Werewolf By Night (2022)

Tonight’s movie is technically as a “TV Special” instead of a movie, but as a stand alone story of 52 minutes length and some of the movies it pays homage to are only around one hour too I feel this counts. “Werewolf By Night” is technically part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, though the story has no direct links or mention of other aspects of the MCU so it is for all intents and purposes a separate world (At least for now). The story is based around two Marvel characters that date back to the early 1970’s, the title character (Often just referred to as “The Werewolf” in the comics) is joined by “Man-Thing” a character similar to DC’s “Swamp Thing” but who debuted two months earlier. The story is directed by Michael Giacchino and written by Heather Quinn and Peter Cameron. It starts Gael García Bernal and Laura Donnelly.

October Review Challenge – Day 27

The story starts (In black and white) with the introduction of an ancient society of monster hunters. The groups leader, Ulysses Bloodstone (Another character taken directly from the 70’s comics) has died recently and so they need to crown a new leader of this society. For this purpose they have designed a special monster hunt where the winner is not only crowned the leader but also gains possession of the powerful artifact the “Bloodstone” (Whose red glow is the only colour on screen for most of the film).

The participants are those hunters with the highest kill ratio, including Jack Russell (Bernal) and Bloodstone’s estranged daughter Elsa (Donnelly). The hunters are only allowed to use the weapons hidden around the estate and may combat each other as well as the creature. Spoilers ahead (Though I don’t feel these are big ones).

Werewolf Amongst Us

Unbeknownst to the rest of the hunters and the events hostess (Bloodstone’s widow Verussa), Russell is not there to hunt the monster and has no interest in the Bloodstone, he is actually a friend of the monster and there to free him. He ends up teaming up with Elsa who is very different to the other hunters herself. The rest of the group are vicious and bloodthirsty, as eager to fight and kill each other as they are to hunt the monster.

But when Elsa and Russell cross paths they clearly have no interest in fighting and as a result end up working together, especially when Russell comes clean to Elsa that he isn’t after the Stone, only the Monster, whom he calls “Ted”. As the Hunt concludes, Verussa turns on Elsa and Russell and this sets up a final confrontation where we finally get to see the Werewolf the story is named for. No spoilers for what happens here, but you can probably guess as a Marvel film who is going to come out on top.

Wait… Marvel did something good again?

One of the reasons I wanted to review this is because Marvel has been incredibly disappointing for me over the last few year. The good story they’ve attempted to tell since “End Game” was “Spider-Man: No Way Home”. As a result I didn’t rush in to watch this, but when I did it was a huge relief. This was very well made. Here we see versions of classic Marvel characters actually done justice too. So while I’m focused on horror this month I really wanted to highlight Marvel doing something actually good!

There is a little bit of modern day subversion thrown in and Jack and Ted have some changes to their comic book personality but the changes work so that’s not really a problem. Elsa being a post 2000 character I’m less familiar with as I have read few Marvel comics post 2000 (and the ones I read I didn’t like that much), but the character on screen is good and seems like a good combination of ass kicking and actually being likeable.

A love letter to Universal

The most impressive part of this story by far though is the visuals. The intent here is to make people think of the classic Universal Monster movies of the 1930’s (and to a lesser extent the 1940’s) and to achieve this the most obvious creative decision is the use of black and white. However, this isn’t a grainy film black and white, it is a very clean modern black and white, with a spot of red thrown in through the bloodstone. A touch that was not needed, but looked damn good visually so I still approve.

The design of many of the visuals, such as the use of the ancient mansion and of the shadow play do a great job of reminding you of the Universal movies without being overly limited by that nostalgia. They have a lot more space to play with but they make sure to drop in a more Claustrophobic feel every now and then. Really outside artificially reducing the the quality of the picture and the effects there is not much else they could do to make it feel authentic. This takes the best aspects of the modern and mixes it with the best aspects of that classic style.

The Wolf Man and The Giant Sized Man-Thing!

One of the best examples here is in the design of The Werewolf. It’s worth noting he’s had several different looks in the comic, so creative changes are par for the course. Here they’ve basically taken a design that is similar to both 1935’s “Werewolf of London” and 1941’s “The Wolfman” but then taken to the pinnacle of what you can achieve with CGI. It creates perhaps the best looking werewolf I’ve seen on screen for a long time. The transformation is done beautifully too with

Contrasting to that Man-Thing (a.k.a. Ted, the hunted monster) is kept largely to his comic book look and while he is black and white, he obviously would never fit with a Universal movie of the 1930’s. They could have tried to make him look like a guy in a suit or something but it would have ruined it so they didn’t, they just made him look like the comic and it worked superbly.

Music To My Ears.

Outside of the look (Which is always going to be the main thing with this special/movie), I have to compliment the use of music. It’s worth noting Michael Giacchino is actually better known as a composer. This is his directorial debut and so naturally he did the music. But this allowed him to work the music precisely against the images on screen. This is another sensible change from how things were actually done for the peak period of the Universal Horrors from 1930-1936.

In those years speech on film was new and while silent movies had accompanying music (and occasionally original scores, such as for Nosferatu), the early talkies tended to have minimal non-diegetic music (that is, music that doesn’t have an on screen source) and the music that was there tended to be stock music, usually classical and in the case of Universal horror often mixed very low. So the use of music here is less about nostalgia and more about enhancing the visuals and it works well. This is a case of creating things how people remember it instead of how it was. No complaints here.

Assessment

Though the story doesn’t really tax any of the actors they all perform their jobs well enough. There is no particular stand out but no let downs either. The story is engaging and fun but also very straight forward. We go in knowing who the Werewolf is (Even if it wasn’t on the poster you’d guess in seconds) and we know inevitably he’ll wolf out, so there is no real complexity there.

Along that many of the side characters lack a bit for the short screen time. Honestly though with only 50 minutes of time they tell the story they needed to, they don’t break anything in doing it, they introduce three interesting characters and the have a good mixture of fun and engagement along the way.

It does what it needs to and nothing more. Clearly Giacchino was given free reign to do what he wanted (where as with the MCU usually the directors have little control) and it paid off big. I don’t know if this will prod the MCU into a more interesting direction through it’s success, but I do hope we get to see more of these characters in the future.

On the other hand it may end up as Marvel’s “Joker” an outlier reminding us of what is possible, but what may not ever be the studios preferred path. Perhaps more of note for the future though is Giacchino, a man that clearly has as much of an eye for visuals as he has an ear for music. If Universal had any sense to them they’d pouch him and get him to work with the actual Universal Monsters.

Conclusion

Overall, with such a short amount of time this achieves a lot. It’s not perfect, but what it lacks is mostly what could have been added instead of mistakes with what is there. I think this is well deserving of the second 7/10 from me this October. Time is running out for anything to overtake so as it stands so far this “Special” is my number 2 horror (or horror adjacent) movie this year around.