From Saw to new movie Wolf Man: The Aussie behind these horror flicks

A young, exuberant man with curtain bangs that can only signify it’s the late 90s sits beside Dylan Lewis on youth culture show Recovery, and reviews newly released horror film Anaconda.

He’s so excited about the creature feature, which he crowns “good trash”, that he can barely get his words out.

That young man is a 20-year-old Leigh Whannell and, just a few short years later, he is going to be part of redefining the horror genre.

“I didn’t realise what a great job [Recovery] was,” Whannell laughs.

“I remember interviewing directors and thinking, ‘I don’t want to interview Tim Burton. I want to be Tim Burton’. So I was probably too much of an ingrate at that time.”

Determined to have his own crack at the business, in the early 2000s Whannell and fellow Aussie James Wan wrote the screenplay for shocking horror Saw. Despite being made on a shoestring budget, Saw went on to break box office records, spawn nine horrifying sequels (and counting) and a spin-off.

Saw’s massive box office success led Whannell and Wan to team up again, this time for the multi-part Insidious horror film series — the third iteration of which saw Whannell try directing on for size.

After finding massive critical and commercial success with 2020’s The Invisible Man, which he wrote and directed, Whannell is diving into Universal’s box of monsters once again, this time pulling out Wolf Man.

The humanity of a monster

Set in the eerily serene forests of Oregon (actually New Zealand), city slicker Blake (Christopher Abbott) is taking his wife Charlotte (Julia Garner) and daughter Ginger (Matilda Firth) to the creepy, creaky farm he grew up on.

It isn’t a happy homecoming. Blake’s father has finally been legally declared dead after being missing for years, and he rallies the family to pack up the house. Then, a violent chance encounter on the drive up to the remote farm leaves Blake with an arm gash and an unshakable feeling that something’s … changing.

Based on the 1941 monster movie, Whannell’s Wolf Man goes further than your typical creature feature — there’s a mournful pathos to Blake’s transformation into the fabled werewolf.

“We’ve seen the traditional version of Wolf Man many times before,” Whannall says.

“I thought, ‘If you’re going to go to all the trouble of spending a year or more of your life making this film, what are you going to do that’s unique?'”

This wolf man, like many before it, is a monstrous-looking beast, but Abbott manages to hold onto the uncanny humanity in the character’s eyes as finger’s elongate and fangs grow.

Just as the audience is repulsed by the grotesquerie, Whannell flips the perspective: the audience sees from Blake’s eyes. The walls are shifting and melting, his loved ones’ eyes flash white, their cries of love morphed into garbled nonsense. Blake is moving into a mental prison as well as a physical one. It’s heartbreaking, any way you look at it.

“From the very beginning, perspective was important to me and the subjective transformation with sound and playing with visuals,” Whannell says.

“It was a combination of elements, that’s when visual effects are such a great tool, but there were also practical elements in there. We were actually manually changing the light, you know, just turning a dial and changing the lighting. I love that handmade aspect of it.”

And that deliberate playing with perspectives is designed to hit at the heartstrings.

“Ultimately, you can’t control tear ducts, but the happiest I’ll be is if somebody says, ‘I cried at the end’.”

Beware the wolf man

That’s not to say the sadness outweighs the scares in Wolf Man. Beyond the soul-crushing terror of seeing your loved one turning into something you don’t recognise, the dark, foreboding house and grounds are the perfect setting for classic horror fear.

Harking back to his Saw days, Whannell ramps up the tension as soon as the Lovell family hit the woods — using the unknown and unseen to elicit terror from his characters and the audience.

“Horror audiences today are so media literate, just as a result of watching hundreds of hours of film and television, they subconsciously learned the tropes and the tricks,” Whannell says.

“You know what the audience expects.I know what the lazy option would be and knowing that allows me to go in the opposite direction. That’s my golden rule going in, is just the expectation. If the audience thinks you’re going to go right, go left.

“You have to weaponise the frame against the audience.”

And while Whannell has the skills to make even the sight of disembodied breath rising above a fence terrifying, he also pulls through some well-timed jump scares.

An Aussie horror renaissance

With a swathe of exciting new local genre films like Talk To Me, Late Night With The Devil, Sissy, The Moogai and Birdeater, the Australian horror scene has never been so robust.

This is a heartening evolution for Whannell who, 20 years ago, was forced to seek out US backing for Saw.

“When James Wan and I were shopping Saw around, I felt like there was no horror scene to speak of in Australia, it just didn’t feel like a community at all,” Whannell says.

“After the [Wolf Man] premiere, I had so many younger people come up to me and say, ‘I grew up on your films. You inspired me to be a horror filmmaker’. I’m proud of the fact that James and I seem to have had a role in this new horror renaissance that’s happening. But I do think that it’s a more recent thing.”

After 20 years of filmmaking, Whannell says his opinion of film critique has changed since his time as a teen on Recovery.

“Now I’m on the other side of the iron curtain, I go much easier on films,” he laughs.

“Once you realise how hard it is to make a film, you start realising, ‘Oh, it’s a miracle that any film actually gets finished, let alone a good one’.”

Wolf Man is in cinemas now.

This post was originally published on here