Werewolf By Night

That was a crypt keeper ass joke that Ulysses’ corpse made

Got a laugh

There's a reason most everyone in that room groaned at it.

I wish that bit hadn't been in the trailer.

It is kind of a shame the trailer existed, really. In the special proper, Man-Thing's appearance is clearly angled as a bit of a minor twist (the narrative goes out of its way to provide 0 detail about the creature for a Nothing Is Scarier vibe) and the Halfway Plot Switch to Russell wolfing out and butchering everybody also becomes telegraphed by the trailer. Alas, the woes of marketing.

Ulysses even kinda looked like Crypty.

That'd be an interesting idea for a sequel; Ulysses comes back from the dead, Elsa is forced to put down her own father.

Swamp thing glares at Man thing

I think Man Thing predates Swamp thing but is also a rip off himself of the Heap.

Man-Thing does predate Swamp Thing, but only by a month. The creators of both were friends, so they were probably sharing ideas with each other.

The Heap himself is drawing from Theodore Sturgeon's 1940 short story "It!", which featured one of fiction's first bonafide muck monsters, the grandfather of them all shambolic monstrosities of the swamp.

All three differentiated themselves from Sturgeon's creation in some sense. Sturgeon's character is purely animalistic (and has no set backstory other than the fact he Was Once a Man) while The Heap has human-like intellignece, he's just incapable of speaking. Heap's backstory is also that he was a soldier granted new life by divine intervention, while Man-Thing and Swamp Thing went with their nearly identical "scientist experiment gone awry in the swamp by way of criminal sabotage". Swamp Thing is very rational and speech-capable (in fact he's often shown as very verbose) and has the whole "Guardian of the Green" thing going on since Moore's reinvention.

Man-Thing, barely sentient as he is, is the closest to Sturgeon's character, but he differentiates himself by his The Empath routine ("Whatever knows fear...").

Seeing the nosferatu trophy on the wall makes me wonder how diverse the vampires here will be. Obviously, if Dracula and/or Deacon Frost show up, we'll have traditional ones, but it'd be cool to have some more inhuman vampires and maybe some repulsive, feral 30 Days of Night-style fiends with absolutely nothing human about them. Some foreign vampires would be cool as well, maybe have Blade and Elsa go after some aswangs, penanggalans, or soucriants.

Was anyone else kinda surprised at how much the greatest monster hunters in the world suck at their jobs?

Like. When they put Jack into a cage and decided to provoke him into transforming into a monster, I kind of thought that the cage would be monster-resistant. Like. At the very least, that the bars wouldn't be made of papier-mache. I know, I know, Werewolf Jack has monster strength. But. Did they not. Anticipate? That the monster. That they were turning into a monster. Would have monster strength?

Seriously, the Bloodstones are the absolute worst monster hunters I've ever seen in my life. I was sitting there fretting about how Jack and Elsa would get out of this and then the answer was, "Oh, no, this was the most escapable situation ever; The Bloodstones are suicidally dumb and not a serious threat to anybody, so the only real stake is whether Elsa will join the bloodbath or not."

As for the werewolf design, I generally prefer my werewolves to be more wolf than man; Werewolves without a wolfy face just look like angry gorillas to me. But this design worked, especially with the whole 50's B-horror aesthetic.

Edited by TobiasDrake on Oct 16th 2022 at 8:50:09 AM

I think their plan was to let the werewolf kill Elsa, then weaken it with the Bloodstone. That's why they zap him instead of Verussa using the Bloodstone immediately, since they want to rile him up. They didn't account for the werewolf not immediately killing her.

Verussa disappears from existence until she needs to show up with the Bloodstone again, which is a problem. But I don't think their plan was illogical.

Still really kinda bothers me that none of them got names. Even if they were just werewolf food.

Well, ending credits does have name for each one.

• Kirk Thatcher is Jovan(the one with beard and axe)
• Daniel J. Watts is Barasso(the one whose ear Werewolf bites off)
• Leonardo Nam is Liorn(the one with crossbow gauntlet and whose hand Elsa chops off)
• Eugenie Bondurant is Azarel(the one with white clothes and gets sword to the face by Elsa).

To be fair, it's not the Bloodstones.

The Bloodstones are Ulysses (dead and reanimated) and Elsa (who does just fine). These are just some associates invited by Ulysses' wife and her goon squad.

It's Mrs. Van Helsing and some randos.

I admit I totally think Daniel J. Watts was a Expy for Blade, though.

Edited by CharlesPhipps on Oct 16th 2022 at 12:02:48 PM

Yeah, generally enjoyed it, but it falls prey to the standard problem of 'I've created a group for the sole purpose of being destroyed to prove how dangerous something is,' which is that it always leaves me wondering 'how did any of these guys survive long enough to get killed if they're this incompetent?

In fairness, the dialogue did keep hyping up how dangerous Ted was (or was supposed to be) but I do agree that what we were told about the monster hunters didn't really match what we saw.

There's a bit of a narrative sleight of hand going on where the main hunters are operating on suboptimal situations (without immediate access to their weapons, competing against one another and fighting a particularly dangerous sort of monster) and Verusa is never really claimed as some sort of great huntress (she just married one), but it is wonky in the ol' The World's Expert (on Getting Killed) chestnut.

James A. Janisse of Dead Meat tallies up the kills of Werewolf by Night and provides a bunch of fun background information in the process.

Kinda surreal to see a Marvel product be covered on the KILL COUNT.