Wolf Man

In a 1990s prologue, young Blake Lovell is hunting with his stern father Grady in the remote Oregon mountains when they glimpse something massive and inhuman moving through the trees — tall, hunched, furred, with glowing eyes. Grady yanks Blake into a hunting blind and warns him never to speak of it. Not long after, a local hiker disappears. The incident is absorbed into rumors of a virus or a bear, and life continues.

Thirty years later, Blake is in San Francisco with his high-powered wife Charlotte and their daughter Ginger. The marriage is under strain — money, Charlotte's demanding job, Blake's unresolved history with his father. When Grady is declared legally dead after vanishing in the same Oregon wilderness, Blake inherits the remote farmhouse and convinces Charlotte to visit, hoping the change will bring them closer. On a foggy night drive near the property, something massive slams into the moving van, sending it into a ditch. The family climbs out shaken, hearing snarls and movement in the dark. An unseen animal stalks them through the trees, driving them on foot to Grady's old farmhouse.

They barricade themselves inside as the creature circles the property, testing the walls and windows. In a lightning flash Blake glimpses it — enormous, wolf-like, but with a disturbingly humanoid posture. During one attack, claws rake his arm as he forces a door shut. The wound is wrong from the start: it burns and pulses, veins darkening around the edges. As the night wears on, Blake's senses sharpen past any normal threshold. He hears things no one else can, smells fear, loses time — coming to in different parts of the house with no memory of how he arrived. Charlotte assumes shock; Ginger notices her father's eyes look different, his voice sometimes slipping into something low and guttural.

Old hunting journals and newspaper clippings scattered through the farmhouse reveal that Grady and a friend spent years tracking the creature, filing attacks as bear incidents and suppressing reports. The suggestion accumulates that the wolf-thing was known, and that the family's proximity to it is not accidental. The idea introduced as a virus in the prologue begins to feel simultaneously literal and metaphorical — a curse transmitted through bites that degrades a man from the inside, generation by generation. Blake's transformation accelerates: enhanced night vision, feral bursts of speed, fingernails thickening and curling, his reflection in the farmhouse windows no longer entirely his own. He wakes after another blackout to find scratches in the walls at shoulder height, the pattern of something pacing the hallway. He begs Charlotte to restrain him or leave with Ginger. The van is wrecked. The forest surrounds them.