A campaign for real werewolves?

Martin Anderson

With no CGI werewolves in 2009's The Wolf Man, is real-tech horror set for a return?

Published on Mar 30, 2008

If any movie monster has fared badly under the aegis of second-rate CGI, it has to be the humble werewolf. Next to eyes, fur and hair are the most insuperable challenge for digital effects artists; even if the more hirsute modern movie monster doesn't have to put up with the same itchy-looking pelt as Willis O'Brien's original King Kong, the fur-creation/behaviour algorithms still suck, and it takes nearly as long to render the teeming millions of polygons in a furscape as it did for Deep Thought to figure out that the meaning of life is 42.

Give a job that hard to the lowest bidder and you end up with An American Werewolf in Paris, and a bunch of unintentionally comic lycanthropes that even Fred Flintstone would call bullshit. There's been some progress: the Doctor Who series 2 episode 'Tooth and Claw' features a shaggy nasty that's no worse than those in Paris, even if it does look like it was rendered on a BBC micro for a fraction of the cost, and there's one half-decent wolf-out for the Lycans in Underworld: Evolution, effortlessly besting the ludicrous wolves in the original. To boot, Roland Emmerich's 10,000 BC boasts some pretty convincing wooly mammoths.

But these are sporadic and unreliable splutters and glimmers in a pre-alpha technology that isn't really ready for follicles, and Joe Johnston may be building up the impetus of anti-CGI feeling started by Quentin Tarantino - whose action-packed Death Proof is said to be CGI-free - by deciding that his much-anticipated The Wolf Man has eschewed the render-farm for the more traditional talents of six-time Oscar-winning make-up wizard Rick Baker.

Baker is no lightweight with shaggy horrors, having created the extraordinary transformation in John Landis's An American Werewolf In London, as well as simian concoctions King Kong (1976), the sasquatch in Harry And The Hendersons (1987), Jack Nicholson's darker and less-shaved side in Wolf (1994) and the extraordinary Joe in the otherwise ropey Mighty Joe Young (1998).

Benicio Del Toro's prosthetically-enhanced wolf-man may be the acid test that convinces Hollywood that CGI - at anything below the best ILM-quality output (that's 95% of all CGI) - is becoming a big yawn and spell-breaker for cinema-goers. That said, Empire reports that some CGI will be used in the transformation sequences.

Following in the current Hollywood trend of hyping movies that only our children may live to see, Universal have released some very moody pictures of the Spring 2009 film, featuring a wolfed-out Del Toro in what can only be described as a poor mood.

The remake of the classic 1941 chiller, which established most of the lore followed by werewolf movies since then, features Del Toro as a late 19th century American getting a nasty bout of lycanthropy when he returns to his homeland, and features Matrix and V For Vendetta actor Hugo Weaving as the Scotland Yard copper on his trail.

Horror-mad Universal Studios retain exclusive rights to make any film called The Wolf Man, Frankenstein or Dracula, and are said to be interested in reviving all these franchises.