Sheeple linin’ up for the slaughter
There are primarily two wrong things with The Wolfman. One – it isn’t scary. And Two – it isn’t funny. The story starts with the brutal murder of a man on the Moors of England by an unseen beast. His brother (Benicio Del Toro) is summoned home to his family’s ancient estate. There he finds his father (Sir Anthony Hopkins) and plenty of townspeople full of the requisite idiocy needed to not figure out the very obvious fact that there is a werewolf on the prowl. The smartest of the sheeple (not a compliment) is a sheriff played by Hugo Weaving (Mr. Smith from The Matrix). Del Toro, Hopkins, and Weaving: These are some of the best dramatists in the business and they fit perfectly into this type of movie. Unfortunately there are not as many good writer as there are good actors. The most creative part of this movie happens when the werewolf is hunting down one of the sheeple. The sheeple gets cornered and tries shooting at the beast. When he notices he can’t kill it (supposedly because he forgot to load silver bullets into his gun) he tries to shoot himself in the head. He fails. To his terror the gun is out of bullets. Then the werewolf decapitates him with a flick of its wrist. There, you no longer have to see this movie. I just spoiled the best part.
It’s sad that the great actors in this movie are wasted. But what is really deplorable is why they were wasted and that's because this movie makes a series of false assumptions of how audiences fundamentally work. In doing so it omits several easy techniques that would easily scare the wits out of us and uses other techniques rather badly. But first let’s go back to the beginning and ask a very pressing important question: What do truly scary movies do and why does that scare us?
One of the scariest movies I've ever seen is Steven Spielberg's Jaws. After I saw that movie I was afraid of swimming alone in a pool. People make a huge deal out of John Williams haunting score and the fact that you can’t see the shark for so long. They say things like, “It’s so scary because it invites you to use your imagination to make the monster real.” Bullshit I say. If that were true than The Wolfman would be scary. That movie has a very good haunting score and for the longest time you don't see the werewolf. No, what makes the shark in Jaws so scary is that it is so thoroughly explained. You have the sheriff reading aloud from books on great whites. You have a scientist that speaks professionally about bite radiuses, feeding habits, and latin genus names. He explains it all very precisely, “It’s amazing. This thing is really a miracle of evolution. All it does is sleep and eat and make little sharks.” Now some of this is bad science but it doesn’t matter because there is so much credible sounding detail that the myth of the great white eating machine feels very real to us. Add in the historical anecdote about the worst shark attack ever, The USS Indianapolis, and your completely set. I am now afraid of my swimming pool.
The thing about The Wolfman is that it apparently thought werewolves are boring. They are never explained. Where did they come from? What do they want? Why does the moon make them crazy? Why would only silver bullets hurt them? Can true love really tame them and how the hell does that work? The writer doesn’t have to make these answers up. I assume they are part of werewolf lore. All he had to do was plagiarize from all those other werewolf movies in the past. But someone somewhere thought that even if we had great talkers like Del Toro, Hopkins, and Weaving explaining things, people would grow restless and become bored. That kind of lowest denominator thinking is really kind of insulting to the audience. May I remind those people that Jaws was a huge success. A person talking doesn’t inherently slow a movie down.
But let’s just assume that we don’t want to explain the monster at all in a movie. Can it still be scary? Yes, of course it can. I point to a great film from South Korea named The Host. In that movie a kind of mutated giant lizard terrorizes a city in South Korea. Nobody knows what the monster is or where it came from but is it still scary. Why? Because when they showed the monster it moved in a rational way as if it was beholden to such things as the law of physics. There is an incredibly good monster “terrorizing a crowd” scene where the giant lizard rampages over many people, killing several. It is especially effective because it is very skillfully shown in long shots. You can see the monster galloping over to a person and eating them in about as much time as it should take for said imaginary monster to do so. This gives a sense of reality to the entire thing. It allows the audience to be able to predict just how much time a man has to run away from it to safety. That creates suspense and is especially scary when we understand that the man won’t make it and see that he doesn’t.
In contrast, the werewolf in this movie sometimes follows the laws of physics and sometimes it doesn’t. A lot of the time he just pops into the frame to give the viewer a jolt. This may scare in the short term but it doesn’t provide suspense and it isn’t going to leave a lasting impression. Why? Because the thing triggers all those nerves in our head that says, "Hey it's okay, this is just special effects."
This movie omits much of the needed dialogue to explain the beast or develop the story or characters. It skips to special effects scenes that don’t make sense and thus aren’t exciting. This gives the viewer the sense that they are watching a movie both in fast-forward and in slow motion at the same time. Everything is hurried through and nothing is happening. The one saving grace a horror movie that isn't scary can have is if it is funny. But this movie wasn’t funny. In fact the only laughs it got were bad laughs. They took place when the only woman in the story stopped the sheriff from killing the beast so she could try to tame it by pure love. After a nice run through the woods and a lot of weeping and pleading, the beast stalls just as he is about to kill her. At this moment of truth she kills the beast herself. A guy in front of me yelled, “Weak!” and everyone laughed. I didn't care about the interruption because I didn't care about the story (although I do wonder what exactly her plan had been all along.)
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