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Any good werewolf yarn, and plenty of bad ones, will tell you the line between man and beast is thinner than we care to admit. The same holds true for greatness and greatly missed opportunities. So much of film history is littered with stories of happy accidents and serendipitous choices that proved the difference between obscurity and an eternity of critical adulation.
Unfortunately, there are far more examples of movies where those fortuitous twists of fate didn’t occur, or they perhaps went the other way. Worse still is when the press gets wind of gusts blowing in the wrong direction. Such was the fate of 2010’s now all but forgotten The Wolfman remake starring Benicio del Toro and Anthony Hopkins. Before the film was released—and before it was even shot—word on the street was that a disaster was imminent. After all, director Joe Johnston (The Rocketeer, Jumanji) agreed to step in at the 11th hour of preproduction after the more prestigious One Hour Photo helmer, Mark Romanek, left the project under a cloud of acrimony.
We will not speculate as to what Romanek’s version of The Wolfman might have looked like, but it is clear the one we got in 2010 after a hefty delay was compromised by studio second-guessing and with the scent of blood in the water. Even if the production had gone swimmingly, and the reviews were good, a Gothic period film budgeted at $100 million would be a tough sell. With reshoots it had ballooned to $150 million, and the critical knives were out.
To be clear, The Wolfman is not a misunderstood classic of its genre. There are significant issues with its pacing, heavy emphasis on tacky jump scares, and even casting choices that hold it back… And yet, if you actually revisit it 15 years later, or just squint, plenty of it still works, especially whenever del Toro is under the influence of legendary makeup artist Rick Baker’s furry handiwork. At times, this movie rips, complete with nearly all the sumptuous and dazzling craftsmanship of some of the greatest Gothic hits of the then-recent 1990s.
If a few key choices had just guided The Wolfman slightly to the left, or just a little to the right, it very well might have stood side by side with some of its biggest influences, chiefly Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula (1992) and Tim Burton’s Sleepy Hollow (1999). As it stands, the film still has enough bite to be worthy of a rewatch for a certain breed of horror aficionado who likes their red meat served with exquisite presentation—and a side of ham.
A Visual Feast
Rick Baker was the first makeup artist to win an Oscar for “Best Makeup and Hairstyling.” Beforehand it had simply been a special award handed out to a few undeniable achievements in the craft (1964’s 7 Faces of Dr. Lao and 1968’s The Planet of the Apes). The Academy picked a good year to start letting artists compete annually for the prize since Baker won for the greatest werewolf transformation of all time in An American Werewolf in London (1981).
All bestial features and quadrupedal shapes, Baker’s first werewolf was intentionally as far removed as possible from the iconic Wolf Man design in the original 1941 movie. It was a conscious choice to escape The Wolf Man’s shadow, but it didn’t mean Baker or American Werewolf’s director, John Landis, lacked affection for the Lon Chaney Jr. classic. In fact, they were huge fans. And the O.G. Wolf Man makeup artist, Jack Pierce, also masterminded the appearance of Boris Karloff’s Frankenstein Monster, Mummy, and a myriad other iconic Universal Monsters. He was an idol to Baker.
So it was again fitting that Baker won his seventh and final Oscar for The Wolfman (2010), a film that acted as Baker’s homage and salute to those boyhood days of watching Jack Pierce’s work on a 1950s television set. Baker’s Wolfman design on Benicio del Toro’s face remains a stunning tour de force. Mimicking Pierce’s now bemusing yak fur and fuzzy beard, Baker created a mask around del Toro’s countenance that was both old school and a departure from everywhere cinema has been headed since the 1990s. The Wolfman, indeed, opened two months after Avatar’s virtual wall-to-wall sea of CGI.
The deliberately retro throwback nature of Baker’s work was dinged in some reviews in 2010, but it’s aged like a cozy fur blanket. And not only because of the Oscar it won. Baker’s Wolfman may very well go down as the most sophisticated and ferocious rendering of the “werewolf” ideal which defined nearly half a century of horror movies between The Wolf Man ’41 and An American Werewolf in London.
Whether it was Oliver Reed or Michael Landon, all the great werewolves of cinema yore were emulating what Pierce and Chaney achieved. But arguably Baker is the first to improve on it by rekindling the iconic Universal Monsters look while also heightening its Gothic menace. The claws are longer, the teeth sharper, the clothes tattered, but the eyes stay expressively, and painfully, human. That is courtesy of del Toro’s greatest asset as an actor being left unaltered by Baker.
It’s a triumph in horror design and one of the many impressive technical choices made on this picture, for The Wolfman 2010 remains a visual feast of viscera and craft. When you go below the line, its clear the filmmakers and artisans on the project sought to honor the past, and not just of Universal Pictures. There’s also a Hammer Studios-inspired level of fiendishness about the gore in the movie, albeit without fear of 1960s British censorship.
The worldbuilding, meanwhile, seems to intentionally invite placement in the same Gothic setting conjured in Coppola’s Dracula. The cinematography by Shelly Johnson bathes almost all of the night scenes in an impossibly bright moonlight. Eschewing the naturalism sought by most modern period piece films, The Wolfman exists in a horror Neverland where everything is cast in a pale light that at times almost renders its characters of marble and ivory… that is before they’re drenching in red.
Priscilla John’s costumes are similarly impressive, offering a little more historical influence to seep into Universal Monsters’ typical iconography, such as emphasizing the furs and pelts adorned by Anthony Hopkins’ big Sir John Talbot, who in this film is a former Victorian great white hunter gone to seed. Emily Blunt and del Toro’s mournfully British overcoats and hats are similarly exquisite. They all give the film’s production a stately grandeur that echoes old school monster movies, even as it replicates them with a style and budget far exceeding what were World War II cheapies by the time Chaney’s original Wolf Man came along.
The movie is simply fun to look at. It’s also easy on the ears thanks to Danny Elfman’s lushly romantic score.
An (Almost) Oedipal Tragedy
The technical merits of The Wolfman are undeniable, but they need to be in service to a story that grabs the viewer. This is where the 2010 movie runs into problems, albeit not from a lack of trying. Written by Andrew Kevin Walker and David Self, the narrative of 2010’s The Wolfman attempts to add psychological complexity to the 1941 classic while also mimicking Walker’s success of turning Washington Irving’s early American fairy tale, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, into a murder mystery whodunit.
Hence The Wolfman 2010 opening with the “hunting accident” only alluded to in the ’41 film which caused an estranged and highly Americanized son named Lawrence Talbot to return home to a cold house on the moors. In the new movie, Lawrence’s older brother is clearly slaughtered by a werewolf in an opening prologue. And the beast’s arrival on his father’s lands draws Lawrence back for a funeral and a hope to find the murderer. Of course one look at Anthony Hopkins’ sinister and delicious interpretation of Sir John robs the movie of any mystery about who the werewolf in town is (at least until the enigmatic beast bites and curses poor Larry too).
At its heart, The Wolfman (2010) wishes to be an Oedipal tragedy as defined by Freud. Sir John and Lawrence are not only estranged from their years apart but also by a sense of primal rivalry. Hinted in the script to have been a strict disciplinarian (or toxically masculine in the modern parlance), Sir John is suggested to have verbally and perhaps physically abused Lawrence, “the fragile one.” We also later learn he sent Lawrence away to a mental institution as a child after the boy saw his father as a werewolf.
Indeed, Sir John is revealed to have spent the last 30 years or so as a lupine who would lock himself away in the crypt of his wife, and Lawrence’s mother, during each full moon. But after his eldest son, who we never really meet, becomes engaged with Gwenlyth Conliffe (Blunt), a woman who looks exactly like the raven-haired Romani whom Sir John married, and whose portrait hangs over his fireplace, the id inside of Sir John’s subconscious gained the upper-hand. He let the beast run free one full moon and it killed his eldest son. The next full moon, we get a front row seat to it damning the boy to a life of werewolfery.
The film culminates in Freudian nightmare after Lawrence, who has taken up a romantic connection with Gwen over the several months the movie is set, is forced to indulge his own id. The climax of the film isn’t whether the Wolfman will kill the girl, though that sequence from the ’41 flick is repeated with loving affection; it’s father and son letting their freak flags fly and demons out. When Lawrence’s werewolf finally slaughters his father’s lupine alter-ego, it is in the burning ruins of the family home and beneath a portrait of the dead mother/wife. Gwen is a surrogate for the woman they both jealously commit murder over.
It is a thematically rich conceit, but one which in execution is muddled. Some of that is perhaps because Johnston lacked a firm hand on Hopkins, who eagerly chews the scenery of every talky scene (of which there are many). Hopkins indeed snarls, chuckles, and literally winks at the camera in one bit after he tells his actor-son that it is up to him to decide if he wants “to be or not to be.”
Yet in something as naturally melodramatic and heightened as The Wolfman story, Hopkins’ hamminess is not unwelcome. It might even have fit well on a Victorian stage where Freudian interpretations of the id and super-ego really were getting the center spotlight via adaptations of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Frankenstein. It also fills a void left by del Toro.
It hurts to come down too harshly on Benicio del Toro, who is one of the best actors of his generation and also such an admirer of the original Lon Chaney Jr. movie that he became the one to convince Universal to remake Wolf Man as a lavish, R-rated horror movie. However, his naturalistic instincts and tendency to dramatically underplay every line is anathema to a story as melodramatic and florid as Wolfman.
Whereas every scene del Toro’s Lawrence has with Blunt or even Hugo Weaving as a Scotland Yard detective shows his co-stars finding the right keys for such earnestly overwrought material, del Toro’s introverted tendencies cause Lawrence to fade into the production design instead of anchoring it with tragedy. And opposite Hopkins’ twinkling malevolence, he all but disappears.
The lack of a compelling tragic hero also makes the film’s other flaws more glaring, including that despite Johnston enjoying classical Hollywood instincts, as demonstrated in the wonderful The Rocketeer and the similarly nostalgic Captain America: The First Avenger, his understanding of horror-building is off. The film is far too reliant on jump scares saying “boo” in absence of establishing genuine dread. And when the director’s cut runs at over two hours, this becomes a substantial problem.
But When It Rips, It Roars
The Wolfman of 2010 is a flawed movie that never quite stands at the heights it comes so close to conquering. Nonetheless, there is still a highly entertaining spectacle for audience members of a specific disposition.
Once again, the film is gorgeous to look at in nearly every moment. The drawing room scenes may not emotionally ensnare you, but the werewolf attacks are a different animal entirely. What the film lacks in terror it makes up for with pure schlocky adrenaline and spectacle in its best set pieces.
Pretty much every post-transformation scene where del Toro is in the full makeup is powered by a giddy gruesomeness. It’s playing to everyone who watched the old Universal and Hammer movies and cheered when the monster made its kills. Johnston shoots the first sequence where Baker and del Toro’s werewolf literally disembowels and eviscerates the local superstitious townsfolk with the glee of Superman taking flight.
And the centerpiece of the movie—where poor Lawrence is tied up in a straight jacket and taunted by “men of science” in a London asylum on the night of a full moon—is a classic setup of anticipation followed by swift dopamine delivery. For about 10 minutes these psychologists and white coats have tortured and condescended to our protagonist, and they literally laugh in his face when he begs them to kill him before he transforms. It’s as unsubtle as an old Vincent Price movie, but unlike those, we aren’t expected to shudder at the ensuing “horror.” Instead we revel in it as the werewolf literally eats his tormentors alive and then is unleashed on London in a cyclical homage to American Werewolf’s own tribute to the first Wolf Man.
It’s a pure play to the most base, lurid appeal of so many horror stories. Rather than hoping to scare you, it courts the lizard (or wolf) brain within, admitting so many of these monster movies are at their most entertaining when the monster is unchained.
It is not the stuff of classic cinema, and certainly not “elevated” horror. But in fleeting moments, it is wildly entertaining for the type of genre connoisseur who can appreciate old Johnny Talbot’s best bit of advice to his son: “The beast will have its day. The beast will out.”
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