Universal Horror remake Wolf Man drops most werewolf lore for a self-contained story about bad dads. by Dom Sinacola Wolf Man is the latest remake in a culture haunted by remakes. Look only a few weeks back to Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu, an adaptation of F.W. Murnau’s 1922 Nosferatu, which was an adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, with key details and names altered to avoid legal action. Though Dracula entered the public domain in the ’60s—which allowed Werner Herzog and Francis Ford Coppola to interpret the book—Eggers remade Murnau’s work over Stoker’s novel, further recycling and recontextualizing a well-known story about a vampire buying real estate and pushing us further and further from the source.  Eggers adapted an adaptation as much as he’s adapted our popular conception of the first adaptation—drawing on more than a century and countless iterations. Remakes of remakes of remakes; it’s enough to make anyone think there are no young stories anymore, only the increasingly grotesque transformation of the old. So, with grotesque transformation in mind: Wolf Man is Leigh Whannell’s fourth film as writer-director. It’s also his second remake of a classic horror title, following 2020’s The Invisible Man, which was the first successful reboot of a Universal Monster property after the whole Dark Universe idea fell apart. Remember Tom Cruise’s The Mummy? From 2017? Probably not; it was such a colossal flop it completely extinguished all hope for a new dark ‘n’ gritty shared cinematic landscape for the Universal monsters. The studio course-corrected with Whannell and doubled down on keeping these new remakes self-contained. Like Invisible Man, which attempted to incorporate modern notions of voyeurism, abuse, and corporate control into the time-honored tale of a bad naked man whose evil manifests as soon as he drinks a potion that makes him invisible, Wolf Man is another solid, modest-budget Whannell remake of a Universal horror franchise with iconography already firmly entrenched in American culture. If that makes you feel like Hollywood has reached its nadir, like there is nothing truly new for you at the theater anymore, just remember: It’s always been like this.  As a member of that Universal Monster roster, the wolf man’s first starring vehicle is George Waggner’s The Wolf Man, from 1941, where Lon Chaney Jr. plays a prodigal son who returns home to his elite, effete father (Claude Rains) only to be struck with an ancient satanic curse that transforms him into a growling humanoid dog-fella after he’s bitten by what he thinks is a big, feral wolf. Seven years later, despite the outcome of Waggner’s film (the wolf man dies in The Wolf Man; sorry to spoil this 80-plus-year-old movie), the wolf man joins up with Bud Abbott and Lou Costello to help them defeat Dracula (Bela Lugosi) and Frankenstein’s monster (Glenn Strange). Later, 1987’s The Monster Squad further expanded on our collective knowledge of lycanthropy when we learned that the wolf man’s “got nards.” Time passes, people change, and yet our archetypal stories persist.  Stripped of most folklore and werewolf myth-making, Whannell’s Wolf Man is about stay-at-home dad Blake (Christopher Abbott) who, upon returning to rural Oregon to clean out his dead dad’s homestead, with his wife Charlotte (Julia Garner) and daughter Ginger (Matilda Firth), is wounded by a terrifying animal. Soon after he begins mutating into the titular canine-human combo creature. No full moons hang ominously over the crepuscular countryside; no silver bullets find a poor monster’s heart. Whannell seems to only be focused on subtext, exploring the aching terror behind watching a loved one become someone, or something, unrecognizable. In that sense, Whannell’s Wolf Man resembles 1986’s The Fly more than Waggner’s The Wolf Man—at least aspiring to be as revolting as David Cronenberg’s body horror smorgasbord. Whannell serves up some squelching, stomach-churning sights to behold over the long, painful night of Blake’s metamorphosis. Witnessing Blake spit out a tooth feels gleefully similar to watching Brundlefly slough off goopy layers of dermis. To accompany all the carnage, Whannell and regular cinematographer Stefan Duscio lean into the mist-wreathed wilderness of Oregon (actually filmed in New Zealand), letting long takes infest every shadow and corner with portent. Jump scares abound, and the film’s sound design opens up these spooky spaces with plenty of menace. Even better is when the film’s perspective shifts to Blake’s and the loneliness he experiences from his inability to communicate with Charlotte and Ginger becomes startlingly visceral, as he's been plunged into a nightmare reality he can’t share. When Wolf Man lapses into dull chase sequences and barely legible mayhem, you may wish to return to the more sensual experience of Blake’s agony. The film eschews expectations of what a modern werewolf movie can be, but it still relies on too obvious dialogue—overexpositing themes about family, masculinity, and gender roles—as telegraphed as its unceasing jump scares.  There are, of course, delights to be had in that, but the pleasures don’t go much deeper. Even the wolf man, in his full lupine glory, looks just sort of lumpy, not really a man and even less of a wolf. Too much of the film amounts to catching chiaroscuro glimpses of a homunculus stalking a poor woman and her daughter, as if Whannell’s take on the wolf man is that he doesn’t really look much like a wolf at all. Such an idea may be uninspired, but Wolf Man comes from a long tradition of uninspired remakes anyway.  Wolf Man opens in wide release on Fri Jan 17