It’s possible that you might associate the name Josh Ruben with the streaming service Dropout, or with one of Dropout’s viral videos. For the last few years, Ruben has been one of the more reliable improv performers on shows like Make Some Noise and Game Changer, with a gift for celebrity impersonations and coming up with strange characters on the fly.
Dropout is just his side hustle, however. Ruben got started with the Dropout team back in its CollegeHumor days, as a writer/director for a few dozen of its short videos, like “Female Armor Sucks.” After CollegeHumor’s near-closure in 2020, Ruben branched out into directing horror movies, the best-known of which is probably 2025’s Valentine-themed slasher Heart Eyes. Ruben is already working on its sequel, due out in 2028.
That puts Ruben in interesting company, as part of the recent comedy-to-horror crossover wave that also includes Jordan Peele, Zach Cregger, and David Gordon Green (who went from directing Pineapple Express and Our Brand is Crisis to the 2018 Halloween reboot and The Exorcist: Believer). In Ruben’s case, he comes off like he got desperately lost on the way to the Hallmark studios. A Josh Ruben horror movie is a romantic comedy with a body count.
2021’s Werewolves Within is technically an adaptation of a 2016 social deduction VR game of the same name, but the two works have little in common. The game is set in medieval Europe, while the film takes place in modern Vermont. You can watch the movie with no knowledge of the game, especially since the movie is currently streaming for free on several platforms, such as Tubi. If you’re curious about Ruben’s horror work or if you simply want a lycanthropic comedy/murder mystery for your Halloween watchlist, check out Werewolves Within.
The hairy-handed wonk who ran amok in Vermont
Finn Wheeler (Sam Richardson, Veep) is a U.S. Forest Service ranger who’s taken a transfer to the little town of Beaverton, Vermont. The night he arrives, an avalanche blocks the main road out of town, which coincides with a suspicious power outage.
When Finn goes out to investigate in the morning, he finds that every generator in town looks like it’s been clawed open. Worse, Finn finds the corpse of the co-owner of the local motel. He looks like he was killed by wolves, but wolves wouldn’t have hidden the body under the motel’s porch.
The Beaverton locals were already at one another’s throats over a recent proposal to run a gas pipeline through the town. Now, they’re stuck indoors with a murderer on the loose, and that murderer might not even be human. As the situation descends into violence, Finn tries desperately to keep everyone from killing each other before something much worse can get them.
It’s worth noting that Werewolves Within is a horror-comedy, and the “comedy” part of that genre tag is the more important of the two. Every scene is out to get a laugh first and be scary later, if at all. It’s successful in that, but manages to undercut some potentially genuine scares in the process.
Beaverton is populated by a host of eccentrics, including a couple of retired tech millionaires (Cheyenne Jackson and Harvey Guillén), husband-and-wife conspiracy theorists (Michaela Watkins and Michael Chernus), and a visiting zoologist with a knack for suddenly appearing from just out of frame (Rebecca Henderson). The standout is Cecily (Milana Vayntrub), the local mail carrier, who immediately steals every scene she’s in.
The criticism you usually hear about these sorts of horror movies is that a big part of their casts are often barely characters at all, because they’re specifically there to get murdered in droves throughout the second and third acts. If a horror movie has an ensemble cast, there isn’t much point in fleshing out most of the roles because they’re going to catch an axe to the face at some point in the next 15 minutes.
Werewolves Within goes the other way, which is fitting for a movie based on a social deduction game. Everyone in Beaverton is auditioning to be the protagonist and has a couple of motives for murder. There’s no way to tell who might be the killer, or the werewolf, or if there even is a werewolf, until bodies start to stack up.
The biggest problem Werewolves Within might have, in fact, is that it’s often too funny for its own good. All the ingredients for a tense comedy-thriller are here, but everyone’s too damn quirky to follow their thoughts to an understandable conclusion. Even Finn gets into the act a couple of times, by telling a joke right at a big suspenseful moment, which undercuts the movie’s mood and its stakes. (Heart Eyes arguably has the same problem, but is better-balanced.) It’s a successful comedy, but one that occasionally gets the laugh at the expense of what could’ve also been a thriller.
That insistence on laughs makes Werewolves Within feel like a high-budget, R-rated episode of Scooby-Doo. As long as you go into it expecting that, you can expect to have a good time with Werewolves Within.
Werewolves Within is available to stream for free on Tubi, Sling TV, Philo, and PLEX.