Wolf Man (2025) Blumhouse Horror without the Bite
“Mummy. He wants this to be over”
I may be a difficult to please fan of horror but in recent years Jason Blum and his Blumhouse Productions House of Horror (Split, Get Out, Five Nights at Freddy’s, The Black Phone) have somewhat reinvented the horror genre but sadly, and it may just be me being a difficult wolf man and hard to please, but this continuation in The Wolf Man franchise just left me howling at a full moon.
Here are the opening 12 minutes:
Through the Blumhouse opening credits and amid the earliest of rumbles of thunder we cut immediately and noisily to what appears to be a wasp being ravaged by an army of ants and then yet more loud cracks of thunder accompanying a dark, misty and gloomy overhead shot of a farm below and the film’s opening crawl:
“In early 1995, a hiker went missing in the remote mountains of central Oregon”.
“After several sightings some members of the isolated community began speculating that the missing man had contracted an animal-borne virus they called “Hills Fever”.
“The indigenous people who came before called it something else”
“Ma’iingan Odengwan or “Face of the Wolf”
From the previous overhead shot of the farm we now cut rapidly between the buildings now on ground level, a farmhouse, outhouse, a working farm building with an array of chickens and a “deer blind” building all soundtracked by distant rumblings of thunder before dissolving onto the face of a young boy “Blake” (Zac Chandler) jumping quickly out of bed as a distant cry of “Ten Hut!” from his father “Grady” (Sam Jaeger) rouses him from his early morning sleep and immediately downstairs for breakfast. Amid smiles for the family Alsatian puppy obediently at his feet, the time is approaching 7am and an early morning deer hunt for the father and son last seen together at the kitchen sink and from the first of a number of shots in the film capturing two characters deliberately, and quietly, from behind. We now cut to two quickly edited overhead shots of first the dense early morning forest below and then a rolling river before the second signature shot of the film and the father and son captured from behind again as they quietly admire the forest wilderness in front of them before with a close-up angle on Grady he breaks the silence with the telling and rhetorical question “This view never gets old, does it?”.
We now cut to the father and son traversing the outskirts of the river before a close up on a collection of wild mushrooms dissolves into Blake, somewhat lost in his own thoughts, approaching them. Angrily admonished by Grady for even thinking about touching or picking these “death cap mushrooms” from the ground, the father is furious with his son for his lack of conscious thought. This sets the scene and tone for both the opening of the film and the film as a whole, with Blake scared and distant from a parent he can only call “sir” in deference and a father or parent as equally distant from their children resorting to anger and talk of protecting them from the world around them and a life that can be extinguished in an instant. Their awkward exchange, and the father’s bubbling anger, is only brought to an end by a distant snapping of a twig and Blake’s spotting of a nearby deer. Quickly capturing the deer in the scope of his rifle, Grady is equally quickly frustrated as the deer moves behind a tree and turning around, he sees Blake is missing. Running through the forest and ostensibly chasing the deer for a better shot, Blake nestles in a firing position and looking through his rifle scope he can’t locate the deer. But what does he see through his scope? A bear perhaps, or was it the Wolf Man of myth and legend? Blake looks again and although he sees neither the latter day hunting prey of a deer nor the fabled Wolf Man, a low growling can be heard in the near distance and growing ever scared he begins retracing his steps but with the roars and growling getting louder and with a spinning camera circling him, Blake is all alone and scared as an angry Grady grabs him and furious once again for his son running off on his own. As Blake tries to explain he was simply chasing the trail of the deer the distant growling grows ever louder.
As the father and son retreat quickly to a nearby deer blind, Grady locks the small door and suggests Blake cover his ears as his trains his rifle on the locked door. With panting and growling increasing second by second and nearer and nearer to their precarious wooden box perched in the sky, Grady fires through the door and after continued growling and snarling comes a thud on the ground and footsteps retreating from the deer blind merging with the cawing of birds in the distance. We cut to a camera angle from ground level looking up at the deer blind and as Grady hesitantly surveys the area above the door we see there are claw marks evident and now looking through his rifle scope at the surrounding area we now see the fresh and bloodied corpse of a deer before a flash of an animal passing the scope. Was it another deer? A bear? The Wolf Man?
“What was it Dad” asks a petrified Blake. “A bear” Grady replies, lying.
We cut for a final time in the opening minutes of the film back to the farm later that evening to find Blake slowly and quietly descending the stairs into the basement where Grady is on the CB radio confirming to a friend that he saw “the face of the wolf” and “in my scope” and he’s going to return the next day to hunt it down. Blake inadvertently bumps into a nearby table, both alerting his father to his presence and raising his anger yet again before quickly running back up the stairs and away from the basement.
“30 years later”…….
Written and Directed by Leigh Whannell (Insidious: Chapter 3, Upgrade and The Invisible Man) there’s an obvious through line to this, his fourth all time film from the director’s chair, and that’s a present day familial tale of distance between working parents and their children and although bathed in frustration and anger, their primordial response of care and protection still remains. 30 years later we have a son and now adult “Blake” (Christopher Abbott) grieving for the father whose footsteps he’s following and a mother “Charlotte” (Julia Garner) estranged from and too busy for a distant husband and racked with guilt for not having a motherly relationship with her daughter “Ginger” (Matilda Firth). 10 year old Yorkshire born Firth is your star of this grisly horror show and in only her fifth all time outing on the big screen, and perhaps it’s therefore fitting we conclude with a film that I warmed to second time around but which still lacks the bite of a real time horror film with my favourite line of the film:
“Mummy. He wants this to be over”.
Sadly Matilda, so did I. But my son loves the film and tried, in vain, to persuade me how great it was. I did say I was a hard to please fan of horror films!
Thanks for reading. I hope this message in a bottle in The Matrix finds you well, prospering, and the right way up in an upside down world.
Whilst you’re here I may as well brag about the release of my trilogy of recently self-published books. Beautiful covers eh! As the title(s) would suggest, this is my life at the movies or at least from 1980 to 2024, and in volume 1 you’ll find 80 spoiler free appraisals of movies from debut filmmakers, 91 of the very best films appraised with love and absent of spoilers from 1990–2024 in volume 2, and in volume 3 you’ll find career “specials” on Paul Thomas Anderson and Quentin Tarantino together with the very best of the rest and another 87 spoiler free film reviews from 2001–2024.
All available in hardback and paperback and here are some handy links:
"A Life at the Movies Vol.1" - link to Amazon
"A Life at the Movies Vol.2" - link to Amazon
"A Life at the Movies Vol.3" - link to Amazon