Even before it premiered on Disney+, Marvel’s Werewolf by Night was clearly something special, and indeed is even pitched as a one-shot “Special Presentation.” While the vast majority of MCU projects either fall into the film or TV series category, along with this December’s Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special, the introduction of Jack Russell and Elsa Bloodstone takes the form of a 55-minute one-off special. Producer Brian Gay recently sat down with ComicBook.com to discuss Werewolf by Night, and laid out how the project didn’t go down the movie or TV series route.

Werewolf by Night brings a dose of classic horror to the MCU that harks back to the black-and-white Universal genre movies of the 1930s and 1940s. However, Gay revealed that the project ended up being influenced by TV specials such as Charlie Brown’s Christmas as much as by those old Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi classics. Gay said:

"It's funny that sometimes things just come together. And it was just one of those. We'd always wondered: where could we introduce Werewolf by Night? We love the character. What feels right? And of course, movie, TV show, series, different length of series, but Disney+ lets us be very flexible with what we do. One of the things that had always come up is we love a good old network special, something like Charlie Brown's Christmas or Frosty the Snowman, things like that that were specials and they show once, or maybe they show every year. And we said, 'Well, could we do one of those?' And it turns out the answer was yes. And that's where Werewolf by Night came from."

Related: How Werewolf By Night Will Impact the MCU

Werewolf By Night Has Been Praised As One Of The Best MCU Projects To Date

Werewolf by Night is showing its claws as the potentially surprise hit of the MCU’s Disney+ offerings to date. As well as its first trailer bringing a delightfully macabre black and white homage to the Universal monster movies, the first reviews of the Marvel Special Presentation suggested something dark, violent and very unexpected coming this Halloween and now available for all to see, the positive reviews have continued to roll in.

While unique in appearance, Werewolf by Night also sets itself up as a new cornerstone for the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and will certainly have an impact on the future of the franchise. That being said, the special is certainly a self-contained affair, and that is exactly what director Michael Giacchino set out to do. He previously told Collider:

"So I was like, 'Well, let's just bring these guys in and let it just be a self-contained story.' I kept referring to it as, think about this as an episode of The Twilight Zone, and we're going to get this story and this story alone one night in the life of Jack and Elsa, and let's concentrate on that. Then from there, who knows? We'll see what we do. We'll see where it goes. We'll see how we play it all out. But I didn't feel the need to worry about any of that at this point. And they certainly weren't mandating that I did, which I love that I thought that gave us a freedom to do something different and do something new. It totally uncuffed us in a way where it didn't matter what we wanted to do because we weren't worried about how it affected anything on either side. So those challenges and those questions we'll deal with at some point. But right now, this is it.”

Werewolf by Night is streaming now on Disney+