“Underworld: Evolution is both a sequel and a prequel,” its director Len Wiseman explains to me in the manic surroundings of the San Diego Comic Con. The new film starts with a bang as Wiseman elaborates: we get to see a medieval sequence with Viktor and his gang of death dealers in armour on horseback battling the werewolves. Audiences have been fascinated with vampires and werewolves since Nosferatu back in 1922 and Lon Chaney Jr as the Wolf Man in Universal’s classic 1941 film. With the first Underworld, released in 2003, making more than four times its budget in worldwide box office, it was inevitable that a sequel would follow. Underworld followed a long line of films and TV that looked at the worlds of the bloodsuckers and the furry beasts. Nosferatu, made by director FW Murnau, was originally intended to be a movie based on Bram Stoker’s classic Dracula but he was refused the rights from the Stoker estate. Murnau, undeterred by this setback, decided to change the name and the film is still a seminal work of cinema more than eighty years after it was made. It took Universal to popularise monsters on screen with the likes of Frankenstein, Dracula, Bride of Dracula, The Wolf Man, The Mummy and Creature From The Black Lagoon. It was Universal who cast the classic Hollywood vampire image. It was also the company who succeeded in killing Dracula and The Wolf Man more expertly than Van Helsing could ever have done by making films like Abbott And Costello Meet Frankenstein and Abbott And Costello Meet The Mummy. It took Hammer Films over in the UK to resurrect the idea of Dracula and The Wolf Man as more than just comic relief. The release of Dracula in 1958 with the heavily sexualised Christopher Lee in the eponymous role with Peter Cushing as vampire hunter Van Helsing went some way to restoring figures like Dracula and The Wolf Man as figures of terror in the public’s imagination. Unlike Universal, Hammer took the figures of Dracula and The Wolf Man and imbued them with humanity and a more overt sexual dimension.
Hammer had a great deal of success with films like Dracula, The Curse Of The Werewolf (Oliver Reed’s first major role in cinema), Frankenstein and Taste The Blood of Dracula but by the end of the seventies, Hammer was a spent force in film. It took John Landis in 1981 to make An American Werewolf in London to spark people’s interest in things that go bump in the night again. The film was a huge hit, as was another werewolf picture: The Howling. Released in the same year as American Werewolf, The Howling, directed by Joe Dante, who went on to make Gremlins and Innerspace, depicted the werewolf as a feral beast. “The werewolf is very much an alpha male and The Howling showed this very efficiently,” film journalist and historian Gary Marshall explained to me when I spoke to him recently. Vampires and werewolves have a very different role to play on screen, as Marshall elaborated: “Vampires and Dracula have an overt sexuality to them whereas the werewolf is all about hidden sexuality.”
In the same decade as The Howling and An American Werewolf, The Company of Wolves, based on a story by magic realist author Angela Carter, came out. Dealing with werewolves, but this time it looked at a young woman’s sexual awakening, something that harked back to German folk tales and fairy tales like Little Red Riding Hood. It was a very different portrayal of a mythic figure that, up to that point, had been seen as a visceral male archetype.
In fact, the 1980s saw a number of horror films which pointed the way to the future of the genre including Kathryn Bigelow’s Near Dark, a 1987 production that eschewed the lighter elements that held back its seventies precursors, and Lost Boys, a slick Hollywood vehicle made the same year as Near Dark which proved to be very popular with audiences.
Comics even got in on the act: In Swamp Thing #40, published in 1985, Alan Moore weaved the werewolf myth into female sexuality and a woman’s ovulation into an intelligent and hard-hitting modern horror tale.
The following decade started badly for vampires: Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula, while attempting to incorporate historical elements into the Oscar-winning director’s take, was let down by a poor script and some idiotic casting. But it was the same decade that planted the seeds for cinema’s positive reception of films like Underworld and one of the main contributing factors was the massive success of TV series Buffy The Vampire Slayer. Spun out of a minor cinema film of the same name, creator Joss Whedon managed to put vampires and werewolves in a contemporary and intelligent setting without coming across as clunky or clumsy. The popularity of Blade and Blade II on the big screen didn’t hurt matters either: the box office on both films showed that the appetite for fictional blood and terror was greater than it had ever been. Canadian horror film Ginger Snaps, which used the werewolf genre to look at female sexuality, was also a cult success on its release back in 2000, leading to two follow-up films.
Underworld: Evolution continues the epic saga that recounts the war between the Death Dealers and the Lycans. It traces the beginnings of the long-running bad blood (pardon the pun) between the two tribes as Selene (played by Kate Beckinsale) and Michael (played by Scott Speedman), the Lycan hybrid, try to discover the secrets of their bloodlines.
Speedman found the sequel much more satisfying for him as an actor than the first film as he recounted to me, also at San Diego earlier this year: “It’s more fun for me this time around. It’s a lot more dynamic and I feel a lot more like I’m just watching the action going on around me and I’m a lot more dynamic as a character.”
Before Underworld, Beckinsale wasn’t known as an action actress but since the first one, she’s gone on to make Van Helsing and this, so now she’s seen as a little bit of a regular fixture on the action movie circuit. Something that still takes her aback as she shared with me (where else) at San Diego this summer: “I had never done a film where I was tough and active,” she laughs nervously. “I’m a very unathletic, frightened person in real life so it was quite a challenge for me to play an action heroine and pull off all that training when I can’t even catch a ball if it’s coming my way.”
Len Wiseman directed the first Underworld but he had no desire to make a retread here, something he made abundantly clear to me: ‘The fact that I wasn’t doing it all over again is what excited me,” he says enthusiastically. “I sat down with the studio and said ‘Look I’d love to do Underworld 2 if it’s a completely different movie. I wanted a whole different tapestry and environment and I had no interest whatsoever in just doing the first movie over again with different effects and settings. I was able to do that and the studio were really behind me in going in a lot of different directions, some of which they weren’t comfortable with.”
One of the aims of the new film is to flesh out the story of the Lycans and the Death Dealers, as Wiseman points out: “A lot of Underworld:Evolution relates to the actual truth of the history between the two tribes. We discover which legends are false and which are true. So a lot of what we had been led to believe was true has been twisted by those people in power and so a lot of that starts to come out.”
The director is reticent to reveal too much but I manage to coax a little bit of information about Beckinsale’s character development: “Without giving a lot away, there are a number of new facts that come to light which tie into Selene’s past that she wasn’t even aware of. She’s much more emotionally involved now than she was in the first film because of facts that she discovers for the first time in Evolution,” he says slightly cryptically.
Production designer Patrick Tatopoulos, who brought so much to the first film, was able to work with Wiseman on this project and the pair were able to build on what they’d experienced from Underworld as Wiseman readily admits: “There’s a lot that both Patrick and I learned that we were able to bring to bear on Underworld: Evolution. It’s great to revisit something you’ve worked on before because you discover that there are better ways of doing things next time around. We’ve altered some of the elements to the creatures and some things you’ll notice and others you won’t.”
The pair went back to the drawing board with the look of the werewolves after their experiences in the first film as Tatopoulos told me: “We liked the design for the first werewolf: we knew that we wanted to do something with massive necks but when we built them, we realised that the actors were stuck in there and couldn’t turn as much. So for this film, Len wanted us to change the design of the creature to allow him to do more with the creature while taking them to another level.”
“We reworked them so that they could move,” Wiseman chips in, echoing the sentiments of his colleague. “When I’m casting an actor for a part as one of the werewolves, I’ve chosen him because I like his movements. I don’t want to weigh him down in a costume that’s hard to move in so it’s not allowing his performance to come through. It’s painful to shoot creatures on set which is why so many directors turn to CGI.”
In fact, the pair have used the traditional Hollywood template for the lycanthrope this time around for a very definite reason as the director elaborates: “We’ve got one that’s much more in the traditional werewolf vein. He has a little bit more of a snout and more of a wolf presence than the other ones. Because this is a character that dates back further than the werewolves in the first film, we wanted to show that the evolutionary process hadn’t developed as much and so he feels that little bit closer to the wolf than the others later on in their history.”
Since the first film was made, there have been some changes in the cast and crew’s personal lives (most importantly Kate Beckinsale and director Wiseman have tied the knot). Obviously Beckinsale realises that this has changed the dynamic of Underworld this time around as she said recently: “I was in a slightly different position than I’ve ever been in before because I wasn’t married to the director on other projects including Underworld. So I started getting involved in the process in terms of its development very early on, which was great. But that doesn’t mean that I had any sort of Yoko Ono-type input at that point,” she laughs and continues. “One of the reasons that we ended up running off to get married was that we both have a similar take on things and I think we both felt at the end of Underworld that it would be quite nice to slightly change the energy.”
By: JOEL MEADOWS
As well as editing TRIPWIRE from 1992 to 2003, the comic industry’s most highly respected features magazine, Meadows has also written about Film, comics and graphic novels for publications like The Times, The Guardian, The Independent on Sunday and What’s On. He has also been published in Broadcast, Time Out, SFX and Word Magazine, covering Film and TV and interview subjects like Joss Whedon, Michael Moorcock, Kevin Smith and Alan Moore. Currently he is co-editing a coffee table book on comic artists, including Joe Kubert, Jim Lee, Walt Simonson, Mike Mignola, Tim Bradstreet, Dave Gibbons and Meobius. He is also preparing a comic proposal as well as a number of different book pitches including a book on London’s bridges and one on illustrator Robert Mcginnis. The writer is a lifelong resident of London.
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