My Skeleton Key: The Wolf Man (2025)
Take this key, open my horror-rotted brain, and pick it apart
hey y’all! it’s time I get a little personal again. not too much, though! i’ve gotta keep my therapist fed. now that The Wolf Man has been out for a few days, i can finally talk about the way i cried at the advanced screening. this is a little different from my usual newsletters, but that’s the point. let’s have a little fun, dissect some horror, and even ourselves if the mask fits.
i want to warn my mother if she’s reading this. this is purely a reflection. i do not hold this against you <3
anger was never expressed to me in a healthy way, and I also wasn’t allowed to express it. meaning, i wasn’t encouraged to be entitled to my anger. this last year was spent processing that foreign feeling and understanding what it means to me. it always left me feeling… well, like a wolf. okay, maybe that’s a bit dramatic. but, true anger left me nonverbal, overheated and disassociated. coming down from my anger usually involved crying because i was so overwhelmed with that feeling.
doing something wrong as a child was met with anger and/or frustration. similar to Blake in The Wolf Man, it felt like walking on egg shells trying to do things right the first time— even if i didn’t really know what “right” looked like. it really is a suffocating feeling when you try to prevent someone else’s anger directed towards you. so when Blake was old enough, he took the first chance to breathe and never looked back.
he grew a resentment for his father that drove him to estrangement: an experience many people can relate to. luckily, my mom and i sat in therapy together for a few years. between that and the open dialogue we’ve had since, i’ve gained a perspective on how her parenting style was informed by how she was parented. it’s funny how the “i’ll never raise my kids that way” ideology travels from generation to generation.
blake, as a father himself, seems determined to show up for his daughter the way his father never did. he’s sensitive, emotionally equipped, and compassionate. his anger slips out and he follows it up with a sincere apology. once his dad dies, he admits that he is sad despite the grudge he’s held all of these years. these two moments early in the narrative remind us that he’s actively unlearning what he was raised on. those unresolved feelings eventually bubble to the surface once his family arrives at his fathers farm, though.
when we become adults, our first instinct is to deny those parts of ourselves that we are ashamed of in order to be the ideal version of ourselves. though blake doesn’t have a happy ending, he embraces his shadows better than his father. his dad acted out of love despite hurting blake in the process. as blake says, “ [parents] try to prevent scars and end up creating them in the process”. that’s a loose quote from memory. but, it really hit in the moment. watching blake slowly succumb, he never becomes the beast that his neighbors fear. the restraint he has, even as he’s losing his grip on humanity, is an act of love in itself.
i cried because i was reminded of my mom’s internal battles for that same restraint. and it was a thoughtful display of acting out of love. for a long time, i believed anger to be a negative feeling— something to be repressed. but to be angry means you also are capable of love. the problem lies in where you direct your anger and how you let it flow. no matter what anyone says about The Wolf Man, it represents the acceptance our shadows for the better.