Glancing at the top films currently streaming on Amazon Prime, there’s the sense that we’re already in deep autumn at the height of scary movie season. American Psycho, Smile 2, Abigail, and the great first season of the Hannibal series are all trending on Amazon Prime. It’s barely September, but I’ve been craving screen screams since the end of July, and sometimes one must go frightfully with the flow.
In fact, the werewolf stands in marked contrast to modern society’s murderous taste for war, its dehumanizing capitalism, and its rape of the natural world. The curse of the werewolf is not a curse of death. The werewolf’s curse is too much life.
That’s a quote from the Disinformation World News podcast way back in 2009. My “Insomnia” segments were a regular feature of the show. I wrote and produced essays about conspiracy theories, archaeological mysteries, mythology and folkloric creatures like werewolves. I love werewolves, and when I saw that Wolf Man (2025) was now streaming on Amazon Prime, I knew my scary movie season was going to begin.
Blake Lovell (Christopher Abbott) is a writer and a stay-at-home dad living in San Francisco. Blake is estranged from his strict survivalist father, Grady, and when he gets news of the old man’s passing, Blake inherits his childhood home and moves his family to rural Oregon for the summer. The film is a reboot of the 1941 Universal Monster classic, The Wolf Man. It follows Blake, his workaholic journalist wife Charlotte (Julia Garner), and their young daughter Ginger (Matilda Firth) as they arrive at the remote farmhouse. On their first night, an unseen creature attacks their van in the woods, forcing them to barricade themselves inside the house.
The movie sets its tone in a flashback to Blake’s childhood when he first encountered the monster on a hunting expedition with his father. The scene establishes the dangerous nature of the Oregon woods and introduces the film’s theme of fathers as protectors of their families. Blake is wounded in the attack at the farmhouse and begins to exhibit strange symptoms — he experiences heightened senses and erratic behavior. As the night progresses, his worsening transformation into the title creature shifts focus to Charlotte. She steps up to protect Ginger as Blake becomes more wolf than man.
The most unique aspect of Wolf Man is that the central events unfold over a single night. The family’s isolation in the dark, foggy woods and the farmhouse’s claustrophobic setting feel like a contemporary American refitting of the eerie British gothic atmosphere of the original film. As Blake’s transformation unfolds slowly over every scene, the film’s creative makeup effects evoke Cronenberg’s body horror in The Fly more than the visceral transformations of American Werewolf in London or The Howling. With monsters roaming inside and outside the farmhouse, Charlotte and Ginger are terrorized and paralyzed with the kind of uncertainty you only find in a Clash song:
If I go, there will be trouble
And if I stay, it will be double
The film is directed and co-written by Leigh Whannell. Whannell’s The Invisible Man (2020) was a remarkable remake of that Universal Monster classic, and I had high hopes for how he might update The Wolf Man. Abbott’s dark broodiness recalls Lon Chaney Jr.’s demeanor in the original, and Julia Garner is always an actress worth watching. Whannell uses audio and visual effects to shift between Blake’s increasingly canine point of view and Charlotte’s perspective as a loving wife and mother in a crisis.
Wolf Man is at its best when it focuses on being a scary picture about a monster in the woods. Whannell’s attempts to explore the couple’s troubled marriage only make the characters less likable, and the overarching metaphor about fathers protecting their children feels like a clumsy attempt to shoehorn more unnecessary family drama into a horror flick. This movie has a dark forest where a werewolf lives, and it’s an eerie, fun fright picture when it embraces its genre instead of struggling to transcend it.
Wolf Man is streaming on Amazon Prime.
Joe Nolan is a critic, columnist and performing singer/songwriter based in East Nashville. Find out more about his projects at www.joenolan.com.