This article contains spoilers for "Wolfman".

Aging is the ultimate horror of the body because it is the long, slow road to death that every living being must experience, bar none. This process, as with most body horrors, is primarily expressed physically. After all, most people will say they are as mentally young as ever, while observing how their body has trouble working the way it used to; It's very common to see a post on social media from a 30-something bemoaning newfound back problems or some such ailment. A person's perception of the passage of time can make it seem as if the years pass quickly, but the slow process of aging allows most people to ease into the physical transition, as it happens almost imperceptibly.

However, that perception is drastically challenged when something happens to change our status quo. In my experience, I've rolled my eyes at those social media posts about people experiencing various aches and pains, mistakenly believing that I haven't experienced such things. The truth was that I had, and still do - my chronic health issues (including but not limited to a liver transplant) changed the way I saw and interacted with the world from an unusually young age. I can no longer relate to such "relatable" content because I no longer see the same world that most people do.

"Wolfman" by Lee Whannell is a film full of themes from body horror, disease, transformation, perception and, ultimately, deathtelling the story of poor Blake Lovell (Christopher Abbott) who contracts "hill fever" which may or may not be supernatural. Blake's ordeal condenses into one long, agonizing night, in which his wife Charlotte (Julia Garner) and daughter Ginger (Matilda Firth) watch helplessly as he transforms into an inhuman being. While the film contains most of the prerequisite elements of a body horror transformation horror film, it does one thing that no other body horror film, let alone a werewolf film, has attempted on the same scale before: it shows us how for Blake. to undergo this change mentally and emotionally as well as physically. This angle is not only part and parcel of Whannell's interests as a filmmaker, but it makes The Wolf Man a uniquely terrifying and tragic experience.

For the October 4, 1985 episode of The Twilight Zone revival series, Wes Craven directed a segment titled "Wordplay," written by Rockne S. O'Bannon. In it, the average salesman inexplicably begins to hear strange words instead of others, and soon everyone around him begins to speak a completely different language. The story is a fantastic metaphor for the feeling of being out of phase with everyone around you and highlights the isolating horror of not being able to understand or be understood. The segment closes with some hope for the character, making the story a parable for those who must learn to live with some form of disability.

"The Wolf Man" takes this concept further into horrifying territory, showing that the infection Blake suffers from ensures that he will have no coping or learning mechanism that will allow him to continue to co-exist with humans. As the disease reshapes Blake's body, improving some of his senses such as sight and hearing, his ability to speak disappears. At the same time, he can no longer understand his wife and daughter, which leads to worry and frustration on both sides. Part of the problem is that Blake, Charlotte, and Ginger already had communication issues even before Blake was scratched from being a werewolf, with Whannell and co-writer Corbett Tuck using the couple's marital problems and their separate struggles raising their daughter as proof of how weak our ability to communicate with other people is even when all our faculties are available to us. The tragic grace note on this theme comes when Blake, who used to be a writer, makes a last attempt to communicate with his wife by writing on a pad of paper. He writes "dying", trying to describe his current state, and Charlotte refutes this (for his benefit as well as her own), assuring him that he is only ill. Even when words are still available to them, the couple cannot come together.

George Wagner and Kurt Siodmak's The Wolf Man, after which Whannell's film is named and inspired, fully established the werewolf as a tragic figure, following Stewart Walker's The Werewolf of London made six years earlier. This tone comes from the fact that the werewolf is a cursed figure, a being forced to either live a double life or have a double personality, depending on the interpretation. during the the many werewolf movies made after these first two Universal Pictures entries (to say nothing of the TV shows, books, and other media), the artists usually give the werewolf some respite from their torment. This usually takes the form of some sort of euphoria after their transformation and can be seen in films as diverse as An American Werewolf in London, Howl, The Wolf, and Ginger Snapes (the latter also being a film about a slow, steady transformation, not magical, back and forth). Even David Cronenberg's remake of The Fly the closest the film comes to The Wolfman's brand of body horror, it sees its titular creature enjoy a period of masculinity before his degeneration.

In contrast, Whannel's "Wolfman" is granted no such favors. Instead, the film commits almost entirely to its conception of the werewolf curse as a natural disease, following in the footsteps of The Fly. However, it even goes a bit further into sci-fi territory than that film, at least in the way it portrays Blake as something completely inhuman rather than a human-animal hybrid. The way Blake gradually finds himself separated from the human world around him in every possible way, his transformation is not only similar to Larry Talbot or Seth Brundle, but also analogous to astronaut Dave Bowman (from "2001: A Space Odyssey") and Lucy (from "Lucy"), characters whose humanity and identity have been dissected thoroughly enough to become a whole new being entirely. Where such transformations in sci-fi films like those can be seen as more transcendent than tragic, Whannell applies the concept of a horror lens, emphasizing how such a complete loss of humanity can be as terrifying as it is liberating.

All of Lee Whannell's films, whether screenwriter or director, deal with the theme of perception. This is usually due to the fact that most of Whannell's scripts involve a narrative twist, and these twists tend to be about things that the main character (and thus the audience) either sees or doesn't see until it's too late. The twist in "Wolf Man" is not narrative, but structural. Whannell presents the dueling perspectives—the world outside Blake versus the one inside—which, in effect, allows a double transformation to occur. Blake, in the real world, transforms into a wolf creature in front of Charlotte and Ginger's eyes, while Charlotte and Ginger transform into some kind of goblin-like demons in Blake's eyes.

This shift in perspective, especially when added to the communication breakdown Blake suffers from, fully articulates what the experience of being transformed into a werewolf might be like. It's not that Blake begins to have the thoughts and instincts of an animal, but that his human personality is so completely altered by the distorted information his senses feed him. As a person trapped in a jigsaw puzzle from "Saw", as someone trapped in Further from "Insidious", or as someone at the mercy of a bully (whether it's an AI program like STEM in "Upgrade" or an evil and powerful formerly in "The Invisible Man"), Blake's reality dictates his werewolf illness.

In addition to this shift in perspective that heightens the terror and tragedy of the werewolf character, it also fully realizes the dissonance inherent in the Wolf Man character. He, or she, or it, is a being caught between two worlds while belonging to neither, a Lovecraftian thing that shouldn't be, to borrow a Metallica song title. It's easy to pity and even laugh at the werewolf, the perennial staple of horror cinema. It's a little less easy when you realize that we all go through our irreversible, cursed transformation sooner or later. As Whannell's film says, dying happens to everyone; the trick is how you react to that change.

Wolfman is in theaters everywhere.