On Friday, Marvel Studios delivers Werewolf by Night on Disney+. The hour-long black-and-white film hearkens back to the classic monster movies of decades past.
Werewolf by Night stars Gael García Bernal as Jack Russell, one of a group of monster hunters who face off at a mysterious estate in hopes of being the sole survivor who gets to wield a magical MacGuffin known as the Bloodstone.
Outlander veteran Laura Donnelly plays Elsa Bloodstone, the deadly monster hunter daughter of the eccentric man who conceived the competition. “She’s been trained from a very, very young age…and it seems that she’s had a fairly traumatic time with that,” Donnelly tells ABC Audio. “She’s…turned up now after the death of her father at the Bloodstone Manor and doesn’t really know whether she still belongs in that world anymore…”
The Oscar-winning composer of movie scores including Up, The Incredibles and Doctor Strange, Michael Giacchino directs the project, which is a deep cut dating back to a 1972 Marvel comic that shares the film’s name.
Giacchino recalls surprising Marvel Studios head Kevin Feige with his dream project.
“He said, ‘Well, if you were going to direct something here, what would you want to do?’ Instantly I was like, ‘Oh, Werewolf by Night….There’s no question.’ And he looked at me like, ‘Really!?'” Giacchino says with a laugh.
He says he loves characters from horror and monster movies “because there’s at their core…they’re just so relatable. Because we all have things in our lives that…we’re trying to figure out…And…[in] monster movies, the monsters are always left on their own to do it. And I always felt so bad that no one would help them.”
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