We’re all drowning in content—so it’s time to highlight the best. In her column, published every Friday, critic Clarisse Loughrey recommends a new show to watch. This week: the stand-alone Marvel special Werewolf by Night.
Werewolf by Night
Marvel loves to play dress-up. It’s like a kid rifling through the attic trunk: here’s the comic book movie as a Cold War thriller, and here it is now as an American sitcom! Why not, then, the studio insists, have the comic book movie as the Universal pre-code horror, with Disney+’s standalone 50-minute special Werewolf by Night?
A clan of monster slayers reunite to determine who amongst them is worthy of inheriting the Bloodstone, a powerful weapon against the paranormal, yielded until recently by the late Ulysses Bloodstone. Among them are Jack Russell (Gael García Bernal), who harbours a secret already made evident by his own name (woof, woof), and Bloodstone’s estranged daughter Elsa (Laura Donnelly), who’s proven unpopular with her stepmother and will-executor Verussa (a wonderfully hammy Harriet Sansom Harris).
Does it make me cynical not to be fooled by the premise? Werewolf by Night is fun—sort of adorable, really—but I ultimately can’t condone how heavily the press tour for this show has relied on the idea that this is classic Hollywood homage in action. Its stylised credits, evocative score by Michael Giacchino (also, surprisingly, in the director’s chair) and occasional use of exaggerated lighting form the only substantial nods to its supposed source material. This isn’t a recreation of the Universal monster movie—it’s simply a Marvel thing in black and white. It’s perfectly spooky, and well-suited as a breezy bit of Halloween fare. But nothing more.
At times, it feels like I’d get more out of Marvel’s offerings if the studio were, at least, honest about its intentions. Is the MCU that cineliterate, or is it simply scrabbling about, trying to find new ways to rebrand the same product? MCU head honcho Kevin Feige giddily unveiled his “Gael García Bernal as a werewolf” pitch onstage at D23 last month. The announcement seemed almost to have gained more traction than the release of the show itself—a fact that’s become increasingly true of Marvel, where logline concepts take priority over fully-formed, individualistic approaches to storytelling.
But it’s not entirely hopeless. I wanted to recommend Werewolf by Night this week because I do think Marvel is starting to recognise how unsustainable its model is. Taking the same story, the same impulse to end every film with five or six characters zooming about in the sky, and popping a fresh coat of paint on it does not a perpetual franchise make. And there’s something genuinely refreshing about how low-stakes Werewolf by Night is. The special is self-contained. It’s entirely standalone. You do not have to do any homework to enjoy it fully.
Giacchino, alongside production designer Maya Shimoguchi, has clearly had a whale of a time indulging in the special’s intentional shlockiness. Ulysses’s animatronic corpse presents the rules of the game, in order to win the Bloodstone, to a room of stunned faces. “Good luck, I’ll be ROTTING for you,” he signs off with a mechanical wink. Screenwriters Heather Quinn and Peter Cameron work in a niche Marvel Comics character who’s too good to spoil, but hits the perfect balance of silly and ghoulish. Bernal, too, never feels like he’s there to cash a paycheck. Though not especially well-known for his comedic work, he does “totally clueless guy” wonderfully.
It’s interesting—the DCEU has spent years doggedly attempting to replicate the MCU’s sense of cohesiveness. Then they handed James Gunn and Cathy Yan the creative freedom to make their respective films, The Suicide Squad and Birds of Prey, feel like personal statements rather than items of a conveyer belt. They proved, together, that a cinematic universe was possible without that entire universe singing the same tune.
Oh, how the tables have turned! Now it’s Marvel taking lessons from its corporate rival. Werewolf by Night—what it is, not what it’s trying to be – is exactly the sort of fun, weirdo project that the studio needs in the lead-up to releasing Blade. There’s (a little) gore. Some paranormal tomfoolery. And the promise that there’s a whole other world out there beyond spandex and VFX punch-ups.
