolfman punctuates the brutality man is capable of. It’s scary in its own right, but more than that it is scary because it represents an impulse that, in civilized humanity, is oppressed. What makes a wolfman a compelling monster is that when they transform they essentially revert to a version of humanity long extinct. The atrocities in the film hammer this concept home adeptly.
If The Wolfman has a weakness as a werewolf picture it is that its CGI effects look cartoonish and dated. Most of the effects in the film are practical so when an image uses CGI its artifice becomes readily apparent and undermines the illusion. This is particularly unfortunate in the scene where Anthony Hopkins meets his fiery demise. Suddenly the scene becomes comic in a way that the filmmakers clearly did not intend.
As a whole, The Wolfman is a competent outing in the horror genre. One has to respect Universal for reimagining one of their IPs as a hard “R” that forgoes any humor. The Wolfman model is what the studio should be using for their reboots of their classic monster movies. These films from more than half a century ago were once terrifying to audiences so it makes sense that a reboot should be equally disquieting.
