How Did They Design the Terrifying New Wolf Man? Everything to Know
To reinvent a horror icon, director Leigh Whannell drew inspiration from body horror and Heath Ledger's Joker.
Wolf Man, writer-director Leigh Whannell’s reimagining of the classic Universal Monster starring Christopher Abbott and Julia Garner, is in theaters this weekend (get tickets here). Like he did with his 2020 version of The Invisible Man, Whannell promises to reinvent an icon of classic horror cinema.
One of the most-discussed elements of Wolf Man is the design of its titular creature, which pays tribute to famous film werewolves of years past while doing something undeniably fresh and new. Here’s everything to know about the new design of Wolf Man.
The classic Wolf Man look goes back over 80 years
The original 1941 film The Wolf Man, starring Lon Chaney Jr. in the titular role, broke new ground for monster makeup in cinema. Makeup designer Jack Pierce, who also crafted the iconic look of Boris Karloff in Frankenstein, spent over five hours each day transforming Chaney into a werewolf, applying fur, fangs, and a lupine nose and snout. Two years later, Chaney returned to the role for Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man.
Though there were many films featuring werewolves in the decades that followed, Universal didn’t return to its original Wolf Man series until 2010, with The Wolfman (no space this time!), from director Joe Johnston, with star Benicio del Toro in the titular role. That film’s makeup designs were handled by Rick Baker, an icon of horror cinema who had also famously worked on the makeup for another werewolf classic, An American Werewolf in London. For The Wolfman, Baker aimed to recreate the look of Pierce’s original classic design. With modern special effects technology, the application to del Toro only took three hours each day. For his work on the film, Baker and makeup effects supervisor Dave Elsey won the 2011 Academy Award for Best Makeup.
Reinventing the Wolf Man for modern audiences
For 2025’s Wolf Man, Whannell and makeup designer Arjen Tuiten set out to reinvent the horror icon. Rather than attempt to recreate the look of the version of the characters played by Chaney and del Toro in previous Wolf Man movies, Whannell and Tuiten reconceived the character from the perspective of body horror. In the behind-the-scenes featurette above, Whannell explains that he was inspired by the grotesque transformations of films like The Thing and The Fly, while Tuiten notes that it's the appearance of characters transforming between ”two anatomies trying to mix that don’t quite go together, and it’s a painful one at that.”
The clip below reveals part of the transformation sequence from Wolf Man, and it looks gnarly. We see Abbott’s character Blake contort in pain, as his body becomes hairier and his fingernails extend into claws, pulling apart from his fingers. His teeth become fang-like, and the shape of his face becomes distorted, less human and more canine.
Terrifying as he is, this Wolf Man isn’t a traditional take on a werewolf. He’s hairy, but not covered in fur, and while certainly far from human, his features aren’t straight-up canine like earlier versions of the Wolf Man.
How Leigh Whannell designed the new Wolf Man
In an interview with io9, Whannell spoke about his inspiration in bringing a reinvented version of such a classic character to the screen. Whannell explained that one touchpoint for him and Tuiten was Heath Ledger’s iconic version of the Joker from The Dark Knight.
“That’s an iconic character. Chris Nolan’s coming into this movie,” Whannell said. “There’s so many different ways you can go with the Joker, right? As we’ve seen. I feel like he made a conscious decision to give people a Joker they had not seen before. And it worked. And so that was my thinking going into this was 'What do I do?' And I felt like you can’t compete with Rick Baker and what he did on American Werewolf in London. So what if I took more of a disease approach? And approached it more like something like The Fly?”
Rather than the more magical, fantastical iterations of lycanthropy that we’ve seen in previous films, this gruesome new take of the Wolf Man comes at the werewolf transformation as a type of disease. Blake isn’t transformed into a literal wolf, but rather, is infected with something that’s taking over and distorting his body in a lupine direction.
After soft launching at Universal Studios Hollywood’s Halloween Horror Nights 2024, some folks on social media expressed surprise at how unlike a traditional werewolf the new character design looked. However, Whannell explained in an interview with Screen Rant that the theme park version of the character wasn’t the ideal representation of the Wolf Man we see in the movie.
“I was like, we have to pull the pin on this thing because people out there are going to think that's what we're doing. It would be like judging the Freddy Krueger makeup by a costume at Spirit Halloween,” Whannell said. “Makeup itself is one component. It’s lighting. It’s how you shoot it. It's where you position the actor. There's so many different things that go into it. If Jeff Goldblum was to wander in here wearing the makeup from The Fly under these fluorescent lights, it probably wouldn't look that great. It's how it was photographed.”
Audiences can catch more of the new, reinvented Wolf Man in all his glory and horror when Wolf Man hits theaters on January 17! Tickets are now on sale right here!
