DESIGNING WOLF MAN

SPECIAL MAKE-UP EFFECTS DESIGNER ARJEN TUITEN DISCUSSES HOW HE COLLABORATED WITH DIRECTOR LEIGH WHANNELL TO CREATE A VERY DIFFERENT TAKE ON LYCANTHROPY

- IAN BERRIMAN

WHEN SFX connects with Arjen Tuiten via Zoom, it’s immediately clear that he’s a fan of '30s and '40s horror, as a sinister figure is looming over his left shoulder... “Oh yeah, that’s Lon Chaney,” the make-up effects designer says. “That’s an oil painting I did many years ago.” There are similar portraits on display at his effects studio, Arjen LLC. “I have a few drawings I did maybe 20 years ago. One is Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi, and we have [Dr Jekyll And Mr Hyde star] Fredric March upstairs in the sculpting room.” Tuiten then turns his laptop to the right, revealing a portrait on the opposite wall: Boris Karloff as Ardath Bey (aka Imhotep) in 1932's The Mummy. The week we speak, he’s working on test make-ups for a new take on that very story, directed by Evil Dead Rise’s Lee Cronin. But today, our subject is his work on another contemporary update of a Universal horror classic: Leigh Whannell’s Wolf Man.

REALITY BITES

“When we first started talking, Leigh brought up the idea of how it’s all really grounded in reality. ‘I don’t want to see anything fantastical’ - he was very adamant about that. He said, ‘My frustration in the last few years developing it, talking to designers, is that a lot of people are doing the same thing, which is the classic look of a Wolf Man. That’s not what I want.’ Then he mentioned David Cronenberg’s The Fly, and that it wasn’t necessarily a fantastical transformation, but a slow one, and more like two anatomies trying to mix. So it doesn’t really become a full-blown creature; it’s more a dog or wolf anatomy trying to mix with a human. He said, 'Whatever was done in the past, don’t look at any of it. Keep it as a disease.”