SPOILER WARNING: The following article contains spoilers for Wolf Man. If you have not yet seen the film, proceed at your own risk!
In the third act of Wolf Man, Christopher Abbott’s Blake goes full feral with the Face Of The Wolf infection, and a funny thought struck me watching the sequence where he gets his caught in a trap while hunting his wife and daughter in a barn. In order to free himself, he doesn’t hesitate to start chewing at his own ankle… and I couldn’t help but think about the horrible fate of Adam, the protagonist in James Wan’s Saw memorably played by Wolf Man writer/director Leigh Whannell.
As it turns out, I wasn’t alone in this reflection. I brought up the thought earlier this month when I had the opportunity to interview the filmmaker about his latest work, and he not only explained how he considered the sequence in question to be a “full circle moment,” but also provided a fun, delicious bit of trivia about how the scene was filmed. Said Whannell,
I had a really great moment on set when we were there because I'm like, 'Oh, we're back here.' And actually the leg that Chris was chewing into was made from chocolate. It was white chocolate [laugh]. So he was actually just feasting on, you know... But it was a really full circle moment for me. It was strange. Because I was like, 'Wow.' When Saw came out, James Wan and I were like, the young kids on the scene now we're like the veterans; we're the old guys. So it was a great full circle moment.
For those of you who are experiencing a mental block or have never watched the movie, Leigh Whannell’s Adam in Saw begins the movie with his ankle chained to a wall in a dank basement bathroom, and unlike fellow captive Dr. Lawrence Gordon (Cary Elwes), who uses a hack saw to perform an amputation of his own foot, he never manages to escape (I maintain its still one of the best traps in the entirety of the Saw franchise). It’s possible that he could have survived had he tried to pull a Wolf Man maneuver… but I also imagine it would be pretty damn difficult to live with the knowledge that he was once forced to chew off his own appendage (which I’d argue is much, much worse than sawing).
And it most certainly would not have tasted like white chocolate.
Wolf Man is now playing in theaters everywhere, and should you want to revisit the origins of Leigh Whannell’s career, Saw is available to stream with an Amazon Prime Video subscription with a MovieSphere+ add-on.
