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.

Okay so I want to do a werewolf in my next movie.

Honestly.
Seriously.
No snark: Come up with a new project.
Push this one to the back burner.

Wise old saying...
Want in one hand. Sh!t in the other.
See which one fills up first.

How about pixie fairy horror movie. Shoot em on green screen, shrink em and BAM! Horror!

Okay thanks.

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.

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!

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.

Could you live without the wolf heads? Like what they did in Wolf (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0111742/) ?

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?

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.


Didn't someone pass around a pixie horror movie script here at one point?

You're thinking of Chip Street's FAERIES script (http://chipstreet.com/screenplays/faeries/) from the other forum.



Could you live without the wolf heads? Like what they did in Wolf (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0111742/) ?

I've made a couple of Super 8mm werewolf shorts in the past. I took the WOLFMAN look approach. I was the wolfy!

http://www.midnightsunent.com/weredog3.jpg

http://www.midnightsunent.com/metamorphosis4.jpg

http://www.midnightsunent.com/metamorphosis5.jpg

Okay, I found her - Melita Curphy. She moved from Texas to Chicago,. Her werewolf blog here:

http://missmonsterwerewolf.blogspot.com/


EDIT: here's the "how to" TUTORIAL. (http://www.instructables.com/id/realistic-werewolf-costume/)


http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2229/1640269107_43b0131fb4_o.jpg

What would your budget be for someone to create the head?

You may want to watch the movie Dog Soldiers.

http://www.werewolves.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/dogsoldiers1.jpg

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?

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.

Wow. Thanks for the feedback everybody haha. It was helpful. Thank you.

Think about that list.. ALL that you mention are potentially, YOU. What would YOU do if you were a werewolf, a vampire, a zombie?

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.

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.

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.

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!

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!

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.

Sounds intresting so.....pls tel me more...

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.

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!

Wow....joure story sounds realy awsome. I hope jou find a realy big and good shooting location.

Wow....joure story sounds realy awsome. I hope jou find a realy big and good shooting location.

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.

Fear of the unknown is much greater than fear of some slobbering, roaring fuzzy monster.
You're shooting for a much more high-brow audience.

Clock punchers kinda relate to the drooling fuzzy monster spying on them from the surveillance cameras over the cash registers and across the cube farms.

FWIW, I both applaud your sensible "resources approach" and the story premise.
Both are very nice.
GL & best wishes on pulling it off.

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

I don't know - THE WALKING DEAD is my favorite thing to watch, right now.

I've been wanting to do a werewolf feature for years, but am strongly thinking of making it a different creature, with different attributes. My interest is usually about how the character deals with that part of himself that he can't control. Kind of like an addict who knows that what he is doing is bad, yet is so drawn to it.

This has already been done in "Being Human". Scoopicman, I know you have to have some better ides rattling around in that brain of yours!

Also, when's yer next feature? Out of all of the indie super-low-budget filmmakers, your films have the most... uh... heart? I don't know how to define it, but even in your worst efforts (*coughawakeningcough*) there's this love of movie-making that comes out in your films that just isn't found in most others.

This has already been done in "Being Human". Scoopicman, I know you have to have some better ides rattling around in that brain of yours!

I don't watch BEING HUMAN. It looks like a soap drama. Here's the thing, I grew up on the Marvel's comic, Werewolf By Night. I like that kind of style and have always wanted to make a movie in that vein. Lucky for you, I'm hung up on more obscure themes. Yes, I do have other ideas that will probably come first. :)



Also, when's yer next feature? Out of all of the indie super-low-budget filmmakers, your films have the most... uh... heart? I don't know how to define it, but even in your worst efforts (*coughawakeningcough*) there's this love of movie-making that comes out in your films that just isn't found in most others.

It might be a year or two. I got behind while financing EXILE and taking a large paycut at my job. I need to get stable first. I guarantee the next movie will be worth the wait!

I've made a couple of Super 8mm werewolf shorts in the past. I took the WOLFMAN look approach. I was the wolfy!

http://www.midnightsunent.com/weredog3.jpg

http://www.midnightsunent.com/metamorphosis4.jpg

http://www.midnightsunent.com/metamorphosis5.jpg

Looks pretty cool to me.

Also, darn, I thought I just watched a pretty cool trailer of a film about werewolves and maybe vampires in which they didn't use much in the way of prosthetics, but still came off looking way cool. I thought it was posted here on IT in the Screening Room. But I don't seem to have bookmarked it. :(

Well, it's always cool when creators come up with new things. But, what the heck, people continue to love the old monsters, including me. Er. Anyway, if they like cake, let them eat cake. :)

@ escher,
Sorry to lead you off on a tangent, my point was not that there was no other types of threats, but that the types of threats you listed are popular for the reasons I gave. The whole power of external symbolism is that it gives the story teller short cuts to the psyche, that doesn't mean that their aren't other paths!

A fun challenge might be to try to symbolize and externalize a strictly INTERNAL fear. You can just say "good acting" but how could we do more? For internal paranoia, Id use mirrors. Say for example the main character goes through great lengths not to see his own reflection... uncovering WHY he does this is the fun part!

In regards to your cool idea, not even suggesting its derivative, but there was a mini series I enjoyed called "The Lost Room" that dealt wit a room as a inter dimensional gateway, with some interesting internal logic's you might find inspiring.

I have to agree with escher here regarding lack of imagination. It seems to be an epidemic in indie horror films.
One of my favorite monsters is "The Tall Man" from Phantasm http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0079714/
It's really odd to have a creature with such a common name yet so mysterious.

If you can't afford to do a good werewolf (maybe you can, but it's unlikely) Maybe the "wolf" like creature looks more like a human. You could actually come up with something a little different and interesting.

Best of Luck

This angle has also been done to death now ("Twilight, "Aaah! Zombies!", "My Best Friend is a Vampire", various episodes of Buffy/Angel, etc...)




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.




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.

It might be a year or two. I got behind while financing EXILE and taking a large paycut at my job. I need to get stable first. I guarantee the next movie will be worth the wait!

Pay cut? Suck!

Hey, keep me in mind when it comes to doing the musical score. :)

Last year, I was part of a werewolf project that my friend shot. He built a pair of wolf gloves, and a very nice head and shoulders. The head was puppeteer-ed, and not worn. The effect was accomplished through shadows, smoke, closeups and blood. The result was quite impressive (Sorry no link, they are still in editorial).

They also needed some sucker to play the human form of the wolf. Someone willing to lose a bunch of weight, and really let themselves go to get this mountain-man look. My avatar shows the result- the teeth are of course fake, but the rest is unfortunately me ;)