Fright Tomes: Playing Games with Leigh Whannell
By T.J. Tranchell
Career trajectories often lead to wonderful surprises. There are things we know about certain people, surface things, and things we only learn by digging a little deeper. Often the deeper things make the surface things more poignant or at least more interesting. That’s a long way to say that filmmaker Leigh Whannell could have been someone completely different, someone interesting, but not someone we would have ever heard about. And it all starts with the writing.
At this point, Whannell is gaining a foothold as a director. His interpretation of The Invisible Man (2020) is considered one of the most unique and successful takes on the classic monsters. His imagining of Wolf Man hits theaters in the winter of 2025. His direction, however, is deeply influenced by his writing roots.
A quick look at his biography reveals important secrets. Unlike the twist at the end of Saw (2004), co-written with friend and director James Wan, the reveal comes first. Whannell cut his teeth as a film critic and reporter in Australia. The thing journalism does — even the type of arts journalism Whannell started in — is that it gives the reporter an opportunity to learn about people. Journalism requires an inherent curiosity, a need to figure out how people tick and what can get people into certain situations. Whannell’s film writing — on the surface, remember — appears wholly situational. “What if this happens?” can be a way to enter the work. “What if some psycho toyed with people and essentially tricked them into their own deaths?” Yeah, that’s Saw in a simplistic nutshell. But Saw gets better the more we start to care about the people. While Whannell hasn’t been involved in crafting later entries, the seeds he and Wan planted with the John Kramer character become what drives the franchise. Insidious, the next franchise Wan and Whannell created, can also be seen at first as situational: what if a father learns that he had a haunted past because his son is now experiencing the same thing? That’s the situation, but it’s the people who matter and it’s one of the reasons we eventually come back to stories of the original characters in the two later entries after a Whannell-directed third installment prequel.
Writers — especially screenwriters — can thrive on situations. But audiences need a character to hang their hats on. The problem is that characters like John Kramer build franchises because they can be dropped into a variety of situations. These can become cookie-cutter, a claim rightfully lobbed at Saw and Insidious. “It’s the same story, just years later.” It’s the same story, but the kid has grown up.” When situations grow because of character, then we get something startling and often fresh. Whannell’s Invisible Man is a great example. The film needs the strong performance of Elizabeth Moss to drive it. If that character were a different person, the film would be different and, I’d argue, less successful. It is character-driven in a way that is harrowing to watch and, to the detriment of the money people, doesn’t lend itself to a sequel. What do you do next? The answer is to try another monster and so the reins of Wolf Man were given to Whannell.
We see his development as a filmmaker grow from his development as a writer. He’s moving away from the situational and towards the characters. We move from “what if” plots to “what would this character do?” That is where Whannell is thriving now. The Invisible Man isn’t about “what if a man turned invisible?” Instead, it’s about “what would THIS woman do if her abusive husband turned invisible?”
Stories that could happen to anyone do have a certain appeal, but in horror those stories quickly become regurgitations, and the characters are recycled cannon fodder for the villains. Yes, Whannell has been just as guilty of that as anyone who produced something successful and was then handed a bunch of money. Formulas work until they don’t. The writers can either fight against that or be doomed to repeat themselves until they don’t get hired anymore. Repetition leads to parody. How do you think Abbot and Costello eventually met Frankenstein? Why did the attempts at starting Universal’s “Dark Universe” fail? Because they wanted formulaic situations and not unique characters. The old school Universal monsters thrived because audiences fell in love with the characters. Catching that lightning in a bottle proved impossible then, and I imagine even a writer such as Whannell won’t be able to do it and perhaps has learned not to. Will there be sequels to his monster movies? That’s hard to say because character-driven films often end in ways that do not lead to sequels. People die for real (within the context of the film, that is) or find ways to move on from the horrors.
We need more screenwriters and filmmakers like Whannell who learned from trying to extend franchises beyond their relevance and who now know they need to focus on strong characters. Answering questions like “who are you and why are you here?” are direct results of starting a writing life as a journalist and maintaining that curiosity about people and what motivates them. Whannell is coming into his own by going back to his roots before he ever wrote the first words of Saw. 🩸
About
T.J. Tranchell was born on Halloween and grew up in Utah. He has published has published six books, including The Blackhawk Cycle, a hardcover omnibus. In October 2020, The New York Times called Cry Down Dark the scariest book set in Utah. He holds a Master’s degree in Literature from Central Washington University and is pursuing an MFA through the UCR-Palm Desert Low Residency program. Tranchell has also published work in Fangoria. He currently lives in Washington State with his wife and son and teaches at a community college.
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