Marvel’s Werewolf by Night secret screening unveils a ‘complete love letter’ to classic horror
Attendees at the 2022 Fantastic Fest film festival in Austin, Texas were the first to see Marvel’s hour-long black-and-white Halloween special Werewolf by Nighton Sunday night, at one of the film festival’s Secret Screenings. Director Michael Giacchino — the composer for The Batman, Thor: Love and Thunder, and Pixar’s Ratatouille, Up, Coco, The Incredibles, and Inside Out, among dozens of other films — called in for a remote Q&A after the screening to explain how the project, premiering on Disney Plus on Oct. 7, came about, and why it looks and feels so radically different from any other Marvel Studios project.
“I was having a conversation with [Marvel Studios president] Kevin Feige, and Kevin said, ‘Hey, like, if you were going to direct something, what would you want to direct?’” Giacchino told Fantastic Fest programming director Annick Mahnert. “And I was like, ‘Werewolf by Night!’ And he was like, ‘What? Really?’ ‘Yes. Yes! I loved it as a kid.’”
The character known as Werewolf by Night — a werewolf named Jack Russell, introduced in Marvel Spotlight in 1972 — has a long, complicated history in Marvel Comics. The Halloween special is his first screen outing from Marvel Studios. Gael García Bernal plays Jack, one of a number of people vying for the Bloodstone, a hereditary monster-fighting weapon that’s up for grabs after the death of its previous owner, Ulysses Bloodstone.
One of Jack’s chief rivals is Ulysses’ estranged daughter, Elsa Bloodstone (The Nevers star Laura Donnelly). But the special doesn’t take any of that too seriously: The actors play their roles with straight-faced gravity, but the tone is somewhere between a winking satire of classic horror films like James Whale’s 1931 Frankenstein, and an open
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