Garth appears briefly in the trailer as either an animatronic or a reanimated corpse (or an animatronic playing a reanimated corpse?). “Good luck,” he intones from an open casket. “I’ll be rotting for you.” No, it’s not quite a Crypt Keeper-level quip, but dads in the audience will be amused.
Who is Verussa?
The meeting appears to be organized by a woman played by Harriet Sansom Harris, recently seen in Licorice Pizza and in an episode of Supergirl. According to rumours, Harris plays a new character called Verrusa. Without a comic book counterpart to draw from, we can only guess at her role in the story, but it seems pretty clear. She gathers the hunters to look for the monster and says lots of creepy things. I’m sure everything will work for her
Elsa Bloodstone
While Verrusa is clearly our villain, the trailer seems to be positioning a trenchcoat wearing woman played by Laura Donnely (Outlander) as our protagonist. As of yet, her character’s name has not been officially announced, but it’s been all but confirmed that she is Elsa Bloodstone. Perhaps the greatest monster hunter of the modern Marvel era, Elsa is the daughter of Ulysses Bloodstone and the inheritor of the jewel that gave the family its surname. Elsa came to prominance in the madcap comic Nextwave: Agents of HATE, alongside WandaVision breakout Maria Rambeau. But she has also teamed up with the X-Men and SHIELD’s zombie hunters.
In the trailer, Donnely’s character shows none of the snarky fight found in the Elsa Bloodstone of the comics. She either stares at the macabre meeting gathered together or cowers in a cage at some oncoming monster, no sneer or shotgun in sight. However, anyone familiar with Donnely’s work on The Nevers or Merlin knows she can go on the offensive if the script calls for it. Hopefully, Werewolf by Night will give her the chance.
Jack Russell
While the trailer doesn’t show much of Elsa Bloodstone, it shows us even less of the show’s title character. His face sallow and his eyes sunken, Jack Russell doesn’t seem to be doing well. But it’s sure to go worse wants evening strikes and he becomes the titular werewolf.
The trailer gives us only brief glimpses of the werewolf, perfering to go the route of famed MGM horror producer Jacques Tournier and rely upon shadows. But the few looks we do get show something far removed from the slick lycanthropes common to modern werewolf stories. Russell appears to transform into something more akin to the Universal Wolf Man played by Lon Chaney Jr. or even Oliver Reed’s in Hammer’s Curse of the Werewolf. Does this mean Giacchino will eschew Marvel’s increasingly unconvincing VFX for practical makeup? That seems like too much to ask, but one can hope.
