VIEWING GUIDE

Werewolves Within is... within.

DIRECTOR JOSH RUBEN unpacks his hairy horror-comedy whodunnit.

A BEAUTIFUL DAY IN THE NEIGHBOURHOOD

Josh Ruben’s Werewolves Within is a deliciously dark comedy that could essentially be labelled ‘An American Werewolf In Knives Out’. Its subversive tone is established right from the off, with a title card that takes an innocent quote from Mister Rogers, that oh-so-american paragon of virtue, and darkens it with ominous strings. “That was a late add,” says Ruben. “We had lines in the movie regarding Mister Rogers, but once the film was in the can we thought, ‘We have so much here about community and about being a good person. So let’s open it with the spokesperson for politeness and then just have a Sam Raimi-esque sound slam.’”

MEET THE SUSPECTS

“That sequence was the one I was most terrified of,” says Ruben of the film’s early minutes, in which new ranger Finn (Sam Richardson) is escorted through town by postal worker Cecily (Milana Vayntrub). Along the way, he is introduced to a litany of bizarre townsfolk, including dotty married couple Pete (Michael Chernus) and Trisha (Michaela Watkins), and rich tech couple Devon (Cheyenne Jackson) and Joaquim (Harvey Guillén). Any of whom could be the werewolf who chomped down on an unsuspecting bloke in the opening scene. “I didn’t quite know how to shoot it. We only had one day on Main Street, and we had to meet these characters and give everyone a chance to improvise and make an impression. And we only had one camera.” Imagine what he could have done with two.

DAVE’S CORPSE

Another challenge Ruben faced, with such a large cast and a relatively low budget, was to find a way to get coverage of his assembled characters. His solution: pack them all into the frame in a series of carefully choreographed and framed shots, most notably one in which the gang get a good look at the bloody remains of the murderer’s first victim. “That was part of how I sold myself as director on the job,” he says. “I want to shoot Fargo as if it were an Amblin film and do these tableau shots with the actors filling out the frame.”

SAY THE NAME

Not all who see Werewolves Within will know that it’s based on a Ubisoft video game. But it is, and while the two are vastly different (the game is set in a medieval village, for one), Ruben was keen to load his movie with callbacks, references and Easter eggs. Including a gloriously clumsy attempt to shoehorn the title into dialogue, when Finn says with a wince, “When werewolves are within.” “I think those moments when people cram a title into a movie are hysterical,” laughs Ruben. “And I love how Sam reads that line. But I had zero stipulations

from Ubisoft. Zero. They were like, ‘Make it a good movie.’ I was like, ‘Wonderful!’”

THE BLOODBATH

After just over an hour of beautifully played, very funny bickering between the assembled suspects, things go south very quickly, with pretty much every major character killing someone, or being killed by someone else, in short order. “Like Clue, or Hot Fuzz, it has that same energy,” says Ruben. “Not necessarily with the stylistic cuts, but the glib nature of the dialogue and the pacing and the music was the feel I wanted.” One key moment sees two characters — stoner mechanics Gwen (Sarah Burns) and Marcus (George Basil) — dispatched within seconds. “That was crazy,” says Ruben. “We had to time out Sarah Burns backing up her truck, and perfectly frame it to block out Michaela Watkins, then time blood-splatter on the window. It was a three-part punch: gun blast, light effect, blood.”

I USED TO BE A WEREWOLF. I STILL AM.

With virtually everyone dead or dying, only Finn and Cecily are left. The ordeal, it seems, is over. But you may have noticed a conspicuous lack of a werewolf up until this point, something which is rectified in style when Cecily reveals that she was the furry fiend all along. Ruben dismisses, with a grin, any suggestion that he considered making a werewolf movie where it turns out there wasn’t actually a werewolf, after all. Especially when you consider that the film was written by Mishna Wolff. Talk about nominative determinism. “Can you imagine, with a name like that and she doesn’t deliver?” laughs Ruben. “But I did want to pull back the slingshot as much as possible and make you think, ‘Is this just a violenter, ridiculouser Knives Out?’ And then, yeah, you have a creature feature on your hands!”

MANIC PIXIE NIGHTMARE GIRL

From the moment they met, Finn has been charmed by Cecily’s perky Manic Pixie Dream Girl act. But it was just that: an act. “That was Mishna’s dream, to break down that archetype,” says Ruben. “Milana is the face of AT&T over here, and there’s no possible way she could be corrupted. When I approached

Milana about the movie, one of her references was The Talented Mr. Ripley, which I thought was genius.” Putting the ‘rip’ in Ripley, then.

NO BUSINESS LIKE SNOW BUSINESS

All the way through the film, Finn has been preaching about the usefulness of snowshoes. And in his final showdown with Cecily, it’s a broken snowshoe that comes in handy, as he rams the pointy end into her skull. This downand-dirty, lo-fi solution was a late replacement for an elaborate action sequence, involving a snow plough, that Ruben and his team just didn’t have the money for. “So we realised we had this beautiful running gag of the snowshoes,” he says. “And we had to put them on the wall of this hipster bar and have him stab her with one. To have to explain that to my props guy was so funny. I had to draw it, because it is an obscure idea.” But cheaper than a snow plough. Or silver bullets. WEREWOLVES WITHIN IS OUT NOW ON DVD AND DIGITAL