In short: Werewolf Castle (2021)

Some medieval fantasy England. Young and not particularly courageous Thorfinn (Peter Lofsgard) witnesses the slaughter of most of his village – lover and parents included – by a group of werewolves captained by one Wulfstan (Reece Connolly). What’s left of the local authorities believe the wolves will continue to be a problem and attack other villages in the vicinity, so they decide to ask their very much not beloved king Vortigern (David Simcock) for help. There’s just a little problem: between the village and the king’s castle are several days’ worth of a journey through the werewolf-infested forest. So the villagers round up a small group of heroes with wonderful names like Hal Headsplitter (Jay O’Connell) and the geographically confusing Hamelin Wiltshire (Tim Cartwright) to make a quest out of the business. An angry and confused Thorfinn joins the group as their local guide.

It’s going to be a rather difficult time for everyone involved.

I don’t think this fantasy horror piece that seems to reuse some of the werewolf suits from director Charlie Steeds’s Werewolf in England is ever going to be a particular favourite of the man’s merry output for me. It’s – rather atypical for Steeds – a bit slow in parts, taking breathing breaks for characterisation that’s often not terribly interesting even in the realm of tropes and shorthand this film moves in. It is also clearly rather difficult to make a proper quest narrative on what the film can afford, so it plays out as a series of somewhat escalating encounters with the same werewolves during each of which characters and audience learn something more about the threat’s nature and where Thorfinn gets to have a variation on the Hero’s Journey. Given the circumstances, this is probably the best way to tell this particular story.

Speaking of the Hero’s Journey, the script’s best – and certainly its original – idea is how it actually subverts some of the ways modern screenwriters tend to use this particular holy writ, letting Thorfinn hit all the right beats on the road, make the proper experiences, and then lets him fulfil his destiny in a way that feels closer to the darkness in actual myth and legend than our modern readings of this. Which is not at all bad for a low budget movie about guys with swords fighting werewolves.

While they don’t all hit for me this time around, I do think that at least two of the film’s set pieces – the surviving heroes’ stay in a rather unhealthy village with the proper mood of doom and the climax – are really well done and edited with the kind of controlled verve I’ve come to particularly respect about the Steeds’s films. That our filmmaker is still pretty great at finding atmospheric and photogenic locations (no warehouses for his films, unless a warehouse actually makes sense) might deserve a mention here as well.

So, even though I didn’t quite love this as much as I did The Barge People or A Haunting in England I still had a fun enough time with Werewolf Castle.