Where was ‘Wolf Man’ filmed? The unexpected filming location behind the Universal Monster movie, Canada Reviews

The latest classic Universal monster to be plugged into the circuit board and reanimated is the Wolf Man. The Invisible Man’s Leigh Whannell has just unleashed another modern take on a classic creature feature, first made famous by Lon Chaney back in the 1940s – this time set in the wilds of Oregon in America’s Pacific Northwest.

What is Wolf Man about?

Wolf Man opens with a flashback sequence that plunges us right into those deep, dank forests in 1995 as we follow a young protagonist Blake Lovell (Zac Chandler) and his troubled, overprotective dad from the remote Lovell farmstead in Oregon and into the woods on a hunting expedition where someone – or something – sinister is lurking. 

Fast-forward to the present day, and Blake is a struggling writer with a wife (Julia Garner) and young daughter (Matilda Firth) of whom he’s fiercely protective. Official confirmation of his long-missing father’s death seems like the perfect excuse to leave San Francisco and head back to that scenic spot for a break and a reset. Big mistake. Huge. Somewhere in those same woods, something furry and ferocious still lurks.

Where was Wolf Man filmed?

Wolf Man is a horror movie with a twist or two in its locker – including its surprising real-life setting.

‘It was a tough shoot!’ remembers lead actress Julia Garner of her stint on Wolf Man – and not just because the Ozark star spends a chunk of the film being pursued by a slavering man-beast. Instead of trekking into the real Pacific Northwest, Whannell’s cast and crew headed for the wilds of New Zealand’s North Island to pull off their latest Universal Monster flick – augmented with photography of the South Island’s beech forests to capture the movie’s werewolf-stalked woodland.

The setting for the remote Lovell farm was found in Mangaroa, about 30 miles from Wellington in the country’s North Island. The same part of the world doubled up as Rivendell in Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy. 

‘The Pacific Northwest has a distinctive look,’ explains production designer Ruby Mathers of the choice. ‘The landscape that the South Island of New Zealand has to offer is nothing short of breathtaking.’

‘If you want that mountainous look that looks like Oregon, you’re going to come to New Zealand,’ adds Whannell. ‘The locations in the South Island were beautiful. This allowed us to find something beautiful and point a camera at it.’ 

The small city of Upper Hutt was the movie’s base camp, while interior sets were built and filmed at Wellington’s Lane Street Studios.

But the key locations – the Lovell farmstead and its outbuildings – were constructing to Whannell’s exacting specifications. ‘It was important to me as an Australian production designer to get well versed in American farmhouse architecture,’ recalls production designer Ruby Mathers. ‘This spans a few hundred years, [so] was not a small feat trying to understand American vernacular architecture.’

The reviews for Wolf Man may have been mixed, but there’s something about the Universal Monster movie’s eerie, forested New Zealand landscapes – often filmed at night and strikingly lit by Stefan Duscio’s cinematography – that conjures up the perfect mix of atmospheric and starkly beautiful on screen.

‘We were lucky enough to find a farm to build our house and create a barn on that was surrounded by a pine forest,’ says Mathers. ‘In the South Island, we did a lot of shooting in native beech forests. Luckily, beech is ubiquitous in the Pacific Northwest as well.’

Wolf Man is in cinemas worldwide now.

Read our review of Wolf Man.

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