Few animated films manage to be as profoundly and existentially terrifying as The Wolf House, a 2018 Spanish-German stop-motion film crafted by Joaquín Cociña and Cristóbal León. While the plot of the film is rather simple, it's profoundly unsettling and disorienting animation style results in an experience that is nothing short of a nightmare. The film is now streaming for the first time on Shudder.

Due to its brilliant stop-motion animation, The Wolf House is a surrealistic fantasy. The characters are constructed and deconstructed in front of you, showing how artificial everything is. The stop-motion manages to create an atmosphere of existential hollowness and uncanny madness. There is no singular moment in The Wolf House where it tries to scare you, rather, it manages to create dread in every single frame.

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The Plot of The Wolf House is Not What Makes It Scary

Many horror films rely on a disturbing and compelling plot to make them frightening. Satoshi Kon's Perfect Blue is a surreal horror film that uses its plot to draw you in and distort your perspective of reality. The Wolf House's plot, however, is fairly simple. Its characters are only faintly defined.

The film centers on a girl named Maria who is chased through the woods by a wolf and finds refuge in a cabin. Once inside, she discovers two piglets. In her isolation, she starts to see the piglets are human children, who ultimately prove to be a danger to her.

There is a fairy tale logic to the film's plot that encourages the audience to accept a lot of weird stuff. For example, the wolf can talk to Maria from outside, often commenting on what Maria sees. The Wolf House's plot is a means to isolate its characters. The events that transpire are mundane, like bugs crawl in the house and a fire that breaks out but kills no one. However, it's the way the events are relayed through animation that makes them profoundly unsettling to watch.

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Ever-Shifting Character Designs and Animation Mediums

The Wolf House incorporates stop-motion animation in a way unlike any other. Most stop-motion involves moving figures or objects bit by bit. This is the style often used by director Henry Sellick. However, The Wolf House doesn't just move figures around. It also constructs and deconstructs the models and sets, forcing you to appreciate the artificiality of the world.

The animators make changes to the sets in real-time. In some cases, this makes the house itself a living character that changes to reflect Marie's mental and physical state. In other cases, however, the animators literally turn the set into characters. The Wolf House creates a profoundly uncanny visual mix of 2D and 3D animation, where a face is painted on the walls but hands emerging from the ground can interact with objects.

Everything is in flux. Nothing remains in its original form for more than a few moments. The house literally warps around the characters, reflecting the emotional state Maria is in at every given moment. As Maria remains more isolated, the room starts to change, growing corroded filthy. Bugs emerge from behind cracks and characters superimposed on the walls demonstrate their metaphorical role in relation to the rest of the room.

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The Pigs

Undeniably the most unsettling aspect of The Wolf House, however, are the pigs. Marie discovers two little pigs in the cabin that she treats like children. Gradually, the pigs start to take on human features. First, their hooves are replaced by hands and feet. Then, their heads reshape into human faces. They eventually start wearing clothes and begin talking.

However, in a sequence where the kitchen lights on fire, the children squeal like swine as ashes erupt from their eyes and mouths. Despite the pigs' appearances, they are still pigs. The animation reflects the delusions of the protagonist, made only worse when Marie runs out of food and the children turn on her. The result is something straight out of a horror movie: the pigs strap Marie down and attempt to eat her.

All of this results in a film that is profoundly unsettling. It is a journey of delusion through the eyes of the delusional. Because the reality is never set in, the rules can be broken in an instant, resulting in a surreal experience where it is impossible to predict what will happen next.

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