Behind the Couch

2010 Dir. Joe Johnston Upon returning to his ancestral home to help search for his missing brother, Lawrence Talbot (Benicio Del Toro) is viciously attacked by the same mysterious beast that is revealed to have torn his brother to shreds. Quickly recovering from the ordeal, Talbot soon realises that the beast was a werewolf and he is now marked by the same curse – doomed to transform into a slathering beast under the light of the full moon. Can his father (Anthony Hopkins) and his brother’s widow Gwen (Emily Blunt) help him find a cure before it's too late? It’s an amazing feat that The Wolfman made it to cinemas at all given its troubled production history. The project was originally set to be helmed by Mark Romanek ( One Hour Photo and various Nine Inch Nails music videos ), however he was dissatisfied with the level of studio interference and was soon replaced by director Joe Johnston ( Jurassic Park III ). Countless reshoots, re-cuts and test audience screenings later a...

Filmmaker Tim Hope began his career experimenting with computer graphics and editing packages. His short film The Wolfman was apparently inspired by a performance piece that he and a colleague created and titled ‘Man-chine’, a hectic story involving a character comprised of part man, part machine. Hope was eventually inspired to transform his ‘soundscape-laden mechano-human exploits’ into a short animated film. The result is The Wolfman , the strangely disturbing tale of an astronomer whose love of the moon is so strong he longs to become a werewolf. I just caught this by chance, very late one evening on Channel 4, a few years ago and it has remained lodged in my head ever since. The film opens with a creepy fairytale-esque scene in which a young girl gingerly picks her way through a spooky forest – all the while she is stalked by intimidating camerawork while a worrying nursary-rhyme warns about a mysterious man with ‘a hairy back.’ Something pounces on the girl and an increasingl...