Warning: This article contains spoilers for Wolf Man.
Leigh Whannell’s new Wolf Man reboot is a subtle yet unforgettable reference to the hit horror movie franchise that kickstarted his filmmaking career in 2004. The film has the core elements of the original Universal Monsters classic – a doomed romance, an estranged father-son relationship, and a werewolf – but tells the story in its own way.
Toward the end of the film, Blake’s wife Charlotte and his daughter Ginger lock themselves in the barn to escape his werewolf form. He burrows under the door and stalks them through the barn, standing right in front of them but invisible to them. This sequence is similar to the climactic sequence in Saw, where Dr. Lawrence Gordon sawed off his own foot to escape from Jigsaw’s twisted game.
This isn’t the only callback to Saw throughout Whannell’s filmography. The director has never forgotten where he came from and has included references to his breakout film in a bunch of his subsequent works. In Upgrade, the face of Jigsaw’s puppet Billy can be seen spray-painted as graffiti on the wall of the computer hacker’s lair. Billy can also be spotted amongst Mary Shaw’s puppet collection in the ventriloquist thriller Dead Silence, which Whannell co-wrote with his Saw collaborator James Wan. In Insidious, which Whannell also wrote, Billy can be seen scrawled on a blackboard underneath Wan’s name.
Whannell has made a lot of great movies over the years, from his thrilling cyberpunk actioner Upgrade to the chilling Insidious franchise (which he co-created), but his first film is still one of his best. He burst onto the scene when he wrote and starred in the original Saw movie, and there’s a reference to that modern classic in his latest horror opus.
Wolf Man is Whannell’s second reimagining of an iconic monster movie; he previously retooled The Invisible Man as a haunting psychological drama about an abusive relationship. The film stars Christopher Abbott as Blake Lovell, a mild-mannered everyman who drives up to his late father’s farm in Oregon, gets attacked by a werewolf, and slowly transforms before his family’s eyes.
Release Date: January 15, 2025
Runtime: 103 minutes
Director: Leigh Whannell
Writers: Leigh Whannell, Rebecca Angelo
Producers: Beatriz Sequeira, Jason Blum, Ryan Gosling, Ken Kao