Warning: This article contains SPOILERS for Wolf Man (2025)
While the opening sH๏τs of 2025’s Wolf Man reboot might seem strange, the symbolic meaning of the scene is relatively easy to discern. 2025’s Wolf Man reboot changes werewolf lore pretty significantly, turning the movie into a tragic body horror rather than a traditional tale of lycanthropy. Wolf Man’s ending reveals that the werewolf who bit the movie’s protagonist Blake was his estranged father, a twist that implies Blake’s death could bring an end to a cycle of disease and death.
Long before this twist ending, Wolf Man begins with a strange, overtly symbolic set of sH๏τs. While Wolf Man’s many references to other horror movies are largely easy to discern, the opening sH๏τ of a hornet being killed by a teeming swarm of ants is a little more ambiguous. This standalone sequence is followed by an opening flashback to Blake’s traumatic childhood hunting trip with his father. That trip ends with a werewolf encounter in an elevated deer blind, but it is the preceding scene that offers a skeleton key to the movie’s story.
Wolf Man’s Opening SH๏τ Symbolizes Blake’s Nature Overwhelming Him
Blake Succumbs To The Same Disease That Claimed His Father’s Life
On the surface of it, Wolf Man’s opening depiction of ants consuming a hornet is a metaphor for the savagery of nature. However, there is more to the image than that straightforward interpretation. The ants teeming over the hornet can be read as a stand-in for the werewolves that infect Blake’s father and later Blake. They are hazards of the environment, evidence that nature’s apparent tranquility can be surprisingly unsparing to the unprepared. This is reinforced when Blake’s neighbor reminds him just how remote and isolated his father’s home is shortly before their fateful car crash.
Both Blake and his father eventually succumb to werewolves in the end, much like the hornet’s sting can’t save it from the inhabitants of an anthill.
While Wolf Man’s references to The Shining make the horror movie’s focus on father issues obvious, this is one instance where Blake and his father are united in their fate. Both try to arm themselves, like the larger, more dangerous hornet, against the threat of lycanthropy. Blake’s father tries to hunt the werewolves while Blake moves as far away as possible, relocating to the safety of the city. However, both men eventually succumb to werewolves in the end, much like the hornet’s sting can’t save it from the inhabitants of an anthill.
Blake’s Death Mirrors The Hornet’s Fate In Wolf Man’s Opening
Blake’s Werewolf Form Is Killed By Ginger And Charlotte
There is another potential reading of Wolf Man’s opening image that casts Blake as the symbolic hornet, but other human characters as the ants. By Wolf Man’s ending, Blake is a full-blown werewolf and no longer recognizably human. A far larger, ᴅᴇᴀᴅlier predator, like the hornet, he is taken down by smaller, smarter, pragmatic attackers. In Blake’s case, this is his wife Charlotte and his daughter Ginger, acting in self-defense by shooting him.
While Wolf Man’s uneasy blend of home invasion horror and monster movie never quite gels, this symbolism proves that a lot of thought went into the movie’s lean story. Director Leigh Whannel’s werewolf movie isn’t perfect, but its opening image is a clever bit of layered symbolism that pays off in more than one way. This proves that Wolf Man has its merits, despite the movie’s flaws.
