George and Josh Bate
Universal Pictures’ The Wolf Man is a seminal horror film that has influenced a range of werewolf films and television shows over the past 83 years. Directed by George Waggner and written by Curt Siodmak, the 1941 Universal Monsters movie is known for the lead performance of Lon Chaney Jr., who masterfully played a struggling man who transforms into a wolf man/werewolf. The makeup process that actualized Chaney’s transformation into the wolf man was notoriously laborious for the actor, but ultimately culminated in one of horror cinema’s most iconic images. The Wolf Man’s fingerprints can be found all over subsequent horror films of the last 80 years, including An American Werewolf in London, Teen Wolf, The Curse of the Werewolf, Dog Soldiers, and The Wolf of Snow Hollow, so much so that an entire subgenre of werewolf films is now recognized. The latest addition to this snarling subgenre is Blackout, a new film from Larry Fessenden, who serves as director, writer, producer, and editor of the project.
Blackout follows Charley (played by Alex Hurt of Foxhole), an artist and resident of the town fittingly named Talbot Falls (Chaney Jr.’s character in The Wolf Man is Lawrence Talbot). Grieving from the loss of his father and grappling with alcohol use, Charley finds himself at the center of several gruesome murders in town. That is because Charley is a werewolf, unintentionally unleashing havoc whenever there is a full moon. As tensions in the small town rise, Charley tries to find a way to manage his werewolf transformation and also deal with a wealthy landowner whose new project is causing environmental damage to the town.
It is not that Blackout does anything particularly novel as a werewolf film – it just does what it does extremely well. Spearheading it all is Alex Hurt, son of the late William Hurt, who plays the lead character Charley. Hurt blends strands of his father’s charm with some eerily Tom Cruise-esque mannerisms, in addition to bringing an incredible authenticity and vulnerability to the character, to make Charley a compelling and likable lead. It takes quite a bit of time into the film until it explicitly identifies Charley as a werewolf, but it’s clear from the start that the man is troubled. He drinks heavily, he has bags under his weary eyes, scatterings of dry paint all over his body, and an expression that conveys the trouble within.
At first, one could interpret that these troubles are a result of alcohol use. That’s because Blackout uses its narrative of a man transforming into a wolf to depict an allegory of the difficulties of alcohol use. The film deftly explores the parallels of these conditions, in a sense both diseases inflicted upon a person that create some kind of dissociation. Like many great horror films, Blackout takes a heightened concept to craft a more grounded tale about a struggle many can relate to. Although the alcohol use allegory has been done before, it’s handled with genuine care and interest here.
While Charley struggles with moonlighting as a werewolf, he also sets his sights on a bit of activism as he tries to takedown a wealthy landowner causing environmental damage to his town. Initially, this adjacent plot feels perplexingly out of place given the film’s primary characterization as a werewolf film. However, as the plot progresses, it becomes clear how these two seemingly discrepant narrative elements – environmental activism and werewolf transformation – fit together rather seamlessly. Eventually, issues related to racial discrimination are thrown in the mix. Balancing so many different themes could easily make the film feel overstuffed, but this is surprisingly never the case. To explore further this would be to reveal spoilers of the film’s plot, but be assured that the script from Fessenden makes most of the narrative pieces fit together into a cohesive whole.
Most, but not all. As he tries to mitigate his transformation into a werewolf, Charley also tries to repair his relationship with his ex-girlfriend Sharon, played by Addison Timlin. Unlike the other facets of Charley’s character, this relationship with his ex-girlfriend proves largely uninteresting and lacks the intended emotional heft. In a film that juggles all sorts of aspects of the lead character, his romantic relationship proves to be the weakest.
Fessenden excels in being a renaissance man of a range of filmmaking roles with Blackout, although more concise editing likely would have proved beneficial. The film features a refreshingly slower pace that allows for the myriad of plot elements to breathe and affords ample time to empathize with Charley as he tackles his struggles. Several scenes in the film, however, drag on without serving much of a purpose, indicating that a tighter edit would have improved the flow of the film.
It wouldn’t be a werewolf movie without some creature effects, and Blackout excels in this department. Makeup artists and prosthetics designers Jared Balog, Pete Gerner, and Brian Spears adopt a throwback look in designing the werewolf that has obvious shades of Chaney Jr.’s character in The Wolf Man. In a strange way, the werewolf in Blackout looks somewhat like a person in a costume and yet it works extraordinarily well.
Ultimately, Blackout is a compelling werewolf film that works equally well as a compelling character study. Fessenden successfully manages to juggle a number of seemingly incompatible themes, including racial discrimination, environmental activism, and alcohol use, into a (mostly) cohesive and emotionally resonant tale. A captivating performance from lead actor Alex Hurt and some fantastic throwback creature effects are at the core of a werewolf film that taps into the brilliance of the 1941 classic The Wolf Man and demonstrates that the nearly century-old subgenre of werewolf films still has more to give.
