Most people know TEEN WOLF as a campy 1985 comedy starring Michael J. Fox as a benign werewolf who, when transformed, looks like Eddie Munster in a basketball jersey. Flash forward to 2011: MTV is about to air a TEEN WOLF series that shares a title, an adolescent lycanthrope and not much else with its predecessor, with genre veteran Russell Mulcahy (pictured left) as its key director.

In the new version of TEEN WOLF, which premieres this Sunday, June 5 before moving to its regular time slot on Mondays at 10 p.m., high-school lacrosse player Scott McCall (Tyler Posey) and his best friend Stiles (Dylan O’Brien) venture into the woods to check out rumors of a dead body. Scott finds half of the corpse—and is then attacked by something he can’t see. After this, his senses are sharper, his strength and speed are increased and his hormones are going into overdrive—but come the full moon…

Jeff Davis (of the bloody albeit non-supernatural CRIMINAL MINDS) developed the series and serves as one of its executive producers. Mulcahy (whose features include RAZORBACK, HIGHLANDER and RESIDENT EVIL: EXTINCTION) worked closely with Davis as co-executive producer in addition to helming six of the first 12 episodes, including the tone-setting pilot.

Although Mulcahy has directed horror TV before (TALES FROM THE CRYPT, THE HUNGER), he points out that TEEN WOLF is a first for him, both on an episodic show and in an executive-producer capacity. Speaking by phone, Mulcahy relates in his deep Australian accent how he came to be involved. “I was invited by Jeff Davis and [fellow executive producer] Michael Thorn to come have a meeting. Jeff Davis and I hit it off straightaway. We’re both genre fans, basically. It just went like wildfire from there.”

Taking on a show with a season-long story arc delights Mulcahy. “It’s terrific. I loved doing TALES FROM THE CRYPT and shows like that, but they are one-off stories. The great thing about this is that there is a through-line, so you can really develop the character relationships. It is a classic story, it is a story of romance, it is scary, it is surprising, and you can just develop all those if it’s an ongoing series.”

The new TEEN WOLF seems closer to AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON than to its namesake predecessor, but Mulcahy says he’s not sure either film equates with the show’s tone. “There are always going to be comparisons, whether it’s TWILIGHT or VAMPIRE DIARIES or AMERICAN WEREWOLF or the previous TEEN WOLF. With AMERICAN WEREWOLF, I think the only comparison probably is that he’s bitten by [another] werewolf, whereas in the original movie, it was hereditary from his father. [According to legend], you can become a werewolf in a number of different ways, whether you’re bitten or you’re cursed or it’s hereditary or whatever. So it’s different from the first film in that respect.

“The similarity between TEEN WOLF, the Michael J. Fox version—which is a wonderful film—is that we have a teenager and he is a werewolf,” he continues. “And I guess we also pay homage to the original by keeping some of the humor—there is humor in the [series]—but Jeff said to me when he was asked by MTV to write TEEN WOLF, ‘Well, why don’t we make it more like THE LOST BOYS and give it that much more of an edgy quality?’ And there were three words that we had in mind always—it was like our manifesto, really—‘sexy, scary, surprising.’ Those were the three words we just kept in our heads when we were designing, storyboarding, casting and shooting it.”

As far as the series’ mythology goes, Mulcahy relates that a lot of research went into it. “Jeff initially did it, and then we all got totally involved. The mythology of the werewolf goes back centuries, way back into the past of Europe, and even expands into Asia, so you can read books and books and books; there’s so much material to read on werewolves. Jeff drew a lot from all that, changed a little bit of the mythology, but it still keeps to the same factor of the shapeshifter and making our werewolf sexy and scary. In this, there are three variations of the werewolves that you’ll see. I can’t give too much away.” None of them are regular-looking canines, Mulcahy adds. “It isn’t like dogs running around. They’re werewolves.”

Part of Mulcahy’s job as both co-executive producer and director of the pilot was contributing heavily to TEEN WOLF’s look and tone. “It was just about coming up with something from the heart, just a love of the genre, and creating something that was a little different. The main purpose was to entertain, [via material that is] a classic Beauty-and-the-Beast story and tragic Romeo-and-Juliet story, a teenaged story, but with a mystical twist. Visually, just trying to be inventive and surprising—though Jeff writes fantastic screenplays and ideas—but we would collaborate along those lines, and also to keep the visual style exciting and inventive, on a cliffhanger basis.

“It even came down to the makeup of our werewolf,” he continues. “A wolf is a very majestic animal. It can be beautiful, but it can also be absolutely terrifying. We wanted our teen wolf to have that quality. At one point, you should want to kiss him, and at another point, he’ll tear your throat out. We wanted a werewolf you wouldn’t pat, but you would kiss. He could be both strangely handsome, but also strangely terrifying.”

Mulcahy notes that, while there is some blood in this supernatural series, don’t sit down to watch expecting the flying viscera of, say, TRUE BLOOD. “I wouldn’t say our show is gory. No offense, but I think that sometimes [the audience] gets into the splatter—our show is not that, but people will die and there will be blood, but it’s obviously not excessive. What we really centered on was trying to make it scary and thrilling and mysterious and frightening, and not just go for the cheap effects in that respect. I guess we’re bigger fans of films like THE SHINING, which are creepier [than they are explicitly bloody].”

Talking about the series’ leads, Mulcahy raves, “We have a wonderful cast. We saw a lot of young actors. When Tyler Posey walked in for his first screen test, he had the ‘it’ factor. The same with Dylan, the same with Crystal Reed [who plays mysterious love interest Allison Argent, pictured right with Posey]. These actors walked in and we went, ‘Wow.’ The great thing about working with these young people is, not only do they have energy, they also have a freshness, the thing that just captures a generation. You can’t really force it out of anyone. They bring their own sort of creative thing to the table.”

Nonetheless, directing episodes of TEEN WOLF wasn’t necessarily a walk in the park—unless one’s idea of a park is dark and bitterly cold, Mulcahy laughs. “I’ve [directed] teenaged boys swimming upstream, I’ve [directed] teenaged boys in QUEER AS FOLK, but this is the first time I’ve ever shot lacrosse. I’ve shot a number of sports—I’ve done car racing in 3: THE DALE EARNHARDT STORY—and lacrosse is a great sport, but it’s very hard to film. It’s very fast. It had its own challenges, especially when we were dealing with minors in zero temperatures, because we shot in the middle of winter in Atlanta, Georgia. So we had these kids in shorts and it was freezing cold and at 4 in the morning, it’s hard to run fast. The limbs start to stiffen up.”

As far as doing double duty as both director and co-executive producer, Mulcahy explains the gist of the job: “It entails just making sure that we can keep on budget and that the show has a unified look, because it is an episodic series. Even though each episode can stand alone by itself, the show is basically one long involved story with many twists and turns, so it was important for me and for Jeff just to keep that flow going, so nothing did a big U-turn or took a big left turn by surprise, and we kept on track.”

Working with the cable network has been a positive experience, Mulcahy adds. “MTV has been wonderful. Obviously, it was a risk that they [took] to branch out to become a network of storytellers and of good product, and they were right behind us all the way. We took risks, in story and style and whatever. And they’ve been very brave and very supportive.”

The TEEN WOLF folks don’t want to give out too many spoilers, but Mulcahy provides this much: “I can definitely say that the season finale is one hell of a cliffhanger.” He plans to stay with the show if it gets a pickup for the next season. “I think I’m sort of married to it,” he laughs. “I mean, I love this project. There hasn’t been something since HIGHLANDER that I have enjoyed [this much].”

Speaking of HIGHLANDER, there are plans afoot to do a remake of the original film that Mulcahy directed. Although he’s not involved in the new project, he says, “Going back to the original story with Ramirez and the Kurgan—I think that was a brilliant idea, because HIGHLANDER II [which Mulcahy also helmed] was a complete failure because of the, you know…”

He doesn’t actually mention the sequel’s focus on the planet Zeist, a story element so almost universally despised that the HIGHLANDER II director’s cut DVD has the distinction of being perhaps the only home-video product that reassures the viewer that scenes have been removed, rather than restored. Adding the extraterrestrial angle “was a huge mistake,” Mulcahy admits. “I’m very proud of the first one, [but when it came time to do] the second one…they’d never really conceived of doing a sequel, so they really got themselves stuck. So I believe the thing to do right now, which they are doing, is basically just retell the original story.”

Much more recently, Mulcahy wrote and was originally meant to direct the 3D killer-shark film BAIT. He wound up stepping down from the latter job, he explains, because he couldn’t be in two places at once. “I wrote it and I was down there designing the sets, but then I had to come back for TEEN WOLF.” He was replaced at the helm by experienced 2nd-unit director Kimble Rendall, and adds, “At the moment, it’s in final postproduction; [there is] a lot of CGI, and that should be coming out later this year. It was fun writing the screenplay, and it’s a good, scary story.”

Meanwhile, Mulcahy says he’s having a great time on TEEN WOLF, hairy night shoots and all. ”It’s been positive so far. In any creative relationship, there are always going to be some disagreements or whatever, but they’re usually good creative discussions. I’ve become very close with Jeff—we are on the same page together creatively. I love the team we work with. The energy on the set is wonderful, the cast is wonderful. I couldn’t hope for more—I get up in the morning and just look forward to going to work, because I’m telling stories I love, I’m working in a genre I love, and that’s rare.”

There’s just one more thing Mulcahy would like FANGORIA readers to know: “I love the magazine. I run to the newsstand and wait for the copy to come!”

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MOVIES/TV - Fearful Features