Werewolves

Josiah

Josiah

Okay so I want to do a werewolf in my next movie. Not a cheap wolfman type werewolf, but one with like a human's body and a wolf's head. But I'm having a difficult time trying to find a werewolf head/mask that is decent. And as far as making one... well let's just say prosthetics and make up isn't my strong point. Anyone have any advice on what to do?

Thanks.
 
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I had a serious discussion a few years back with makeup artists about doing a werewof movie and was advised against it because of the cost to make a werewolf costume that looked half way decent. All of the hair has to be put in by hand. So, the cost is sky high.

That is why in the UNDERWORLD movie series they cut back on the amout of hair the werewolves had. Considering the were making their movies in the $20 Million range, they had considerably more money to play around with than people on this board. So, they were able to afford many werewolves

Remember too, those werewolves are a combination of on set prosthetics and post computer graphics.
 
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There's always the more typical low-budget approach. Avoid showing wolf-form as much as possible, keep it in the dark when you do. A little post-futzing and you could end with something pretty cool.

dlevanchuk, I ABSOLUTELY want to see the pixie horror movie now!
 
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I would say, buy the services of someone who IS good at prosthetics with a good portfolio to show you. Or learn to get good at it. Those seem to be the alternatives here...

Personally, I like werewolf stories that are done well... make sure the story lives up to the expense you will end up making to get decent werewolf makeup/prosthetics done.
 
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Didn't someone pass around a pixie horror movie script here at one point?

Also, why werewolves? I keep seeing the same darned movie monsters these days: vampires, werewolves, zombies. It's starting to get a little boring.

Can't anyone think of any new threats to humanity?
 
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I love a good werewolf tail....er, tale. There's a girl on my old Myspace account that makes werewolf heads. I think she lives in Texas.


escher said:
Didn't someone pass around a pixie horror movie script here at one point?
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You're thinking of Chip Street's FAERIES script from the other forum.



richy said:
Could you live without the wolf heads? Like what they did in Wolf ?
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I've made a couple of Super 8mm werewolf shorts in the past. I took the WOLFMAN look approach. I was the wolfy!

weredog3.jpg


metamorphosis4.jpg


metamorphosis5.jpg
 
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escher said:
Didn't someone pass around a pixie horror movie script here at one point?

Also, why werewolves? I keep seeing the same darned movie monsters these days: vampires, werewolves, zombies. It's starting to get a little boring.

Can't anyone think of any new threats to humanity?
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Think about that list.. ALL that you mention are potentially, YOU. What would YOU do if you were a werewolf, a vampire, a zombie?

The REAL story is not fighting the creatures, its fighting the self. Finding new ways to tell that story is the hard part. I think "The Thing" does this very well but its the same really.

Humanity has been fighting this internal struggle since the days of communal fires and the dawn of story telling, you cannot find a NEW way, only discover an old way that has not been too popularized already.
 
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wheatgrinder said:
Think about that list.. ALL that you mention are potentially, YOU. What would YOU do if you were a werewolf, a vampire, a zombie?
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This angle has also been done to death now ("Twilight, "Aaah! Zombies!", "My Best Friend is a Vampire", various episodes of Buffy/Angel, etc...)


The REAL story is not fighting the creatures, its fighting the self.
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I don't agree with this conclusion. While there are indeed a huge number of stories about fighting the self, that doesn't make every one of these potential stories about that. You're ignoring an entire category -- external threats are easily separated from internal threats (although many good stories include both).

However, I find stories that treat an external threat as just a metaphor for the internal struggle to be pretentious and, often, kinda boring. How many times do we have to watch "man is the real monster of them all!"? We don't know that! It's a presumptuous claim to make, lacking in imagination.


Humanity has been fighting this internal struggle since the days of communal fires and the dawn of story telling, you cannot find a NEW way, only discover an old way that has not been too popularized already.
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I also don't see this as a valid conclusion. That's like that patent office guy from back in the 1800's who said "Everything that could possibly be invented, has been invented."

I think what often happens is this: any set of subjects/topics/ideas can be split in various different categories, depending on the criteria of the categorizor. But then, if this set of categories becomes popular, people start to treat that set of categories as non-arbitrary and then as absolute. The very notion that there's a different way to slice it is forgotten.

I see this all the time in the realm of symbolism. Storytellers going waaay back interpret a set of symbols a certain way ("a circle is unity!", "cloven hooves == bad!", etc...) and then everyone latches on to those as if they were a fundamental part of the universe/psychology/fairyland/whatever and no one ever bothers to see their own symbols, or to interpret the world in a different way.

We keep going back to the same sources, forgetting that once upon a time those sources did not exist and were invented by people just like you and me.
 
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As an example: The script I'm working on for my first feature has an external threat of physics itself, and an external threat of the main character against himself without it being an internal threat.

I've never seen anyone try to tackle that before.

C'mon people, we're storytellers! The medium of the screen has given us the stage for us to present anything we can imagine. So get out there and imagine stuff!
 
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escher said:
As an example: The script I'm working on for my first feature has an external threat of physics itself, and an external threat of the main character against himself without it being an internal threat.

I've never seen anyone try to tackle that before.

C'mon people, we're storytellers! The medium of the screen has given us the stage for us to present anything we can imagine. So get out there and imagine stuff!
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Sounds intresting so.....pls tel me more...

The script im working on. the physical world and its inhabitants are al projectens of fears, regrets and dreams of the mean character. As the protagonist sinks into a negative spiral....so does the world. Its gona be my first movie.....working on the scrpt for 3 monts now I expect to finish the first draft over 3 or 4 Months.
 
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Feutus Lapdance said:
Sounds intresting so.....pls tel me more...
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I'm obviously not going to give away any of the major plot points :) but the setup is: A police officer becomes trapped in a mutli-dimensional house (physics accident) during a homicide investigation.

To keep my one location from feeling cramped, each version of the apartment he travels through will have different furniture arrangements, lighting, time of day, etc -- a maze of parallel-world apartments all the same but different.

This is also why I have a stack of apartment maps drawn on index cards next to my keyboard -- I have to make sure everything stays consistent.

As to the "he's his own external threat" bit... that's a major spoiler I can't really give away. :P


The script im working on. the physical world and its inhabitants are al projectens of fears, regrets and dreams of the mean character. As the protagonist sinks into a negative spiral....so does the world. Its gona be my first movie.....working on the scrpt for 3 monts now I expect to finish the first draft over 3 or 4 Months.
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This is the kind of movie that, if done well, can be fantastic. The drawback is that if it's not done well, it will be absolutely horrible. There's very little middle ground here, so I wish you the best of luck! Knock our metaphorical socks off!
 
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Feutus Lapdance said:
Wow....joure story sounds realy awsome. I hope jou find a realy big and good shooting location.
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I hope my writing can live up to my premise.

The script is being written around my available logistics: I have one single actor (who I will actually be able to pay for his time, too!), and I have the entire ground floor of a house, which is my apartment. The whole script is written around this serious limitation of stuff. I'm still lacking lighting equipment, but have almost all the other props and things I need, including real actual police uniforms that actual real police wear. (All of the police "costumes" I found were seriously lacking in visual quality.) I still need to get badges.

I need to finalize the script and work out a shooting schedule with my actor. I'm hoping to start production this upcoming February. (I had originally planned on starting earlier this year but real life intervened and production had to be temporarily postponed. Gives me more time to polish the script, though. That's nice.)

Anyway, weren't we talking about werewolves and how they should be replaced by something better and more easily done by a low-budget filmmaker?

Here's my free-to-use idea if it's deemed worthy:

Random people are suddenly stricken by a growing fear of everything around them. This builds up over about 30 seconds or so to a complete screaming terror fit, at which point the person drops dead. There is no identifiable biological cause and it doesn't appear to be any kind of infectious, transmissible malady.

People just... suddenly become terrified and die. More and more each day. An unidentifiable epidemic of unknown cause.​

How's that for a low-budget setting? :)

It also leaves a lot of room for a wide set of possibilities for what kind of story can be told against that backdrop, and it's not something that's already been done to death. Fear of the unknown is much greater than fear of some slobbering, roaring fuzzy monster.
 
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