Let me get my due diligence out of the way up front: there are no werewolves in Werewolf Game. I say this because werewolves are hot right now and because the film’s marketing plays coy about whether the titular lycanthropes are literal. Horror geeks don’t like it when we’re promised werewolves and don’t get them, so for the sake of clarity: Werewolf Game is not a werewolf movie.
Instead, it’s a Squid Game/Battle Royale riff that doesn’t do much to innovate on its influences. Twelve strangers find themselves trapped on a remote island, where a masked man called The Judge (Tony Todd) explains the rules of the game they have been conscripted into. Two have been designated “werewolves,” and the other ten are “villagers.” Each night, the werewolves will hunt and kill villagers. Each day, everyone who is left will vote for a member of the group they believe to be a wolf, and the person with the most votes will be shot dead in front of them.
With a huge social media conglomerate pulling the strings, millions of dollars in prize money for the winners, and nothing short of death for the losers, the stakes couldn’t be higher. The expected reality show staples ensue: fractious group dynamics, alliances, romance, suspicion, and accusation. Will the players manage to put aside their differences long enough to take the fight to the game masters, or are The Judge and his cronies too well-protected?
When a beloved icon in our fandom dies, it tends to change how we view their body of work. Knowing we won’t be getting any more from them, we give their late-career entries more grace than we might otherwise. (I am not immune to this–see my soft spot for Wes Craven’s objectively subpar My Soul To Take.) Assuming his part in the upcoming Final Destination: Bloodlines is roughly equivalent to his contribution to the other franchise entries, Werewolf Game is likely Tony Todd’s last bit of significant screen time. I do not think that obligates me to go easy on it. After all, for every Candyman or Night of the Living Dead, there are a handful of Death Houses or Agoraphobias. To be certain, Todd was a fine actor who always elevated the material, but a good part of his filmography consists of horror con guestlist pandering schlock, and you can’t honor his legacy without embracing that fact.
RELATED: ‘Return of the Living Dead’ (2025): Everything to Know
Werewolf Game is not a good movie. It’s full of overblown dialogue (the word “gigachad” is uttered unironically), misjudged slam-bang editing, flat attempts at poignancy, and ridiculous plotting. But here in the post-truth era, where we live on islands of bespoke misinformation, the film has its inelegant finger on the pulse of something. Horror films like last year’s acclaimed Red Rooms have been unpacking our world’s techno-depersonalization and the filtering of empathy through screens, and hits like M3GAN and its upcoming sequel sound alarms about big tech overreach. Werewolf Game asks us how much easier it might be to kill someone by tapping their picture on a tablet rather than pulling the trigger yourself. Horror has always played with truth’s unreliability. But when it explicitly positions social media tech bros as manipulators of trust in a behavior-modification experiment with life-or-death consequences, Werewolf Game seems to be pointing the way forward for the genre, even if almost by accident.
You probably recognize the feeling of watching something you are certain will not age well. I get it from influencer horror like Superhost (but, oddly, not Influencer), as well as the glossy, probably AI-sweetened stuff that populates everybody’s Netflix suggestions these days. It’s the hallmark of movies that are self-consciously “of their time” without feeling particularly new–Werewolf Game, for instance, has one paw firmly planted in mid-2000s MTV torture horror aesthetics. Despite those moments where it grasps at themes that will surely be emblematic of the time we’re living in, Werewolf Game will be remembered, if at all, as the final junk food slice of that good old Tony baloney.
