Cursed puts a new twist on the werewolf legend via horror maestro Wes Craven. © Dimension Films.

One of the main problems in monster movies has always been monster suits. Take werewolves. Men have been transforming into wolves ever since the days when Henry Hull stalked London, in Werewolf of London. But it was not until Joe Dante’s The Howling and John Landis’ American Werewolf in London that efforts were made to have the werewolf bear actual resemblance to a quadruped. Until then, the werewolf, whether played by Hull, Lon Chaney Jr., Oliver Reed or even Michael Landon, was always a hairy man, a sort of Mr. Hyde with a few wolf-like characteristics, skipping around on the balls of its feet. And even the work of Dante and Landis was limited to few long shots of somewhat stiff animatronic creatures or miniatures. The real curse of the werewolf has always been the legs — the human legs that could not be made to appear with canine angularity.

Now Wes Craven and Spencer Cook have changed all that with their fun and scary rollercoaster ride.

Craven’s new film Cursed features what are without doubt the most realistic werewolves ever put on screen. Created from three main sources — a costumed actor, animatronics and a digital werewolf, the filmmakers no longer had to resort to shadowy suggestion to put across images of a truly hybrid creature as equally wolf-like as human. Spencer Cook, Sony Imageworks animation supervisor on Cursed, explains: “The digital component was to replicate Rick Baker’s werewolf costume, to make a digital copy of it. We modified it to some extent, because in the digital shots, you see the full werewolf from head to toe, as opposed to the performer in the costume, which you see only in close-up or from the waist up. And that was mainly because of the design of the werewolf with the canine legs — the back legs of a dog, with the foot elongated, so the werewolf is walking on the balls of its feet, the heel much higher and the tibia bone much shorter. We modified the lower half of the body somewhat so it looked more natural. And then, of course, we animated it walking and running in an appropriate way as well. It’s a much different kind of walk than a person could do.”

Animation supervisor Spencer Cook.

Stages of Transformation
Cook came onto the project after animator Jeremy Cantor had done the preliminary work. “Jeremy did the initial rig of the werewolf models,” Cook explains. “Basically, the process was that Rick Baker’s studio designed the werewolf based on Wes’s ideas, and input from the art director as well. A scale maquette was sculpted, and then a costume was made from that design. The animatronics were created mostly for the facial part of the costume, to move the lips, eyes, ears and wrinkle the skin. The costume was worn by a performer, and his facial expressions were the animatronic aspect of it.”

Cook adds that the model department at Sony designed and built the surface textures for the animation model, with all the muscle shapes and surface details. Once scanned and digitized, the animation could begin. “The werewolf gets rigged with a series of joints that allows us animators to select certain controls and bend the arms, bend the leg, turn the head and do all the stuff we need to do to create a performance with it.”

Naturally, the final rendered image with fur, muscular details, deformations and lighting, takes hours per frame to complete. Hence during the animation stage, Cook worked with a lower-resolution version of the werewolf, which allowed him to see the movement of the creature in realtime. “When we move the limbs, there is not a big delay — the analogy I use is that we’re manipulating it like a stop-motion puppet. I come from a stop-motion background and to me it seems like the same thing — there’s a jointed skeleton inside this thing and it holds whatever position you put it in, and that’s what’s happening in the computer as well, you’re selecting certain controls that move the joints, and so we’re posing it in that way. We work with a low-resolution figure so we can get the feedback quickly and see how the motion looks and feels, and then quickly make changes based on that.”