0
0
Currently howling on screens across the country, Werewolves is being described as “The Purge with werewolves,” and that description is not wrong. In fact, it’s pretty spot on. But for an even more accurate idea of what you’re in for, think of an ‘80s or ‘90s action movie. Now, set it against a zombie apocalypse, and change those zombies to werewolves. Oh, and there’s one more very important layer to add to this visual salad: FX legend Alec Gillis (Prey, Alien3) made those werewolves. Still with me? Then this movie is made for you.
Werewolves goes off the rails when it needs to, but only in a way that enhances the fun. It feels like the sort of movie I would have pulled off a video store shelf and excitedly shared with friends, back in the good old days. The bulk of the 94-minute runtime involves high-octane car chases, explosions, crashes, and machine guns. That’s largely in part to director Steven C. Miller growing up on a healthy diet of action and horror, a blend which has sort of become his forte. Miller does not shy away from humor, nor does he skimp on the action.
“My favorite movies growing up were the original Terminator, which in my opinion, is a slasher movie. That kind of movie hit me pretty hard early on because I loved how scrappy it was and it just felt like a big movie,” says Miller. “When it came to actual horror stuff, I was into Fright Night, things that were a little bit more monster-oriented. Monster Squad was a big movie for me growing up. In my teens, it was the original Blade, I loved that movie. Even the first Resident Evil I just loved the way they mixed horror and action in all of those movies and that late 90s, early 00s Dark Castle vibe.”
In spite of his deep seated love for Monster Squad, Miller chose to forego any “Wolfman’s got nards” jokes. But that doesn’t mean Werewolves is entirely free of Easter eggs and callbacks.
“There’s a great Demons callback in the movie when all the wolves are sort of gathering together,” he teases. “There are a couple from Jurassic Park thrown in there. We could have gone on a tangent with Monster Squad because the movie is so much fun. They had to keep me from going off the rails with this because I was having so much fun, and I just kept thinking we could do a beeline over here and go do this with the movie, and everybody’s like ‘keep it moving get Frank home’ I’m like alright okay fine.”
Miller is candid about the fact that this film is independently financed without a massive marketing budget, but they certainly opted to spend that limited budget on all the right things. Werewolves lead Frank Grillo, for instance. And FX maestro Gillis, for another. If you’re going to call your movie Werewolves then you’d better deliver. As much as Miller doesn’t skimp on humor and action, he absolutely does not skimp on the creatures here. In fact, the beasts get more ample screentime than most creature features allot to their star monsters:
“When I read the script, I knew there were going to be a lot of werewolves on screen. I was trying to put as many as possible. We had to go get the right guys, and obviously Alec Gillis is a legend. So the plan was, let’s put all our money to those guys and make sure the werewolves look awesome, that way everyone really understands it’s a werewolf movie. If those don’t work, the movie doesn’t work.”
When it came to the initial werewolf design, Gillis and Miller had conversations about their favorite werewolf movies and creatures. Gillis says the two were on the same page right off the bat: “We both were kind of landing in the same area, something that towers over someone. The seven-foot guy was always something that we wanted and I’m dialed into that, having done so many Alien and Predator movies with that sort of character.”
Miller infused a variety into the werewolves that added some additional fun to the final mix, revealing that “I was like a kid in a candy store with this movie just trying to put as much as I could on the screen, give the werewolves as much personality as I could to make them feel different, fun and unique. When you have a punk rock wolf dropping down out of the sky everybody’s like ‘what’s happening right now?’”
Yes, you read that correctly: A punk rock wolf.
Gillis expands: “We really wanted to have a broad-shouldered smaller-headed werewolf with a slim waist, but also a little bit lean-looking because wolves are actually quite lean. That was nice to kind of be able to play a little bit with that anatomy. Not make something too bulky. I think that’s a danger where you end up with somebody so encased in rubber that they can’t really move very well so they’re not very athletic, and they also don’t look sleek, and they don’t look sexy. That was part of it, but we wanted very evil faces. I always thought of this script as a graphic novel.”
Another major question when it comes to werewolf design: How do they walk? “The bipedal vs quadrupedal thing was a big question. You can see some quadrupedal stuff in the film, which I think is interesting to mix it up a little bit. They can be on all fours, they can be on two legs, and once we got into the heavy action the quadrupedal stuff was a little more cumbersome. To really make that work you need the resources for overhead rigs that can support them. Tim Burton’s Planet of the Apes is a good example of guys on quadrant with arm extensions who can really just tear around. We did a little bit of some stalking stuff.”
The initial plan was to do practical transformations and create digital werewolves, but as Gillis began to map it out, the plan changed out of necessity. “Practical transformation stuff is very costly, and I’d love to do it, but I said we might need to invert this. Maybe instead of doing all digital werewolves, which are gonna wear thin on people over time and probably be unaffordable, we should make practical werewolves, and we should do the transformations digitally,” Gillis explains. “We’ll have the endpoint that I created. So you just have to get from a human being to that endpoint.”
To that end, Gillis and his team built five practical full-size werewolf suits and a series of animatronic werewolf heads. The “A-heads” feature roughly 20 motors, allowing for nuanced movements like lip curls and expressive eyebrow movement. The B-heads had fewer moving parts but still allowed for “some snarling but otherwise, no eye movement, no brow movement, no ear movement. That was good for mid-ground guys. We ended up using the B-heads a lot in fight sequences because they’re lighter weight.”
For those digital transformations, Gillis already had the perfect longtime collaborator for the job. “I recommended my friend Scott Anderson, who I worked with on Starship Troopers, Hollow Man and some other movies. He’s the kind of guy that is going to really bring something dynamic, he’s had a long career sort of half in practical, half digital. He’s just a really great guy, I’m proud to have lost an Oscar with him.”
Miller isn’t precious about rationing our werewolf servings, instead serving up packs of the hairy beasts on full, moonlit display. Which is awesome for a werewolf-loving audience, but for the FX team, Gillis describes it as “a double-edged sword”, albeit one that can be eased with the right coverage.
“Steven has such a great kind of unflagging level of energy. If you don’t have a whole bunch of shots of these werewolves, then you have less of a chance of making them look cool. There’s always some moment where it stops looking like a cool, ravenous monster and starts looking like an exhausted guy in a rubber suit, and you have to cut around those. You need lots of angles, and you need lots of coverage. Steven really pushed through, and his whole run-and-gun style developed through his low-budget experience translated really well to a practical effects action movie.
“It’s like the ‘80s again where practical FX are carrying this movie, so we gotta step up,” Gillis notes. “Then I’m like ‘oh God could we not show them off today, we haven’t had a chance to fix them up…’ but then you watch the movie, and everything does flow seamlessly. There are moments where I go ‘oh yeah that was shot at the beginning of the film when they looked pristine.’ By day 28 of 16-hour days, these things are really starting to look a little ratty.”
But the way around that, is a cinematographer who understands how to shoot practical FX. Gillis has plenty of praise for Werewolves cinematographer Brandon Cox: “The great thing is you have rain, you have nighttime, and you have Brandon Cox, the cinematographer who really just knew exactly how to shoot it from the get-go. He really helped the look of the wolves, which is what we’ve always done since forever.
“It’s a real thing, so you need to light it like a real thing and not expect it necessarily to look a hundred percent awesome at any angle in any lighting. That just doesn’t exist in life, and it doesn’t exist in practical effects. The only place that thinking exists is in digital effects where you think, well, it can be anything, but that results in maybe more bland lighting or full frontal lighting, and it’s not scary anymore.”
Miller has managed to wrangle one hell of a team for this independently financed film. “I love the process in general of making movies, but I think a lot of people continue to work with me or enjoy working with me because I’m just having so much fun. We’re having a blast on set. We were having a blast months before we even got there with Alec and in his creature shop. I was there all the time, I just wanted to be involved and have fun.”
“It’s so surreal because you’re just thinking God I watched this stuff growing up,” he reminisces. “You watched the behind the scenes of this stuff growing up, and so when you’re there it’s just a moment. You have to take it in and just go ‘okay I just want to live here for a second’ and enjoy all of that.”
Miller and Gillis both shared they have an abundance of ideas and new things they’d love to try should a sequel be in the cards. Now, that’s in the audience’s hands.
Werewolves is now in theaters. Grab your pack and head to your local cinema this weekend. We say it all the damn time, the best way to support indie horror is to get our butts in the seats, so let’s go!
