The Wiltshire Times has posted 23 new photos from the set of the ongoing Wolf Man remake, starring Benicio del Toro, Anthony Hopkins and Hugo Weaving. You won’t find any juicy werewolf shots here, but they’re worth checking out simply for the astounding level of detail in the sets and costumes. Let’s hope the extra with the cell phone put it in his pocket before they started filming.

Another photo has surfaced of the Wer-wolf character from The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian. That is one ominous cloak. Click for a larger version:

The Wer-wolf was created by famed Kiwi special effects company Weta Workshop.

Peace Arch Entertainment has just posted a trailer for their upcoming werewolf movie, creatively entitled “Never Cry Werewolf“. You can watch the trailer, but be forewarned: it is not awesome. No release date has been scheduled, so watch yourself– this could arrive in your local video store’s DVD bargin bin at any time.

Werewolf news has been slow these days. It’s kind of hard to believe, with the X-Files: I Want To Believe & The Wolf Man on the way, Welcome To Hoxford coming out in August, and a spate of werewolf novels hitting the market. Rest easy knowing I’m still out there, patrolling The Internets for juicy lycanthropic factoids. If you have some werewolf news you want to see here, you can email it to me at werewolfnews[replacethiswithan@]gmail.com. Art, short fiction, a sweet costume you made, anything werewolf-related.

I finished reading Sharp Teeth the other day, and I’ll try to get a review posted here in the next few days. Suffice it to say that even though the creatures in it are more were-dogs than werewolves, it’s still very, very good.

As reported by Variety and a number of different sources today, the new X-Files film now has an official title: “X-Files: I Want To Believe”. No word on whether the film involves werewolves or not, but according to Variety,  director Chris Carter confirmed that “that the pic won’t focus on the show’s alien mythology but instead features a stand-alone story on the struggle between faith and science.” There’s still hope!

NarniaWeb has posted scans and a transcript of a recent Total Film Magazine interview with Howard Berger, special effects guru for the forthcoming Narnia film Prince Caspian. Among the various creatures Berger’s team created is a particularly nasty-looking werewolf (or wer-wolf, as the film calls him).

From the interview:

The digital werewolf was being handled by Weta Digital in New Zealand, but we also had a full suit with mechanical head, pretty messed up and scarred and everything, which was great. Really cool.

You can check out the rest of the interview here.

Update: I don’t know why I didn’t think of posting this before, but here’s some concept art for the werewolf, courtesy of the Narnia Wiki:

Mother Jones magazine has an interview with Toby Barlow, author of the fantastic free-verse werewolf novel Sharp Teeth (I’m halfway through my copy, and I strongly recommend it). The interview focuses pretty heavily on the dynamic of human / animal interaction and the potential benefits of a wolf-pack structure in human society.

I think human beings have all these tools for social connection, which should bring us together but instead causes all sorts of confusion and discombobulation. With dogs, they’re either fighting or they’re falling asleep on one another’s necks. It’s a much simpler form of community that they’ve come up with. I agree, people are oftentimes very self-congratulatory about the civilization we’ve built around us, when in fact lying at our feet are much simpler and more satisfied societies.

Read the entire interview here.

Nibris, a game studio based in Cracow, Poland, is getting ready to release a game titled Sadness for the Nintendo Wii. Set in Europe during the 1910s and presented entirely in atmospheric black and white, Sadness is a psychological horror game for adults. According to concept art and comments made by the game developers, many of the creatures in the game are inspired by Slavic mythology. And what does that mean? Why, that means werewolves, of course!

According to Gaming Today, the werewolves in Sadness “will not have a whole lot in common with the more traditional aspect of werewolves. In the game, the werewolf is born human and when mature they will change during the full moon and will not regenerate after death.”

Not much else is known about Sadness at the moment. Game news sites like GameSpot and IGN are maintaining game overview pages that have been largely stagnant since 2006, but yesterday’s announcement by Emergent Game Technologies (who are providing the development platform for Sadness) has stirred up interest and some new information.

Players will need to confront their greatest fears and protect themselves in hopes of not getting trapped inside the main character’s nightmare. The game has eight different extreme endings each with their own premise, which are assigned to a player based on specific factors during the game. To compliment the intense gameplay, the Wii-mote and Wii Nunchuk control the main character’s hands so players feel as though they are in the psychological thriller.

Watch the game’s official site, sadness-wii.com, for further press releases about what sounds like a groundbreaking game.

The latest issue of the Official Nintendo Magazine has an interview with Yoshihisa Hashimoto, lead designer of Sonic Unleashed. Hashimoto confirms the presence of a “Were-Sonic” mode, which offers gamers a slower but more physical method of playing through the levels. From the interview:

[Were-Sonic is] a slightly slower and yet more agile beast. Where Sonic dodges past obstacles, Were-Sonic manhandles them out of the way and can toss enemies around like nobody’s business.

You can read the full interview in Official Nintendo Magazine issue 29, which went on sale last Friday. If I can find scans of the whole article, I’ll post ‘em here.

Blogcritics Magazine writer Richard Marcus has posted a review of The Complete Underworld, a graphic novel collection that illustrates and expands upon the setting, story and characters of the Underworld films. There’s also a prequel story (today’s the day for Underworld prequels, isn’t it?) called Red In Tooth And Claw, which Marcus says is “quite a good, inspired, piece of story telling that manages to recreate the world of the vampires and werewolves in another environment.”

The Complete Underworld is published by IDW Publishing, the same company that’s releasing Ben Templesmith’s new werewolf series Welcome to Hoxford, which Werewolf News mentioned earlier this week.