Director – Dominic Brunt, Screenplay – Joel Ferrari & Pete Wild, Producer – Joanne Mitchell, Photography – Vince Knight, Visual Effects – Neale Myers, Creature Creators – Paula Anne Booker & Shaune Harrison. Production Company – Mitchell-Brunt Films/Wild Edric Media/The Club of Wyrd Tales/Francis-Castle Pictures.
Cast
James Fleet (Oliver Lawrence), Jay Taylor (Steve), Thalia Zucci (Fiona), Nick Evans (Trevor), Damien Mathews (Simeon Altman), Rupert Procter (Derek Francis), John Henshaw (Thaddeus Saxon), Martin Portlock (Owen)
Plot
At an old manor, a group of filmmakers are shooting a vampire movie starring the aging actor Oliver Lawrence. Various of the crew are then attacked by a werewolf that is prowling the grounds.
Dominic Brunt is a British actor who is principally known for his long-running role in the tv series Emmerdale (1989- ). Brunt is also a horror fan and has run the Leeds Zombie Film Festival since the late 2000s. He has directed a number of horror films with the zombie film Before Dawn (2013), Bait (2014) and Attack of the Adult Babies (2017), while co-directing EVIE (Evil Has a New Name) (2023).
Wolf Manor, also known as Scream of the Wolf, is Dominic Brunt’s take on the Werewolf Film. He sets everything around the shooting of an old-fashioned vampire film at a country manor and then has a werewolf (werewolves according to the final shots) preying on the cast and crew. There is nothing too much more to the film beyond that. Certainly, there is no revelation of who the werewolf’s human identity is as you usually get in these films.
Werewolf on the attack
The whole werewolf on a film set was previously conducted in the also-British-made The Snarling (2018), a werewolf film that took place on a zombie film set. Both films take a light-hearted playing. The scenes with the film-within-the-film being shot lean on the style of Hammer Films. Here the show is fairly much owned by James Fleet, the film’s only recognisable face, playing an old school actor with a drinking problem and an elevated sense of his own reputation, which provides a needed sense of humour that carries much of the show.
There’s not much more to Wolf Manor than that. It runs a surprisingly brief 85 minutes. The wolf effects are also on the less convincing side – at one point it looks like a person covered in hair walking on all fours. There is also no transformation sequence, which is always a bonus of many werewolf films, where its absence seems clear evidence of a low-budget.
