Old School Rockers Give Wolfman His Howl
Now here’s the kind of news story we don’t get all the time. In just a couple of weeks Universal’s redux of The Wolfman will be hitting the big screen in what we’re sure will be grand fashion, but are you wondering who will be delivering the creature’s howls?
DC reader Avery pointed us in the direction of an article over at Box Office in which director Joe Johnston reveals that both Gene Simmons of Kiss and David Lee Roth of Van Halen fame were among the many people who came in to the studio to provide animalistic sound effects for the flick!
“Well, when we were designing his howl, we were going off in a lot of different directions,” Johnston tells the site. “We tried a lot of things to see what would work and be interesting. We listened to every wolf howl ever done on every film. We listened to all of them. And you’d be surprised how unconvincing most of them are. Some were just wolves, but some were men going, ‘Aoooooooo!’”
He continues, “We didn’t get a lot from our research in what’s been done before. We were looking for this great pure tone—we knew we were going to process it and overlay elements to it, but we wanted that great foundation. We tried Gene Simmons and one of Gene Simmons’ howls is in the movie. I don’t think Gene Simmons would recognize it, but it’s in there. We had David Lee Roth come in and do a few howls … That was a blast. We had opera singers come in and howl, we had animal impersonators. Gene Simmons and David Lee Roth were pretty near the end of the process. By then we knew what we were looking for, we were homing in on it. And their stuff became the most useful stuff that we did. Like I said, I don’t think they would recognize it after what we’ve done to it because we’ve digitally processed it and added cool overtones and all that stuff. We were basically just looking for a wolf howl you’d never heard before. What we realized is that everybody in the audience knows what a wolfman sounds like. Even if it’s from their imagination, it’s all pretty much the same thing. We just wanted our howl to be the best version of that howl. And I think we’ve come up with something that’s definitely spine-tingling, and at the same time it’s familiar enough that the audience is going to recognize it—it’s what they expect, with enhancements …”
Look for The Wolfman in theatres on February 12th.
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