I’m not calling myself an expert, but I’ll be first in line for any new werewolf story I can get. Werewolves are one of the most wicked vehicles to describe the fear of change, self-acceptance, lust, anything! What I love about them is their stories allow viewers to enjoy multiple perspectives. Some movie-goers look for a more tangible fear through subcontext or relatable base storylines, and others prefer to sniff out a story of raw violence and survival. Either way, there’s a good chance you’ll find something entertaining.

Leigh Whanell’s The Invisible Man was probably the last horror movie we saw in theaters before the world almost ended at the hands of the coronavirus. Funny enough, sickness and questionable disease make up a large portion of Whanell’s latest Universal Monsters rendition, Wolf Man. There are no full moons or silver bullets this time. “Face of the wolf” is the animalistic virus known to the indigenous populations of the rural northwest.

Wolf Man, written and directed by Whannell, stars Christopher Abbott in full dad-mode, working through a strained family dynamic with his wife Charlotte (Julia Garner) and daughter Ginger (Matilda Firth). With news of Blake’s father passing, the family takes a trip to his childhood farm in central Oregon to pack up his belongings. Not much closure is awarded to the estranged father-son relationship before getting into some real infectious business.

Historically, the diaspora of werewolf cinema is as vast as U.S. Route 20 is long (which will also lead you straight up to Oregon), which gives plenty of room for creative risk and personal interpretation. A great werewolf story should never be without at least a little tragedy, but as fans roll out of the theater with mixed reviews, it’s clear that we could’ve pumped the brakes on the familial trauma just a bit- we’ve seen that over and over.

Some risks were taken with this movie, just not with the plot or its dialogue, and the real plague is the tacky discourse forced onto a capable cast. However, Abbott’s body acting bleeds through as his unknown disease progresses. He’s an excellent choice for a role that swaps between loveable dad, and damaged being beyond repair. His duality makes his agonizing mutations that much more tragic for everyone- on screen and off.

Conventional but visually gorgeous is a thin wire to sit on, but it’s held together with hauntingly captured countryside scenery. The real weight is pulled by transformation scenes that borrow from the greats of the sub-genre. The bits of practical body horror blessings are what saved me from a trip to the bathroom, and what I believe will save this film from the unforgiving trenches of Film Twitter. Fans of An American Werewolf in London and The Fly will have something pretty to feast their eyes on, I’ll tell you that. I heard mumblings of Cronenberg influences before screening, but I did not expect this level of gore.

The fears of not knowing what’s happening to your body, the body of a loved one, or if they will even survive are exploited in a pretty disgusting (complimentary) way. So much so, that the base conflict of breaking generational trauma, and removing animosity out of marriage doesn’t, and shouldn’t really matter. Just like Blake’s ordeal with his estranged father, we aren’t awarded closure there either- which supports my point; it doesn’t really matter.

Look, the intimate interpersonal themes in The Invisible Man were on point. They complimented any angle you could watch the film from, driven by a monster that exists on a human plane, but we’re playing on different turf now. Werewolves are a threat that exist on the far end of fantasy, so why not give us a more fantastic underlying conflict that aligns more with the anxieties that come with the health of self and loved ones? Clearly, a large amount of thought and effort was put into the passage of the wolf himself, and it paid off. I would’ve preferred to stay in that realm, but to be realwith you, I sat down to witness a wicked wolf, and visually, yes, that goal was met.

Wolf Man is in theaters everywhere Friday, January 17th

The second film I wanted to cover, that’s “based on a true story”, is one that utterly fascinates me…and not for the right reasons. After Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, I felt let down. I am by no means a Henry Lee Lucas expert, but even with someone having the bare knowledge of the case, I couldn’t believe they dared to refer to it as having anything to do with the Confession Killer. Could The Exorcism of Emily Rose pull me out of this pit of despair? Can it get some basic information right? Ugh.

The Exorcism of Emily Rose is a unique take on exorcism films. The film follows Erin Brunner (Laura Linney), a high-profile defense lawyer. Brunner is fresh off a murder case where her client was cleared of all charges–only for that client to turn around and commit another set of murders. In the hopes of becoming a partner at her law firm, Brunner is talked into taking the defense for Father Richard Moore (Tom Wilkinson). Father Moore finds himself in the hot seat after a series of exorcisms resulted in the death of Emma Rose (Jennifer Carpenter). The twist? Erin Brunner is agnostic! OooOOoooOh.

This film brings us the dramatized events of Emily’s tragic final days through the setting of a courtroom drama. There’s something fun about this idea. It’s surprising this idea hasn’t been reused. Laura Linney and Tom Wilkinson are an excellent duo, they play off each other very well. If only the real-life lawyers were as likable as Erin Brunner (we’ll get there later). The real star of the show is Jennifer Carpenter. Tasked with doing justice to the real Emily Rose (Anneliese Michel), Carpenter handles her performance with class.

The story jumps back and forth between the courtroom and Emily’s experiences. There is great information for the film to base its script on, and it doesn’t do it interestingly. One of the most notorious pieces of evidence in this case is the leaked audio of the 67 exorcisms performed on Michel. The Catholic church did not release this audio until around 2011, but Carpenter does a great job of channeling the pain you can hear in the audio.

An interesting angle of the real Anneliese Michel story is how the lawyers were really trying to put the devil on trial. Unlike the film, Michel’s parents were also put on trial, as well as the two priests who initiated the exorcisms. Rather than the film’s dramatic guilty plea with time served as a sentence, the German justice department thought the parents had suffered enough and that the priests should just get fined. In reality, both the parents and the priests deserved to go to jail. The complete neglect of Anneliese’s ailments was thought nothing more than the dirty hands of the devil. Anneliese’s parents and the priests were the cause of her death. Their extreme beliefs in a bearded man in the sky trumped the reality of what was actually happening with their extremely sick daughter.

The film plays off Brunner as someone who needs to see the light. Brunner is put on this case to help rectify her previous case (the one where she got the murderer off without charges). God put her in Father Moore’s hands. So, by this logic, co-writer/director Scott Derrickson thinks that for one person to receive redemption, another must die. The Exorcism of Emily Rose is nothing more than religious propaganda. “What if god is real,” Erin Brunner asks the jury. Even if god is real, a young woman is dead! God isn’t on the chopping block, Father Moore is. This latter half of this film plays strictly to the Bible Belt.

Also, Erin Brunner is written as someone who can be redeemed and will be redeemed, a tragic character who has accepted greed over truth. Do you want to know who defended the Michels in real life? Lawyers who defended Nazis in the Nurenberg trials. Scott Derrickson can fuck right off.

Everything about this film feels like nothing more than Catholic-funded propaganda. Rather than owning up to their mistakes and accepting the punishment they deserved, the Michels and priests never had to answer for their true crimes. They left a young woman to die a truly horrible death and all got off with a slap on the wrist.

All of this went down around the same time as Vatican 2. The Catholics who were against Vatican 2 were hoping that they could find a way to prove that Anneliese was possessed because god wasn’t happy with the Vatican II overhaul. If they could prove god’s anger, they could use that as fuel to ensure Vatican II didn’t happen. Anneliese’s mother gaslit her into refusing the idea that her neurological issues could be the cause of all this. See, Anneliese wanted to be a teacher, but her mother forced her to believe that no one would hire her as a teacher if she had all of these issues. People won’t hire a crazy teacher.

Failed by those around her, Anneliese was posthumously deprived of any justice. If there is a god, I can only hope the Michels and the two priests do not meet him. Instead of breaking down all of these fascinating aspects of the case of Anneliese Michel, Scott Derrickson crafted a shell of a film. His lack of care for the source material is beyond disrespectful to Anneliese’s pain in her short time on earth. Scott Derrickson’s classless and [seemingly] Catholic-funded sophomore feature film is nothing more than a film that has a few solid scares that rely on you taking him at his word. For a film that starts with the title card “based on a true story,” there is not a lick of truth in this nearly two-hour film.