Director Leigh Whannell is a veteran of the horror genre, and that includes taking on iconic characters from Universal’s deep bench of monsters. His 2020 thriller The Invisible Man came amid a global pandemic when the terror of fighting an enemy you couldn’t see was all too real. Now, on January 17, Universal will release his latest twist on a classic monster with Wolf Man.

The film features Christopher Abbott as Blake, a San Francisco-based husband and father who comes into a strange inheritance—his father has left him his remote childhood home deep in the Oregon woods. That would be all well and good, but the handoff isn’t without mystery. Dad has vanished and has been presumed dead—not the most auspicious way to inherit a home—yet Blake convinces his wife, Charlotte (Julia Garner), to take a break from their busy city life and make it a family trip, bringing along their daughter Ginger (Matlida Firth) to their new little house in the woods. What could possibly go wrong?

Things go immediately wrong. An unseen animal attacks them before they’ve even stepped foot on the property, and they’re forced to barricade themselves within the house while the creature prowls just outside. Worse still, Blake sustained an injury while defending the family in the initial attack, and you can probably guess what starts to happen from here. Poor Blake begins to feel strange and then looks like a stranger. Soon enough, Charlotte will have to decide what to do with a husband who is no longer himself, retaining only the faintest connection to the sweet guy she married as he transforms into a wolf, man.

While werewolves have long been a big part of folklore and myths dating back centuries, in the cinematic world, they burst onto the screen in director George Waggner’s iconic 1941 movie The Wolf Man for Universal. Here, Whannell was determined to create Blake’s transformation from husband into a creature using as many practical effects as possible. Forget relying on computer wizardry to turn the sweet-faced Abbott into a monster, this was a hand-crafted effort.

“I wanted to actually see it,” Whannell said in this behind-the-scenes look at the creation of Wolf Man. “I needed it to exist as if it was happening right in front of you. For the look of Wolf Man, I knew I wanted to do something very different,” Whannell said.

To that end, Whannell deployed special make-up effects designer Arjen Tuiten to create something novel and terrifying.

(from left) Charlotte (Julia Garner), Blake (Christopher Abbott) and Ginger (Matilda Firth) in Wolf Man, directed by Leigh Whannell. Photo Credit: Nicola Dove/Universal Pictures

Tuiten did some thinking on what they could do a little bit differently in Wolf Man to “dare to step away from what had been done in the past.” Some serious legends have worked on previous iterations of the character, including 7-time Oscar winner Rick Baker, who won one of those Academy Awards for his work on director Joe Johnston’s 2010 film The Wolf Man, turning Benecio del Toro into the hybrid beast. Whannell and Tuiten knew trying to one-up Baker was a mug’s game, so their strategy was to take it in a completely different direction.

Christopher Abbott as Blake in Wolf Man, directed by Leigh Whannell. Photo Credit: Nicola Dove/Universal Pictures

Inspired by films like John Carpenter’s The Thing and David Cronenberg’s The Fly, they the job of understanding what would happen if “two anatomies tried to mix that don’t quite go together” seriously, as Tuiten put it.

The results of the work that Tuiten and his team did were so convincing that co-star Julia Garner said she was speechless when Christopher Abbott got out of his trailer. Tuiten explains that even the crew, who have seen it all, came up to him to tell him Abbott’s transformation had them properly spooked.

“Creepy and absolutely crazy,” Matilda Firth, the youngest performer on set, confirmed. It’s labor-intensive work to turn a performer into a monster, with craftspeople working on every last detail, from single hair to nails to every inch of deformed skin. “It’s not the Wolf Man you’ve seen before,” Whannell promises.

Check out the Wolf Man monster’s workshop here: