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Paste’s ABCs of Horror 3 is a 26-day project that highlights some of our favorite horror films from each letter of the alphabet. The only criteria: The films chosen can’t have been used in our previous Century of Terror, a 100-day project to choose the best horror film of every year from 1920-2019, nor previous ABCs of Horror entries. With many heavy hitters out of the way, which movies will we choose?
Comedy and horror are natural cinematic bedfellows, but always a tricky proposition when it comes to actually balancing the intensity of both sides of that particular equation. Too little frightening atmosphere, blood or guts, and you end up with comedy that feels toothless and ineffectual, afraid to fully commit to an element of danger and irreverence that typifies the genre. Go too hard on making a legitimate horror feature, meanwhile, and you lose the spark of wit and engagement that makes the best horror comedies–say, Tucker & Dale vs. Evil or One Cut of the Dead–transcend both genres. Josh Ruben’s Werewolves Within understands how to walk this delicate line, offering one of the only great comedic films to feature a lycanthrope (outside of WolfCop), but still being just sincerely scary enough to appreciate at face value. There’s a reason it holds a position of honor in our list of the best werewolf movies of all time.
Writer-director Ruben (though Werewolves Within was written by Mishna Wolff) just has the touch, when it comes to crafting this particular brand of genuinely 50/50 modern horror comedies, stories that attempt to both entertain and legitimately quicken the pulse simultaneously. His 2020 debut Scare Me skillfully gets the absolute most out of a small handful of talented performers (including himself) cloistered in a claustrophobic single location, beginning as a charming farce about the soul of storytelling before morphing into a genuinely tense, increasingly psychological thriller by its finish line. Werewolves Within, on the other hand, is a bigger and more ambitious film, a cunning blend of Agatha Christie murder mystery and lupine throat-ripper. It has the odd distinction of being technically the best-reviewed “videogame movie” of all time, although the Oculus Rift VR game it was originally based on is arguably significantly less known than the film at this point. Ruben might as well just accept the plaudit, even if it is a technicality.
Werewolves Within is a welcome star vehicle for Sam Richardson of Veep and Detroiters, in a perfectly cast role that plays to his natural tone of benign affability and clueless everyman-ism. He’s playing the new forest ranger in town, which in this remote corner of forested and snowed-in Vermont, might as well be the sheriff as well–not exactly the position of responsibility you probably want to be in when people start being torn to shreds by a suspected werewolf. He’s joined by a sparkling ensemble cast of comedic character actors, including Michaela Watkins, Harvey Guillén, Wayne Duvall and Milana Vayntrub, the latter ditching the “Lily from AT&T” persona that had made her a widely recognized commercial actress for many years, instead displaying an impressive knack for comedic timing that should really see Vayntrub cast in more indie comedies. She’s charming to a fault here, and it’s difficult not to fall in love with her at least a little bit in the exact same moment that Richardson does: When she begins dancing enthusiastically (and without the least bit of self-awareness) to Ace of Base’s “The Sign.” Suffice to say, it’s a couple seconds of screen time that Ruben clearly calculated will fully win over the audience to her, and he’s not wrong.
Of course, when a blizzard descends on the town, its motley crew of residents are forced into tight confinement, and in the grand tradition of Old Dark House films those close quarters breed dead bodies and chaos. It seems that someone here just might be a werewolf, which is a good enough reason for all the town’s longtime residents to unearth their old grudges with one another and revel in the paranoia. Before long, the identity of the lycanthrope hardly matters at all, given the way these folks gladly accept the invitation to turn on each other and run amok. Richardson is of course caught in the middle of all of it as the new guy, gamely attempting to direct traffic and make peace as his character Finn attempts to become more of the assertive, decisive man that may have been missing from his last failed relationship. But with an alpha wolf in town, what hope does the beta male really have of standing tall?
The main selling point of Werewolves Within is certainly its wry sense of humor, and the way it juggles its ensemble and allows the quirky personalities trapped in the small town’s hunting lodge to ping-pong off one another. There’s a nice slice of socioeconomic representation, with natural, believable friction between characters such as the town’s blue collar original residents and the affluent NYC vacationers who have set up their artist bungalows here while taking advantage of cheap real estate in the backwater burg. We’re given just enough about these folks to feel the occasional pang when they betray each other or fall victim to the ever-elusive monster, which of course narrows the list of suspects. Turns out that whether or not you can afford multiple vacation residents, by the way, you taste just about the same to a werewolf fattening up for the winter.
A couple of films into his career, Josh Ruben has made good on the lessons learned as a prolific CollegeHumor video creator, demonstrating an instinctual knack for tightly plotted genre stories that display a deft balance between characterization and visceral horror bonafides. Here’s hoping he can continue raising the bar for the horror world’s most charming subgenre, or apply his talents to an entirely new horizon.
Jim Vorel is Paste’s Movies editor and resident genre geek. You can follow him on Twitter for more film writing.
