The 48-year-old Australian filmmaker has directed Wolf Man - a reimagining of the 1940s picture The Wolf Man - and explained that he opts for a realistic approach when it comes to the theme of scary monsters.
"I'm a big fan of gothic horror movies," Whannell told SFX magazine.
"I love what Tim Burton did with Sleepy Hollow and I love what Guillermo del Toro does.
"There's such beauty to those gothic elements, like fog and cemeteries on a hill backlit by the moon.
"From a production design element, I love all that stuff ... but I think I love it more as a viewer."
"When it comes time for me to make a monster, my mind immediately wants to place that monster in the real world and take a very grounded approach: we're not dealing with a folk tale, we're dealing with something that could really happen."
A reimagining of the 1940s picture The Wolf Man, Leigh Whannell's Wolf Man stars Christopher Abbott. (AP PHOTO)
The new movie tells the story of how family man Blake (Christopher Abbott) transforms into a werewolf after being clawed by one of the beasts during an attack.
Whannell revealed how he put disease at the centre of the movie as he first started writing the script during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.
"I was writing it during COVID, so obviously I was in a certain state of mind," The Invisible Man director said.
"Everyone was isolated in their houses, and there was this disease out there. It was a very difficult year, and all the dread and the fear of that time is in this script.
"When I sat down and thought about it, I wasn't trying to force anything. I wasn't saying, 'I've got to work out the theme'.
"I was just thinking, 'What is this movie about? What's my North Star?' The thing that presented itself straight away was disease."
Whannell believes that his take on werewolves is less supernatural than other movies.
"If you think about the concept of a werewolf, it's a disease," he said.
"It's a bodily thing that's affecting us. I could really easily break that down and turn this movie into a story about dealing with that.
"All of us know somebody who's suffered from an illness that has broken them down.
"Most people you meet know somebody who's had an experience with cancer, if not their own experience with cancer.
"The fragility of the human body and the fact that we might have to face this stuff one day is a scary concept.
"That's always something you should gravitate towards with a horror movie: does it scare me in real life?
"So that just seemed to be the right way to go."
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