Always make money. Capital is the credos of the Blumhouse brand. Is the brand in decline? They continue to make profitable horror movies while other studios are eating their lunch on profit plus quality recognition. A24, Neon, IFC, Mubi, and everyone else are also making profitable horror movies now and some of them happen to be more than marketing meeting a hungry market. If their releases once embodied a new hope in horror, they now occupy a space of market saturation.

Rounding out a ten year first-look deal with Universal Pictures, Blumhouse have diverted from their original purpose. With the Halloween, Exorcist, and Universal Monster movies, they must do a second thing, deliver efficient branded genre fare that lives up to the reputation of marquee genre entities, delivering them to a modern market in sleekly relevant, new packages.

This has allowed to studio to tap stewards of the genre to produce modernized takes on franchise horror. It allows Leigh Whannell to make The Invisible Man (2020) but then also requires him to make Wolf Man. The disparity between the projects, in terms of vision and execution, is vast.

When a director hits and misses so hard, we begin to look for who to blame. Perhaps Whannell was given cart blanche on The Invisible Man and then had to do the same thing again but with Wolf Man. It makes sense now that would happen.

The new Wolf Man movie is today’s Blumhouse in a nutshell. The hook is self-evident, it’s a creature feature. By trying to tie the origins of the creature to generational trauma, the movie just spins its tires for most of the runtime, grounding its story in such obvious metaphor.

Horror can always be read as metaphor. We can always link the reason for fear to some deeper social construct or psychological fear we have. But it’s become clear that the audience needs invention when these movies are expositionally about trauma. The audience isn’t dumb. They will already know it’s about trauma if you just make a horror movie that doesn’t remind them of it. That’s perhaps why there seems to be a growing resentment for this particular mode of storytelling.

In Wolf Man, Blake (Christopher Abbott) learns of the passing of his father, and struggling with his work life and relationship with his daughter Ginger (Matilda Firth) and partner Charlotte (Julia Garner), decides that a trip back to his home woods of Oregon (played by New Zealand) is in order. Given his increasing distress at his loss of power as a worker, parent, and partner, Blake struggles with recollections of his late father, trying to break the cycle of generational anger. Instead, they arrive and pops is a werewolf and soon so is Blake and then the movie loses itself upon arrival at what should be its more exciting destination.

That the movie more confidently handles the human drama and loses itself in the man-turned-wolf dynamic is telling. It shows a weakness in the script, which has a premise but nowhere to take it. Effects-wise, the transformation scenes are acceptable, looking good enough to sell the concept, and using practical effects where it can. The one new concept brought into the werewolf genre is Blake’s Wolf Sight, a thermodynamic hunting lens which looks cool but doesn’t do anything vital for the movie.

So, Blumhouse has resuscitated another throwback genre piece, which feels rather empty and silly, arriving a month after the wonderful Nosferatu (2024). All pent up trauma with nowhere to go, the film, like the character of Blake, is pitted against generations of history, which breeds a certain kind of resentment. We want to see beyond Universal’s shameful universe-building attempt at the Dark Universe, but it seems that the company still has the same tract in mind, and perhaps The Invisible Man was an exception to the rule, certainly for Blumhouse and Universal, who are trying too hard to make this happen, but perhaps not for Leigh Whannell, who could have a very productive career at any of the competitive studios who are also making money but not at the cost of good product. Until then, Wolf Man feels like a sizable missed opportunity to make a more resonant and moving lycanthropic picture.

4/10