Universal Pictures' proposed Dark Universe may have died a death long before it ever really got going, but the central idea — to take the studio's iconic pantheon of monsters and bring them into the 21st century — has remained very much alive (ALIIIVE!). In 2020, Saw co-creator Leigh Whannell successfully reimagined The Invisible Man as a timely allegory for the terrors of gaslighting with Elisabeth Moss, resulting in one of the best horror movies in recent memory. Now, with his upcoming Wolf Man, the Aussie filmmaker is preparing to retool Universal's 1941 creature feature as a tale of toxic masculinity and the dissolution of the familial unit starring Christopher Abbott, Julia Garner, and newcomer Matilda Firth. Check out the beast of a new trailer that's just been released below:
With each passing trailer, the bigger picture of Whannell's Wolf Man has been coming into sharper focus. The first teaser established the movie's rural Oregonian setting, prodding at the possibility that the unleashing of the beast within Abbott's Blake would be as much a symbolic transformation as a literal one. The second trailer then leaned more heavily into the transformation itself and the threat Blake comes to represent to wife Charlotte (Garner) and daughter Ginger (Firth) following his lycanthropic encounter in the woods. Now, with this latest look at the film, the "straight-up, pure horror" Whannell described to Empire earlier this year is writ large, with bloodshed, breaking bones, distended limbs, and a slew of stylish, staccato camera movements unleashing Abbott's beast, lending a real sense of urgency to the movie's killer logline: "What if someone you loved became something else?"
And here's that official synopsis one last time: "Here's the official synopsis: "Christopher Abbott stars as Blake, a San Francisco husband and father, who inherits his remote childhood home in rural Oregon after his own father vanishes and is presumed dead. With his marriage to his high-powered wife, Charlotte (Garner), fraying, Blake persuades Charlotte to take a break from the city and visit the property with their young daughter, Ginger (Matilda Firth). But as the family approaches the farmhouse in the dead of night, they’re attacked by an unseen animal and, in a desperate escape, barricade themselves inside the home as the creature prowls the perimeter. As the night stretches on, however, Blake begins to behave strangely, transforming into something unrecognizable, and Charlotte will be forced to decide whether the terror within their house is more lethal than the danger without."
We'll see what happens when Abbott goes full beast mode — and whether Whannell's latest Universal picture is a roaring success or a bit of a howler — when Wolf Man hits cinemas in the UK and Ireland on 17 January.