***THIS BLOG CONTAINS SPOILERS FOR MARVEL’S WEREWOLF BY NIGHT***
Hello Internet!
I hope you all are doing well and staying healthy. I am so happy that it is officially fall and that summer heat has finally gone away. I love the chilly autumn weather! I could stay at this temperature until May and I’d be happy. It’s just so nice. Especially when the leaves begin to fall and it rains. It becomes the perfect mood to just curl up with a book and waste a day away. I’ve actually been neglecting books recently, but I’m hoping to turn that around. Anyway, I hope you all are enjoying the autumn weather and are finding some time to read some good books during this season. Now that it is October AKA Halloween month, I bet some of you are enjoying some spooky stories and really getting into some horror novels. For me, I’ll happily stay away from anything too spooky.
Anyway if you don’t have anything to read, I would suggest reading the stuff here on my website. I don’t write that much horror stuff, but every October I tend to write stuff that’s a little bit spookier. I even have a tradition of writing Two Sentence Horror Stories every Halloween. These tend to be a bit harder to write than you might think. So check those out if you want a quick spook. For everyone else, the last time I published a Weekly Blog, it was back on September 4th. I wrote about how I’ve been dealing with Major Burnout. If you are new here, you might not know that I tend to write pieces on a weekly basis. I try to maintain a schedule where I publish three pieces a week. However in August I didn’t manage to publish a single piece the entire month. I’ve been dealing with burnout for over a year now and at times it leaves me so creatively exhausted that I can’t even force myself to write. I talk about this and more in that Weekly Blog so check it out if you want to know what’s going on with me and my writing process. Other than that, I have been busy writing and publishing Poetry. Each week I’ve managed to publish a Poem including Brisk Stop, Tell Your Story, Autumn’s Siren Song, and Hollow Victory. All of these are pretty short reads so you can really burn through them if you want to or you can sit with them after you are done reading and really reflect on their meaning. There are also over 700 other pieces on my website so you have plenty to read during the fall and winter.
Like I said earlier, I am so happy that it is finally fall. I really do enjoy this season so much. But one thing I never really get into is the spookier and scarier elements of the season. People love October and Halloween so much and a big subset of those people enjoy watching scary movies, going to haunted houses, and catching up on their favorite supernatural podcasts. I’m not really into any of those things. However, I am really into superheroes. More specifically, the Marvel Cinematic Universe. I’ve talked before how I am a big fan of the Marvel Movies and even the Disney Plus Shows. (Currently I’m really enjoying She Hulk.) But what does this have to do with the spooky season and horror? Well this past week Marvel released a special presentation called “Werewolf By Night.” This was a project that got announced over a year ago, but then not much was told about it. It didn’t really have the big fanfare that other MCU projects had. So when it was released, I knew I had to check it out, but I didn’t know that much about it. Well now I’ve watched it and I want to share my thoughts on it.
First I should say that Werewolf By Night is unlike pretty much anything else that has been made by Marvel Studios. They are known for their superhero movies, quippy dialogue, and their third acts where the hero must take on a villain which is just like them in terms of abilities but evil. Werewolf By Night is none of that. There is a unique part of Marvel comics that many might refer to as the supernatural corner. Far from the aliens, cosmic beings, people in robot suits, and supersoldiers is a corner revolving around demons, magic, and even vampires. Although MCU Projects like WandaVision and Dr. Strange In The Multiverse of Madness have touched on things like dark magic, Werewolf By Night takes this a step further by stripping away the superhero elements and focusing on the horror. The whole presentation is like an old, Universal Monster Movie and it leans into those elements hard. I’ll get more into explaining what that means, but this is the point where I’m going to tell you that if you haven’t watched Werewolf By Night, you should. Just go watch it. Don’t look up anything about it. I went in pretty much blind and I had a great time with it. It’s really good.
Like I said, Werewolf By Night is like an old monster movie. It’s even Black and White for the majority of the special. The only color throughout most of the special is the red glow coming from an item called The Bloodstone. This bloodstone is actually the central mcguffin of the spooky special. The premise is that a monster hunter named Ulysses Bloodstone has passed away and a group of other expert monster hunters show up at the Bloodstone manor to respect the deceased and compete to be the next one to yield the magical bloodstone. There is a competition between several monster hunters including Ulyseses’ daughter, Elsa Bloodstone. They are tasked with hunting down a vicious monster and retrieving the stone for themselves. Elsa Bloodstone teams up with another hunter named Jack Russell after Jack tells her that he’s not actually after the stone. He’s here because the monster they are hunting is actually his friend. He promises her that if she helps the monster escape, he will give her the bloodstone. They team up and are able to free the monster while fighting off other monster hunters.
However when Jack tries to pick up the bloodstone, it glows brightly and sends him flying back. This reveals that Jack is not an ordinary monster hunter. He is actually a monster himself. Jack and Elsa are thrown into a cage together and then the bloodstone is used to force Jack to become his monstrous, werewolf self. Instead of attacking and killing Elsa, Jack escapes the cage and kills the other monster hunters. Elsa and Jack end up helping each other again. Jack escapes alongside his friend Ted AKA Man-Thing and Elsa gets to keep the bloodstone.
So what did I think about Werewolf By Night as a whole? Well I really enjoyed it. Honestly I didn’t know anything about Werewolf By Night or the supernatural elements of the Marvel comics before watching this special. I really enjoyed the old, monster movie elements like the story being told in black and white and the fake lense burns that popped up occasionally. This really helped sell the concept that this was an old time monster movie. Another thing that helped sell this concept was the special effects. Man-Thing was fully CGI but Jack’s werewolf form was just him wearing prosthetics and hair. The werewolf looked like it would be at home in a 1950s or 1960s werewolf film and I love it. Also I have to shout out the music and use of sound. Werewolf By Night is directed by Michael Giacchino who is most well known for composing the soundtracks of Disney Movies like The Incredibles, Ratatouille, Zootopia, and Rogue One as well as other Marvel Movies like Dr. Strange, Spiderman’s “Home” Trilogy, and Thor: Love and Thunder. So this guy knows music and how important it is to a project. As both the director and composer of Werewolf By Night, Michael Giacchina absolutely nails it. The music is great and really highlights the tension felt by these monster hunters when they are hunting down Man-Thing. It also raises the horror of fJack, the werewolf, tearing apart people with his claws and teeth. The use of gore is also well done in Werewolf By Night. Usually MCU projects keep the blood to a minimum in order to maintain that PG-13 movie rating. But Werewolf By Night gets away with some bloody scenes. The blood is black and white, but it flies during this special. Once it even coats the camera lense which adds to the overall production of the special.
Overall there are so many things going for it, that it’s hard not to recommend. I’d say my only criticism against it is that for whatever reason, I walked away from watching it thinking that it was good, but not great. It’s hard for me to point at any one thing and say I didn’t like it, but at the end of the special, I just kind of sat there thinking, “Yeah, that was pretty good.” Overall I think people really enjoyed the special and I did too. But I can’t help but think that the only reason I watched it is because it was a Marvel Studios project. If it was just an hour-long monster movie special on Netflix or something, I would probably pass on it.
Which kind of leads me to my final thoughts on Werewolf By NIght is that I hope that they do more of these specials. I’m sure that I’m like many people who only watched this because it was a Marvel project. And Marvel Studios has the ability to bring many more eyes by highlighting passion projects like Werewolf By Night by creating them under the MCU umbrella. That’s not to say that Werewolf By Night won’t have repercussions in the wider MCU because I believe it will. With Blade coming out in the next couple years, Dr. Strange 3 likely to happen, and Midnight Sun is rumored to happen, I’m sure we are going to get some more MCU Horror and Supernatural Elements. It’s possible we could see Elas Bloodstone, Man-Thing, and Jack all return alongside Blade, Moon Knight, or even Ghostrider in a future MCU Project. I’m just hoping that Marvel uses more of these specials to tell one-off, more creative stories that might not necessarily feel like they fit alongside Captain America, Iron Man, Guardians of the Galaxy, or Thor. We know that we have a holiday special featuring the Guardians of the Galaxy later this year, but I suspect that will more closely be in line with other MCU projects like Guardians of The Galaxy 1 and 2 or Thor Ragnarok. Who knows what the next special will be, but I hope Marvel continues to make them and does not fear making them as unique as Werewolf By Night.
Thank you so much for reading that Weekly Blog all about Marvel’s Werewolf By Night. I hope you enjoyed reading all about my thoughts on the spooky special and if you did, please give this Weekly Blog a LIke. This lets me know that you enjoyed what I wrote and helps me decide on what thing I might talk about in the future. If you really like this, I might go ahead and check out some other, more classic monster movies to review. Or maybe you can suggest some movies I should check out in the comments below. I’d love that! While you are down there, you can also leave a comment on what you thought about Werewolf By Night. Did you love it? Hate it? Just think it’s ok? I’d love to hear any and all thoughts down in the comments. If you are new here or just don’t Follow Me, I highly recommend you change that. I’m trying to build a positive and creative space here on the internet and all of your Likes, Comments, and Follows help me do that. I’m slowly inching toward 900 Followers and I’d love to hit that milestone. However I can only do that if you help me out. Follow me here on WordPress and you’ll see my stuff show up in your reader’s feed as soon as I post it. Like I mentioned earlier, I’ve been a little burnt out and inconsistent with publishing, so the best way to make sure you get to see my stuff is by Following. I really do appreciate all my readers new and old. They shower me with love even when I’m bad at writing and publishing stuff on my Weekly Blog. All the love and support really makes my day, week, month, and year. So thank you for reading my stuff.
Thank you again and I hope you have a wonderful week!
-Allen_The_Writer
Header Photo Credit to Werewolf By Night’s IMDB page
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt15318872/
Allen The Writer 
Leave a Reply