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A supermoon triggers a latent gene, transforming anyone and everyone whose skin touches moonlight into a feral beast in Steven C. Miller’s (Silent Night) Werewolves. That premise alone highlights the scope of ambition and challenges for an independent action-horror feature: Frank Grillo fighting his way through hordes of werewolves requires a lot of stunt and creature work. Luckily, Werewolves boasts a lot of talent on screen and off in delivering just that, including SFX legend and werewolf designer/effects creator Alec Gillis of Studio Gillis.
Gillis’ expansive career has given horror fans no shortage of cherished movie monsters, from the Aliens to Predator to the eerie monster in Smile and Smile 2. Yet despite such an impressive career, Werewolves marks a major first for the artist. “Technically, it’s my first werewolf. Although,” Gillis points to a mask in his office when speaking with Bloody Disgusting via Zoom, “this character was from a movie called Cirque du Freak: The Vampire’s Assistant. But he technically wasn’t a werewolf. He was a wolf man. So yeah, this is the first werewolf that I’ve done.”
Miller’s feature, which releases in theaters on December 6, had a long winding road to getting made thanks in large part to a global pandemic. But Gillis was attached nearly from the start, eager to give his spin on the classic movie monster.
“Myles Nestel, the producer, contacted me,“ Gillis explains of how he came aboard. “This was before Covid. He said, ‘Hey, we’ve got this script, and it’s pretty cool.‘ It was called Year 2 at the time. I read the script, and I thought, ‘This is really a fun take on a werewolf, and I have never done a werewolf.’ I’m always on the sidelines of the werewolf stuff because so many people have done so many great werewolves. I’ve enjoyed them and had my opinions about what a werewolf should look like, what I would do, etc.”
Gillis continues, “But then the movie was supposed to start up, and Covid and the lockdown happened. It kind of went dormant for a while, and you know how it goes. It’s hard to put a movie together, especially an independent film that is as big as this is. It’s not easy. Then Myles came back and said it’s not over. Steven C. Miller will be directing. So, I got on Zoom with Steven, got on great with him, and it was just a matter of them pulling the deal together. And then we started to build.”
Director Steven C. Miller’s WEREWOLVES, a Briarcliff Entertainment release. Credit: Courtesy of Briarcliff Entertainment © 2024 All Rights Reserved.
“One of the things I love about smaller budgeted films is that everybody is looking at the end result,“ Gillis said of his werewolf design process. “It’s not like you have to get there right. You have to get there fast. You can’t dawdle too much because as fun as design phases are, and I enjoy them, that’s where a lot of money can be eaten up. So, if there are parameters that the filmmakers already have, that, to me, is like gold. Steven had a piece of artwork that he had commissioned that gave a vibe, and I thought, well, this is what I would be doing. Because what I wanted to do was make a werewolf that is big in its frame. You know, broad shoulders, but still has a kind of sleekness about it, almost a slenderness.
“If you look at actual wolves, they’re very slender. They’re almost gangly. It’s their necks and their heads because of the mass of their fur that gives it that powerful feeling, but their limbs themselves are actually pretty long and thin. Since childhood, I’ve been looking at people like Bernie Wrightson’s drawings, which always have a muscular but lean look to them, and I just knew that I wanted to balance out the size of the head with the size of the shoulders and the hands. We weren’t too interested in doing the big dogleg thing. I’ve done that a lot on the Alien movies and probably going back to Pumpkinhead.”
Gillis elaborates, “I didn’t want to do that necessarily here because there’s so much stunt work. These things have to really be mobile, and that kind of silhouette looks great in limited action. But I thought, let’s give them monstrous feet and extend the feet sculpturally. Basically, have the guys walk on their toes, and that works out quite well. We have some arm extensions in the movie, and we have some walking on all fours. We have them upright but with arm extensions so that they have this very long reach. Then we also have normal gloved looks. I usually am okay intercutting all these different arm lengths together because I think that the editorially composite impression of what the proportions are comes through in the edit. I don’t really feel like you notice if you’ve got a long arm and it reaches out, and now it’s a gloved hand that grabs someone. It all works to build the composite of what the character should be. These are all things that I learned in the ’80s and ’90s in terms of editing and creature effects.
“When you have a movie like this, and a director specifically like Steven C. Miller, who is all about the edit, camera placement, and the action and movement in the shot. You never have to worry. Well, very rarely do you have to worry about being way back from the action and having everything happen within the frame. That’s a more contemporary post-digital revolution, CGI preacher sort of thought where you’re going to be way back. It almost mimics the Ray Harryhausen stuff. That’s why I chuckle to myself; Ray Harryhausen would do that. He’d put you way back. You’d be in with the actors like a normal movie. Then, when the creature appears, you’re way back, and he comes walking in and does whatever he’s going to do, and I loved it as a kid. It gives you a sense of scale, but these werewolves are up close and personal. We knew we had to have practical, real things there on set.”
While there may be dozens of on-screen werewolves in the film, that certainly wasn’t the case during production. Werewolves credits three actors as the Lead Wolves and four more as Additional Wolves to account for the number of creature suits on set.
Behind the scenes of director Steven C. Miller’s WEREWOLVES, a Briarcliff Entertainment release. Credit: Todd Stefani / Briarcliff Entertainment. © 2024 All Rights Reserved.
Gillis enlisted trusted performers to bring his Lead Wolves to life. He explains, “I was very blessed on this production because I had three people that I’d worked with before: Ian Whyte, who has played the Predator multiple times that I’ve worked with. Ian Feuer, who also played one of the Predators in Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem. He’s such a go-getter and such a bulletproof performer. Then, I had my most recent addition to my stable of suit actors, Dane DiLiegro. My experience with him on Prey was so fabulous; he really brought character and emotion to the role. You could see the Predator thinking, and I’m always interested in elevating a monster beyond just a force of nature that’s tearing things apart. I want those little cocks of the head or little compound movement of the neck so it doesn’t look like I’ve built a suit that cannot move. Sometimes, psychologically, you put it on someone who’s unprepared for it, and they’re like, ‘Oh, my God! I’m trapped!‘ No, no, you’re free. You have to free up the movements, have isolated movement, and all that kind of stuff. Dane gets that. I was very fortunate to have it.”
Naturally, his leads wasted no time preparing for their physical performances. “What we did starting off, I shipped a pair of walking arms to Ian Whyte, who lives in England,“ Gillis explains. “I think he’s in Bristol, and he wanted to practice with them. So, we made a quickie pair for him, and he played with it. Then he sent the video to me and our stunt coordinator, Eddie J. Fernandez. I sent a pair of walking arm extensions to our stunt team in Puerto Rico so that they could be working with our basketball players; we had another 4 or 5 guys who were basketball players practicing with them. What I always do is give broad strokes to the performers, and then I watch how each one nuances it and what they bring to it. That’ll always determine who’s foreground, mid-ground, and background [in the shot].”
Werewolves has a retro horror spirit to it, which also proved to be the case during production. So much so that it brought Gillis back to his early career. “This movie reminds me so much of James Cameron’s Aliens,” Gillis reminisces. “It felt that way. The energy was like that on set. Everything was just energetic. It just felt like the ’80s again. On Aliens, we only had six alien warrior suits. But you look over here, and you see four aliens coming at you. You look over here, and you see six aliens coming at you, and that’s ten aliens, but it’s all the same aliens. What that meant was that we had to give up some of the individual character of each werewolf and rely on dressing and styling the hair. We’ve got the one character that’s got American red, white, and blue across his face. Things like that. I had to make all the wolves look pretty much identical so that we could reuse them again and again and again. And that’s the way you make these. That’s the way you build it out.”
Director Steven C. Miller’s WEREWOLVES, a Briarcliff Entertainment release. Credit: Todd Stefani / Briarcliff Entertainment. © 2024 All Rights Reserved.
To highlight the ways that costuming and styling gave each werewolf a more distinct identity, one of the standout werewolves is a female punk, complete with facial piercings and a vibrant mohawk. Gillis laughs, “It was in the script: ‘Punk Princess.‘ I just laugh because it’s such an ’80s idea. It’s literally the kind of character that we would have done in 1987 or ’89 or something. That was very heartwarming. And so then it’s just like, well, it’s accouterment, right? I do have to get with the costume department, and they were great. We sent them all the measurements of the guys in the suits because we were in LA, and they were pulling it together in Puerto Rico, and they did a fabulous job. But yeah, Punk Princess was really fun, and that’s Ian Whyte performing in it. It was really a blast to see, too, at 3 in the morning, in a closed-off section of the town, Ian Whyte putting a feminine touch into his wolf performance. He really did a great job.”
One other noticeable distinction with Gillis’s wolves is the more sporadic fur on their bodies. He details, “This is something that’s afflicting people. It’s like a virus, right? Steven decided he wanted to make them look a little less densely furred than I was initially going to go. Normally, in werewolf movies, you have long hair. It looks like primate hair, which kind of makes sense because it is human beings that have transferred. But you rarely see it where it really looks like dense wolf fur, shorter but thicker. I was starting to go in that direction. Then Steven explained about the disease thing, and that’s a great point. These are still former human beings. But where does all this hair also generate from so quickly? We backed off on that and punched more hair on the root, but we left a lot of the skin exposed as well. That’s also where we came up with that very glossy, wet look. The idea is that their metabolisms are running really hot. They’re sweating, shiny, and kind of more demonic.”
It wasn’t just the wolves that made Gillis’ experience such a blast on set, but the liberal use of gore. “One of my favorite moments was when one of the wolves is over Frank Grillo; he’s impaled it, and it’s just barfing blood on him. That was a blast,” Gillis fondly recalls. “Because you never know how that’s going to go like, ‘Hello, Frank! Hi! We’re about to puke blood.‘ We have 5 gallons of blood here. I don’t know how much the director is going to want to use, and I feel like he used all of it. And multiple camera angles, too. And Grillo, that guy was down for it. He’s like, ‘Do you need another [take]?‘ Steven was just howling and laughing during the whole thing. So I think that was my favorite thing to shoot.”
(L to R) Frank Grillo as Wesley Marshall and Katrina Law as Dr. Amy Chen in director Steven C. Miller’s WEREWOLVES, a Briarcliff Entertainment release. Credit: Todd Stefani / Briarcliff Entertainment. © 2024 All Rights Reserved.
The lifelong monster fan and artist is also keenly aware of what horror fans want in a werewolf movie: a memorable transformation sequence. Budgetary and time constraints meant that Werewolves’ brief transformations are digital, not practical, and Gillis walked us through the decision process. More importantly, Gillis wants fans to know that he’s hungry to dial up the practical effects work even further in a sequel. He’s ready for more werewolf mayhem.
“I should also say that initially, in this movie, I was talking to Myles and Steven about exclusively creating transformation sequences. As we got into it and started budgeting things, we realized that there was so much need for practical werewolf suits that we should probably flip that,“ Gillis says of the choice to emphasize the actual wolves over their transformation. “We should probably put that money into the practical suits, which meant that we’re having digital transformations, right? I know that a lot of fans are really jonesing to have full, practical transformations in a werewolf movie. I’m with you on that, by the way, which is why it’s very important for us to make this movie a success so that there is a sequel. I’m already banging on that door, and in addition to doing practical suits, I’ve also got to do some parts and pieces. It’ll be a blend of digital and practical. But I think we could do some really cool stuff.”
“Anyway, that’s not to say anyone should be disappointed, because I went to my friend, my old friend, Scott E. Anderson,” Gillis notes. “I was nominated along with Scott Anderson on Starship Troopers. Scott’s a very artistic guy. I thought, if we’re going to do digital transformations, you’ve got to go with Scott Anderson because he has a foot in practical. He came up old school. We worked on Hollow Man together. He did these transformations based on my end result, and I’m really happy with what I’ve seen. I think everybody’s gonna really dig the transformations as well because he really went the extra mile to make it feel like a practical, real thing.”
He adds, “What I really want to do is I want to work with Scott on the sequel and really figure out some cool transformation stuff because I think what we’re missing in movies right now is we’re missing that tight within the frame overlap of practical pieces and digital extension and enhancement and transformation. I think we could do something that’s so cool looking that it stops the viewer from worrying about how it was done, and you can just enjoy it. I know that that’s in this movie as well because I’ve seen it, and Scott’s work is fabulous. But I just want you to know I’m greedy. I want to be part of it all.”
Werewolves howls its way into theaters nationwide on December 6, 2024. Enter to win a custom head by Gillis himself!