The following contains spoilers for Wolf Man
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Summary
- The ending of Blumhouse’s Wolf Man is somber and deals with loss in a family living through a cursed night.
- Whannell creates a metaphorical and literal curse in Wolf Man, focusing on a man’s transformation.
- In a tragic twist, it is revealed that the creature that caused chaos and death was the protagonist’s father.
Like any really good horror movie, the ending of Blumhouse‘s Wolf Man is not some uplifting ending where everyone lives happily ever after. It’s credibly somber. People are dealing with loss and a family is dealing with living through a night that no one could ever really imagine. The entire tone of Wolf Man is one of people trying to make it through life living under the specter of a curse.
Curses aren’t real of course, though in Wolf Man, Leigh Whannell found a way to make the main characters live under a metaphorical curse and then, through the form of a virus, an actual curse that changes people forever. This remake of the well-known story is given a completely different setting and completely different characters and manages to make a monster movie while also putting the focus on how those around the titular character are affected as he transforms from regular guy, to something much more sinister.
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What Happens In Wolf Man
The Wolf Man opens with a young Blake and his father, Grady on a hunting trip. It’s established early on that Grady loves his son, but tends to have his overprotectiveness manifest in anger. After a little yelling and crying the two see something in the woods that looks like man but doesn’t behave as one.
After avoiding the attack and getting home safely, Blake stumbles on his father talking on a CB radio to another hunter about how he’s going to out and look for the thing they saw. The movie then shoots forward to adult Blake who now has a wife and daughter who finds that his father, who had been missing for a long time has been declared dead by the state of Oregon and Blake is now tasked with packing up his father’s house.
The marriage between Blake and Charlotte is clearly in trouble and Blake decides that the whole family should go up to Oregon to spend some time in the woods to check out the scenery, unwind and heal. And this is where Wolf Man really starts to spin up.
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When the family arrives, they get lost and run into another hunter who is willing to show them where his father’s house is. Unfortunately, this little delay allowed it become dark and the time of the Wolf Man. The monster attacks the moving truck after it crashes because it nearly hit him and Blake is scratched during the attack, getting what this movie pitches as a virus that turns people into the titular creature.
The rest of Blumhouse’s horror flick is all about Blake first not understanding what is happening and then slowly but surely realizing that he is turning into something less than a man and more than a wolf. Eventually, he’s a danger to his family, while still trying desperately to hold onto his humanity and then the Wolf Man that attacked them to start all of this off shows up and begins his attack anew.
How Does Wolf Man End?
After becoming the titular monster, Blake doesn’t survive the ending of Wolf Man — but the way that he’s killed is more tragic than a satisfying ending for him or his family. After being infected by a mysterious creature’s attack, Blake spends much of the film slowly losing himself to an apparent illness and transforming into a similar animalistic state. Although he steadily becomes less human, Blake notably retains some elements of his human personality and perspective.
This shows itself at the end of the movie when he is almost entirely gone. He’s defeated the monster that transformed him and killed him, but because he’s almost fully transformed he starts chasing his wife and daughter through the countryside. Eventually, the chase leads Charlotte and Ginger to take refuge in the same dear blind where young Blake and his father hid from the first Wolf Man.
While the transformed Blake does find the two, Ginger realizes that he’s hesitating and she tells her mother that he wants it to end, he wants Charlotte to shoot him and kill him. In this story, the creature can be killed like anything else, there’s no need for silver bullets and Charlotte has a hunting rifle that will finish the job. He lunges one last time, Charlotte does indeed end him and Blake dies, surrounded by his family, which he made clear was the most important thing to him.
What’s The Big Twist In Wolf Man?
Before the final confrontation in the newest Blumhouse horror movie, there is the big duel between the Wolf Men and after Blake manages to kill the thing that infected there is a closeup of the other creature’s arm. On that arm is a tattoo that the audience saw earlier in the film. It’s a tattoo that matches what Grady had.
It turns out that the big twist in Wolf Man is that the thing that ended Blake’s life and tore his family apart, was his father.
Wolf Man
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