Hot on the heels of yesterday’s disastrous monster reveal, Blumhouse and Universal have released a teaser trailer for Leigh Whannell’s upcoming Wolf Man remake. Have a look:
According to a new synopsis, “Golden Globe nominee Christopher Abbott (Poor Things, It Comes at Night) 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 (Emmy winner Julia Garner; Ozark, Inventing Anna), 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.”
Perhaps wisely, Blumhouse has decided to keep its titular “Wolf Man” off-camera for the first teaser—so what has the studio decided to show us instead? Some cool bugs, for starters! I’m totally down with that. The trailer begins with a preying mantis lunging at a wasp beetle, before reminding us this new remake is from the director of The Invisible Man and the producers of The Black Phone. You liked those, right? Though documentary-style insect footage isn’t the most intuitive choice to introduce your werewolf movie, it seems the film plans to meditate on the upsetting necessity of life needing to feed on other life to survive.
As the title is slowly sliced into the film itself, Abbot’s character promises to protect his wife and daughter from “what sounded like an animal, but was standing on two feet.” Naturally, this goes poorly for our doomed hero, and as the trailer illustrates, the film seems to take a Fly-esque approach to his inevitable transformation by having him slowly lose his teeth and fingernails. We finish off with a clawed hand punching through a car windshield as he comes for his terrified wife. It’s not a bad trailer, honestly—but if you’re one of the many people who found the creature depicted at Halloween Horror Nights off-putting, there’s little here to win you back.
Co-starring Sam Jaeger, Ben Prendergast, and Benedict Hardie, and produced by Ryan Gosling (who was once attached to star, before Abbott took over the role), Wolf Man is scheduled for a January 17 theatrical release date.
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