These two legendary movies influenced The Wolf Man, and here’s how!

“Universal made a Wolfman movie in 2010, so I had to find a way to get it out.In an interview with AlloCiné, Lee Whannell, screenwriter and director of the remake, admits that the only way to offer an interesting film was to go in a completely new direction.

That’s what he did with The Invisible Man in 2020, a modern retelling of the Invisible Man myth. For this new film, the filmmaker opts for a minimalist story behind closed doors with four characters and the action unfolding in one night.

With Wolf Man, the filmmaker wanted to approach his story by being “anchored in reality“.”I wanted to approach this story more from the point of illness than the supernatural or folklore“, he explains.

“Cronenberg” tone

Two major films were the inspiration for this remake. The first is none other than David Cronenberg’s The Fly, a monument to body horror. Parallels appear on the screen in front of the wolf man. The physical evolution of the hero played by Christopher Abbott is reminiscent of the character played by Jeff Goldblum.

This remake also draws attention to the David Cronenberg classic with several gruesome sequences, including the vomit or claw scene. The Wolf Man and The Fly also ask the same question: How can you continue to love someone who is no longer yourself?

Another major inspiration is Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. The outline of Wolf Man is similar to the first part of this horror masterpiece: a small family (parents and their daughter) go to a remote place – a country house replaces the Overlook Hotel – until the father is contaminated by an unknown evil that threatens their survival.

Comments collected by Thomas Desroches on January 6, 2025.

You can see Wolf Man by Leigh Whannell in the cinema