Review of Blood Moon (2014) by Amy-Louise G — 05 Jul 2007

The.

Biggest hook for any werewolf movie is the changing scene: you watch and watch and watch hopefully to be rewarded with some clever effects. Blood Moon upsets this expectation to a pretty interesting effect. The werewolf changes gradually throughout the whole movie, not all at once under the full moon. What marks this movie as unique is the clever inversion of expectations when it comes to the monster's physical form. The werewolf-to-be begns the movie as a docile, emotionally vulnerable, internally beautiful teenage girl afflicted with Lycanthrope, a real condition that covers you with hair head to foot. She's exhibitted in a travelling freak show as "The Wolf Girl". Her transformation, which is explained as a psychotic condition spurred on by a series of injections that she takes to rid herself of all her wolfish body hair, sees her looking less wolf-like and increasingly more the average girl as the movie progresses. On an aesthetic level, she goes from monster to human, but psychologically, her transformation takes her as is expected: from human to monster. As she becomes more human, she becomes more monstrous. The theme here might be one of two: 1)Humans are monsters, cruel and insensitive, and no different from wild beasts. This theme is best supported by the townspeople themselves who pay to see "freakshow oddities" for their own amusement, and also by Shawn Ashmore and his cronies who constantly terrorize Tara in her wolf-girl days. OR, 2)"Human" is a designation based upon the state of your soul, your inner psyche, and has only superficial bearing on outter apperance. I think both themes, though contradictory, are important: like the performers in the freak show, people are both monstrous and kind at the same time. We're naturally good and naturally evil. Tara, then, didn't really change at all. From begnning to end she was a beautiful monster; all that changed was where that beauty lay. It's a bit of an insufferable cliche, which is why I think this movie got no recognition, but Blood Moon is nevertheless a really interesting way of delivering an old piece of tired wisdom while playing around quite sassily with the conventions of the standard werewolf movie.