C.M. Rosens's Blog, page 49

The Enthusiast’s Guide to Spotting Murder Ladies

I can’t stop loving murder ladies (or writing them, it seems), so please enjoy this blog post from Dr Sam Hirst and go follow this blog for more top notch Gothic content.

Welcome to our discrete guide for the discerning. Many of you will have turned to us because you are simply exhausted by the stream of bland heroes, …

The Enthusiast’s Guide to Spotting Murder Ladies

Werewolf Films: 1970-1979 Part II

This is the longest section: crime/thriller horror films intended as straight horror, some of which were police procedurals too, and some were based on real life serial killers.

I also cover exploitation films here too, but CW for… everything, from on-camera real life rodent torture/death to sexual assault and torment of a disabled person.

Links in this post are to other blog posts, reviews, Wikipedia, IMDB, and some of the full features where available on Dailymotion and YouTube.

Crime/Thriller Horror

El Bosque del Lobo (1970) is a Spanish drama/horror film based on the novel by Carlos Martínez-Barbeito, itself partially based on real-life Spanish serial killer Manuel Blanco Romasanta, who claimed he was a werewolf. The film is a consideration of the social outcast and the impact of superstition and ostracism on vulnerable members of society. It tells the story of epileptic peddler Benito Freire, who wanders through Galician towns but is subjected to superstitious misunderstanding regarding his condition. As rumours about him spread – such as, that he is a werewolf – Benito descends into madness. You can read more about real-life Romasanta ‘the werewolf of Allariz’ here, and here.

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The Brazilian film, O Homem Lobo (1971), was a horror directed by Raffaele Rossi, a colourful character in Brazilian cinema history. Toni Cardi’s interview for Vice (in Portuguese) gives some context for Rossi, but I’m including this horror here because it too has elements of social commentary. The film again considers the impact of ostracism, but this time the effect of fractured family relationships upon a vulnerable minor. In it, a young boy whose mother died in childbirth on Christmas Night (a common time for werewolves to be born!) is sent to a distant boarding school by his father. The professor character, who knew the boy from birth, wanted to visit him but was prevented by his wife, who is jealous of the boy. When the professor does visit, he discovers that the boy is actually a werewolf who terrorises the country villages under the full moon, and has to stop him.

This film could have gone under ‘Folklore and Religion’, a section in Part III (coming soon!) but because the themes of the film are more about the isolation of the boy and the dissolution of his family, the trauma of his upbringing and the jealousy of his father-figure’s wife, overshadow the folkloric reason for his transformation. In fact, it’s arguable that the familial tragedies are more the cause of his wildness and violence, placing this film as another example of the werewolf representing social anxieties. The full film (black and white, in Portuguese) is available at the time of posting on YouTube.

Moon of the Wolf (1972) is also potentially one for the Folklore and Religion section, so it might get covered again there. This is a police procedural made-for-TV movie that is also a Southern Gothic crime thriller, in which a sheriff of a small town in Louisiana suspects that the series of animal-attack deaths are the work of a loup-garou, a werewolf. This one is full of Southern Gothic elements, though, which potentially overshadow the loup-garou lore, or rather the loup-garou is a part of the Gothic Horror rather than the only element.

You can watch the full film here on YouTube (at the time of posting).

The Boy Who Cried Werewolf (1973) is also more a ‘straight’ horror film, in which a father takes his son to (guess) a cabin the woods (you win!) and is attacked by (guess) a werewolf! (Yay go you!) GUESS WHAT HAPPENS NEXT yes, that’s right, the boy tries to tell people about the werewolf attack and no one listens to him because it’s plainly untrue. Who gets attacked by monsters in cabin in the woods, for heaven’s sake? Well, the werewolf attacks a hippie commune at one point, and is not the only werewolf to do so: this is also the plot of Werewolf of Woodstock (1975) which I’ve refused to place anywhere except under the Horror Comedies.

This is also a film about fractured family, though, and the troubled relationship between the son, his father, and the will they/won’t they get back together thing going on between the two parents. The mother doesn’t believe her son, either, when he returns from the trip and tells her he doesn’t want to be alone with his dad anymore because the man is a monster.

While this is literally the case, and the film itself is not really meant to be a metaphor for anything, it’s also got a lot of resonance with childhood trauma where the monstrosity can be viewed as metaphorical. If you do view this kind of thing in this way, then the ending is problematic (but of the time): SPOILER: the boy gets bitten and his mother sees the bite mark on him, slowly realising that this means he is going to become a werewolf too. The propensity for monstrosity – for violence, for killing, for brutality – has been passed down. The myth that abused children grow up to be abusive adults has been debunked, but it still leaves a deep psychological scar.

The full film is available here on YouTube (at the time of posting).

[image error]Calvin Lockhart stars in THE BEAST MUST DIE (1974)

On a lighter note, The Beast Must Die (1974) is a fun horror-mystery, starring Calvin Lockhart, Peter Cushing and Charles Grey (best known [to me] not just for The Devil Rides Out but also for his roles in The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) and the lesser-known cult sequel Shock Treatment (1981) where he had a thing with a younger Ruby Wax). Anyway, I digress.

The whole point of this is to guess who the werewolf is based on the clues scattered throughout the film, and there was a ‘werewolf break’ for the audience to have a go at guessing before it was revealed. You have a selection of characters to choose from, all of whom have been gathered in a remote country house for this purpose – because one of them is the Beast, and the Beast must Die. But can you guess who it is?

Scream of the Wolf (1974), directed by none other than , was another made-for-TV movie featuring a big game hunter called out of retirement to help solve a series of grisly murders that may have been committed by a werewolf. The hunter character is an interesting foil for the mysterious, murderous Beast: when explicitly challenged by a local man re: why he enjoys killing innocent animals, the hunter gets in his face and says he can’t explain why he enjoys it, but he can show the challenger why. There’s an interesting parallel here – a man does not need to be, or outwardly present as, a Beast in order to do Beastly things (either to animals, or to people).

You can watch the full feature on YouTube at the time of posting.

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I’m going to put Legend of the Werewolf (1975) here too, which is another sort-of adaptation of the 1933 Endore novel, but this time set in 19th-century Russia and starring Peter Cushing. In this film, the main character was a boy born on Christmas Eve (the use of this superstition as an origin story again could put it under my ‘Folklore and Religion’ section in Part III) and is bereaved and raised by wolves. A travelling circus adopt the feral child until he grows out of his ‘wolf boy’ feral state – but when he’s all grown up he does actually transform into a wolfman, and kills one of the troupe. He goes on the run and soon becomes a Russian werewolf in Paris, where he falls for a sex worker who won’t marry him as she feels their relationship won’t work. He transforms at the full moon and takes it out on the brothel clientele. Professor Paul Cataflanque, a skilled forensic pathologist, deduces the attack was made by a wolf, and he and Inspector Gerard are drawn into the story as the net tightens around our protagonist Etoile.

I’ve included it here instead of Part III because again, the crime/thriller plot is the driving force and it’s more interesting to look at it through this lens since it’s one of a number of films based on the Endore novel that use the Christmas Eve birth (this time without the sexual assault of the mother as an added bonus) as an origin for lycanthropy in the child. While the novel makes use of the folklore, the films are more following the novel rather than making use of or doing anything interesting with the folklore itself.

The full movie is on Dailymotion and YouTube (at the time of posting).

Exploitation Cinema

An American Grindhouse exploitation flick that blended the outlaw biker gang genre with the traditional horror film is the brilliantly named Werewolves on Wheels (1971). If you want to get deep with it (why not), it played with tensions surrounding subcultures, the nature of “freedom” and the rejection of Christocentric norms. Or it was a violent Grindhouse flick with a low budget that wanted to turn a bunch of bikers into werewolves. Whatever.

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It’s about an outlaw biker gang who fall foul of some satanic monks worshiping the devil in the Arizona desert (as you do). The cult transform the lead biker’s girlfriend Helen, who infects her boyfriend. Helen is introduced as the doomed Bad Girl, fascinated by death – including her own. In the first few minutes, after we establish the gang are volatile, violent and all-round good chaps, she asks a tarot reader to read her cards and tell her how she dies: she is told she will die “in the tower, struck by lightning”.

The alpha couple then kill off their own gang until they are stopped and the gang return to the church for revenge on the cult – but stop when they see themselves in the cult procession. Of course you want to see it. Here’s the full film on YouTube (at the time of posting).

Andy Milligan made some cult films back in the day, and there are not one but two of his on this list. The first is The Rats Are Coming! The Werewolves Are Here! (1972). “Man-eating rodents are only playthings for a 19th-century family who have a unique problem with the full moon” reads the brief synopsis, but in fact, the werewolves only appear at the very end of the film in the final minutes. This film dials down Milligan’s trademark sex and violence and amps up the verbal abuse, with the main action revolving around the vicious arguments that the family members have. There is a lot of physical and verbal abuse of the brother, who has learning difficulties. There is on-camera live rodent torture (it was the 70s… rodents were harmed during the making of this film). There is a lot of “suspense” as the family await the full moon (oh no, the audience gasp, whatever is about to happen? What was the title of this film again?) and it’s… it’s not great. If you want to watch it, I can’t stop you. It’s embedded from YouTube here at the end of this review.

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Milligan’s misogyny, obsession with incest and general batshittery comes out even more in Blood! (1973). This one apparently features blood-drinking plants, a mad scientist with a vampire bride, lycanthropic infidelity, incestuous infidelity, vampiric infidelity, gratuitous everything, was largely filmed in his own house, and was billed as a “traditional Gothic Horror”. Alright love, calm down. The reviews are probably just as disturbing as the film, mainly because if you’re reviewing an Andy Milligan film, you’re having to mention the plot at some stage. Here’s the Dominion of Scum review. Trash Film Guru’s review has the film embedded (from YouTube). So does this one, via These Girls on Film. Good luck.

Finally, we end with the Italian sexploitation sleazefest of a film, apparently intended to be a serious film about lycanthropy as a psychological condition, La Lupa mannara (1976). The protagonist, Daniella Neseri (played by Annik Borel), a survivor of childhood rape, has nightmares about a werewolf ancestor who appears to her in waking visions. Under the delusion that she is a werewolf, she seduces and murders men by tearing their throats out with her teeth, including her own sister’s boyfriend. She is committed to an asylum where she attacks and kills a (female) nymphomaniac who tries to seduce her, and escapes. She meets a compassionate stuntman with whom she falls in love, and this temporarily ‘cures’ her. However, the couple are attacked by a group of men and he is killed while she is raped. Daniella resumes her murderous rampage in revenge. She is eventually captured in the woods where she is found, nearly feral and dancing behind a wall of flame, by the authorities. She is re-committed while her father kills himself.

The promotional material and final credits claim that this was based on a true story – and while she doesn’t change into a werewolf except in her head, this gets included here as a ‘werewolf’ film anyway. Here’s a review where the trailer, and full film, are embedded at the end. The soundtrack is meant to be good.

NEXT TIME:

Part III, horror comedies and folklore/religion, coming on Wednesday!

Self Care Bingo: Gothic Edition

Tweeted this last night but thought I’d drop it here too for Easter bank holiday weekend. #StayHome and pine appropriately.

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[image error]Ghostly beings haunt at home this weekend!!

Werewolf Films: 1970-1979 Part I

The ’70s was a decade of B-movie joy, so there were a LOT of werewolf films. One or two were even critically acclaimed. From Argentina to Bollywood, with links to several full features on Dailymotion and YouTube, there’s a film here for your every mood (as long as you speak Portuguese, Spanish, Italian and/or Hindi, but there’s English language flicks in here too).

In terms of recurring tropes and what the werewolf is used to represent (in those cases where it’s not just a monster used for kicks), the duality of civilisation vs primal instinct is played with, the comedy element starts being overshadowed by the potential for violence, and Grindhouse gets a look in. There are some classics again in this decade, and again Werewolves.com has a brilliant list I’ll be mainly working off for these posts, with some additions (yeah, there’s more).

I should say that on the Werewolves.com list is The Colonel and the Werewolf (1979), the English title of a Brazilian film. It shouldn’t really be on the list. This is the feature-length treatment of José Cândido de Carvalho’s bestselling 1964 novel, O Coronel e o Lobisomem, a novel which has nothing to do with werewolves. The title is a reference to the imaginative mind of the titular ‘Colonel’, Ponciano de Azeredo Furtado, “coronel por trabalho de valentia e senhor de pasto por direito de herança, destemido caçador de onça-pintada, lobisomem e, sobretudo, de rabo-de-saia.” (which Google Translate tells me means, “colonel for work of valor and lord of pasture for inheritance, fearless jaguar hunter, werewolf and, above all, tail-skirt.”) The novel and its small-screen and big-screen adaptations are about a retired, Quixotic? colonel and the loss of space and power of the rural landowners in the face of progress. While it may be a classic of Brazilian literature, it’s not going to be covered in this post as a werewolf legend!

Werewolf B-movies came out against a context of more horror, more sex, more violence and more gritty realistic drama being shown on screen. Cinematic innovation was on an upward swing at the start of the decade, and filmmakers and cinema-goers wanted to push boundaries and weren’t satisfied with mediocre and conventional productions. Stories became more personal and grittier, and the background of social change and civil rights had its part to play in the types of stories being told and consumed.

I was planning on doing this chronologically, but there are still SO MANY films to cover in the space of five short years that I’m going to do it by theme as well. The 70s were all about exploitation cinema, including exploitation of trends and popular tropes, so it’s no wonder that there was an explosion of monster movies during this time.

CW: Some of the films covered in Parts II and III contain graphic sexual assault, and make use of the werewolf as a ‘child of rape’ superstition.

Monster Mash/Fantasy-Horror

First off, let’s just get Spanish cinema’s Count Waldemar series out of the way before we start:

La Marca del Hombre Lobo / Mark of the Wolf Man (1968)



Las Noches del Hombre Lobo / The Nights of the Wolf Man (1968) (now lost, may never have been made?)



Los Monstruos del Terror / The Monsters of Terror (1969)



La Furia del Hombre Lobo / The Fury of the Wolf Man (1970)



La Noche de Walpurgis / Walpurgis Night (1970)



Dr. Jekyll y el Hombre Lobo / Dr. Jekyll and the Wolf Man (1971)



El Retorno de Walpurgis / The Return of Walpurgis (1973)



La Maldicion de la Bestia / Curse of the Beast (1975)

There were others made in the 1980s, one in the 90s and a film in 2004. We’ll get there. The films meander around the by-now-usual werewolf tropes, but also introduce a number of new origin monster mashup stories, from being bitten by a yeti to being bitten by two vampire women.

Count Waldemar is killed numerous times and brought back again more times than Christopher Lee’s Dracula, and tangles with the other heavyweights in the monster world.

This series had a number of alternative titles depending on the country of their release, of course, so you might know a few of them by other names. I think for me the complete lack of internal consistency in the films is part of their charm (?) and the yeti origin story is certainly inventive. It harks back to Werewolf of London (1935) where the titular character was bitten by a werewolf while in Tibet, the location of the yeti attack. The films also include other monster staples like Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, whose own transformations and dual nature correspond with the werewolf-within-the-man concept, as well as vampires, Frankenstein’s monster, and various misadventures.

Dracula contra Frankenstein (1972) not part of the Count Waldemar series but also a Spanish film, takes more direct influence from Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Dr Seward (as in Stoker’s character) is its hero, a vampire hunter who kills Dracula successfully only for Dr Frankenstein and his assistant Morpho to show up and resurrect the Count. There’s nothing for it but to summon a werewolf to stop the Count’s reign of terror. This is more in the fantasy-horror vein, and has some elements recognisable to fans of Van Helsing (2004).

One film that doesn’t fit any of these genres I’ve roughly/arbitrarily lumped these into is the critically-acclaimed Swiss/French film, Providence (1977), where a werewolf appears as part of a fantasy sequence dreamed up by ailing, alcoholic novelist Clive Langham (played by John Gielgud). Lying in bed, the aging writer mentally composes and re-composes scenes for his latest novel, based on his relationships with his family members. The werewolf, in his imagination, is his son Kevin, who is being hunted through a dark, tangled forest. The film won the 1978 César Award for Best Film.

NEXT TIME:

Werewolf Films 1970-1979 Part II: Crime/Thriller Horror and Exploitation films.

Be warned, some of these are pretty grim. I’m following them up with Part III: Horror Comedies & Folklore and Religion to cheer us up.

Next time: CW// sexual assault, suicide.

How to tell if you’re a Gothic or Gothic Romantic Hero

Absolutely my new favourite blog on the whole wide internets

Silly little, lovely little stories

Do you have a spare wife lying around? Perhaps in your attic?

Have you recently wrestled a bear (to save a pig thief), engaged in a naked pirate fight and escaped the clutches of a murderous prostitute and her gang?

Have you gambled away your fortune and given all your money to a fellow debtor?

Did you lose your girlfriend about a book ago and aren’t entirely sure where she’s gone?

Have you ever mysteriously disappeared for years only to come back rich and find that made absolutely no difference?

Have you ever rescued your lady love  only to lose her a day later after losing a duel with her dastardly uncle?

Did a servant actually rescue your love interest?

Have you murdered several of your previous wives?

Has your lady love been held prisoner in a half-ruined castle in the Apennines?

Did a mysterious old dude longing for…

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Werewolf Films: 1960-1969

There’s a good list of werewolf films that covers this decade on www.werewolves.com, and I’ll have a look at these in this post. The 1960s saw a much larger appetite for werewolf films, spurred in part by the commercial successes of previous classics like I Was A Teenage Werewolf. Mexican cinema in particular went mad for it, but most films were of the campy horror-comedy type, rather than treating the werewolf as a serious source of horror or terror. This may be due to the make-up and special effects available at the time, of course…

1960s

La Casa Del Terror, The House of Terror (1960) was a Mexican horror-comedy starring Lon Chaney Jr. and Mexican comedian Tin Tan. In this monster flick, Casimiro (Tin Tan) is a night watchman in a wax works museum being drained of blood by his employer, a mad scientist who is trying to raise a mummy to life. Turns out, the mummy is (also) a werewolf. There’s a lot going on here, but it falls in line with werewolf cinema lore established in the 1940s-50s, and follows a lot of the usual themes.

In 1961, werewolves finally got the Hammer treatment. Only a third of Hammer Films’ productions were horror despite the label being synonymous with the genre. Although the Golden Age of the company came after their Sci-Fi horror The Quatermass Xperiment (1955), it had been set up in 1934 and is one of the oldest film companies in the world.

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The British-made classic, The Curse of the Werewolf (1961) was an adaptation of the 1933 Endore novel, but set in Madrid instead of Paris to save on building new Parisian sets after the BBFC objected to the script for a film set during the Spanish Inquisition.

The plot has a lot of sexual assault (actual and attempted) in it at the start, following the genesis of the werewolf in Endore’s take on the folklore, then picks up with Leon, the tragic werewolf protagonist, played by Oliver Reed in his first starring role in film. The resulting film was heavily censored, but the uncensored print was finally shown on the BBC in 1993.

[image error]Oliver Reed in THE CURSE OF THE WEREWOLF. Reposted with permission of the artist Rafael Navarro – Insta: rafael_navarro007.

Since the 1960s was the decade of women’s lib, it’s not surprising that monsters and their base appetites were given the sexy treatment too. Vampires had always been predators with sexual overtones, and now werewolves and their savage instincts were taking centre stage.

Lycanthropus (1961), an Italian film released in the U.S. as Werewolf in a Girls’ Dormitory, took the action into the bedroom (literally) but kept up the horror side with savage murders and wolf sightings at a girls’ school. Keeping with the medical horror themes, suspicion falls on a newly-hired chemistry teacher, who may or may not be a werewolf.

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The lust of monsters had always been a horror concern, and in 1962 this was made explicit in campy horror-comedy House on Bare Mountain, where the Wolfman, Dracula and Frankenstein (the monster) spy on a nudist girls’ school in the mountains and eventually invade it. I know a few girls who wouldn’t mind that.

In the same year, Beauty and the Beast (1962) turned the werewolf into the tragic antihero of the 18thC fairy tale. The full film is on Vimeo! This adaptation takes place in a faux-medieval setting, where the transformation is brought about by an alchemist (the mad scientist of the day) and the spell can only be broken by the werewolf’s true love.

This element of the werewolf’s curse – only being killed or ‘cured’ by someone who loves him – was a feature of The Wolfman (2010), but not the 1941 original in which Larry Talbot is able to kill the original werewolf, Bela the fortune teller, with his silver-topped wolf’s head cane.

The true love element is lifted from the fairy tale, not cinematic werewolf lore, and it is not really a feature of the folklore either – at least, it’s hard to find a source for that which isn’t Tumblr. Anyone, according to some Germanic lore, could call the name of a person transformed into a wolf and that would summon the person back into their human form.

Another Mexican horror-comedy, Frankestein el vampiro y compañía (1962), features werewolves in this monster mashup where two screw-ups get entangled with Frankenstein’s monster, mad scientists, vampires and werewolves. This one has more in common with Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein and its Egyptian remake, as well as keeping it in the humorous vein of La Casa del Terror.

Not to be outdone, Hong Kong produced a werewolf film in 1963, Ye ban ren lang, Midnight Were-wolf, in Cantonese. There’s very little information about this film in English, and I can’t find it, but it’s classed as ‘fantasy’ and ‘drama’ rather than horror. I find that interesting, but I don’t know enough about the plot or Hong Kong cinema and trends/attitudes to comment.

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Also in 1963 was the werewolf offering of the infamous El Santo series, Santo en el museo de cera, Santo in the Wax Museum, in which the masked Mexican wrestler Santo discovers a mad scientist is kidnapping people and turning them into monsters (obviously) but he able to overcome them with his wrestling moves.

Lon Chaney Jr’s werewolf-mummy role was reprised in Face of the Screaming Werewolf (1964), I absolutely kid you not, which was a low-budget horror film that combined footage from La Casa del Terror (1960) and a completely unrelated film, La Momia Azteca (1957), with new footage shot by the director Jerry Warren. The resulting hatchet job of a plot is tied loosely together with wet string and is pretty much exactly as awful as it sounds.

The werewolf film-that-never-was, meant to be released in 1964 or that was at least shot or partially shot that year, was a Western B-movie horror called Devil Wolf of Shadow Mountain. Apparently about a cowboy who drinks from a wolf’s paw print and becomes infected with lycanthropy, a piece of lore that pops up in the [cancelled] series Hemlock Grove, nothing ever came of this one, but it gets an honourable mention.

Italian cinema produced Ursus, il terrore dei Kirghisi, (lit. ‘Ursus, Terror of the Kirghiz’) in 1964, with the English title Hercules, Prisoner of Evil. Ursus battles an evil sorceress after drinking a potion that turns him into a murderous werewolf on certain nights: another Jekyll/Hyde theme, with undertones of medical horror (the potion), a historical setting and fantastical plot.

Werewolves were a little more serious in the anthology film Dr Terror’s House of Horrors (1965) starring Peter Cushing as Dr Terror. Dr Terror reads tarot cards for five strangers, whose stories unfold in five segments. There is a vampire story, a sentient, intelligent plant story, a voodoo story, and one in which Christopher Lee appears as an art critic being pursued by a disembodied hand. The werewolf segment has all the usual elements: an architect returns to his ancestral home, much like Larry Talbot in The Wolf Man (1941), and finds a vengeful werewolf there. This has more in common with The Hound of the Baskervilles, but it sets the werewolf as a key horror monster that no self-respecting horror-comedy anthology could be without.

The Orgy of the Dead (1965), an erotic horror film of the naked women variety in which a couple wake from a car accident to find themselves watching ten naked/striptease dancers one at a time, each with some tragic or sinister back story, entertaining the Emperor of the Night (some kind of powerful demonic being who hangs out in a graveyard). The couple are captured and brought before the Emperor by a Wolf Man (in a mask) and a mummy. There’s no reason for this. I mean, there’s no reason for any of this, but it was written by cult director Edward D. Wood Jr., who also adapted the screenplay into a novel. This is not a werewolf film, but for some reason a werewolf or Wolf Man is in it, so that’s good enough, and I’ve mainly included it for the line, “Your puritan upbringing holds you back from my monsters but it certainly doesn’t hurt your art of kissing.” No context required. Here’s a review.

One young lady who absolutely isn’t held back from monsters by any sort of upbringing is Clarissa Fernandez, played by Kitty de Hoyos in Mexican horror La Loba, The She-Wolf (1965). Clarissa is a rich, attractive Mexican girl by day who is also a murderous werewolf by night, and falls for a doctor whom she sees for a cure. It turns out that the doctor (the wonderfully named Dr Alejandro Bernstein, because all mad doctors and scientists need to be Germanic, apparently) is also a werewolf, and they go on a love-filled killing spree together only to be killed by – wait for it – a specially trained, werewolf-killing dog. I’ll go out on a limb and assume it wasn’t a chihuahua, but what a twist that would have been.

There follows a whole host of films in which monsters are positively crawling out of the woodwork all at once, and werewolves get their share of the action. These include:

El Charro de las Calaveras, Rider of the Skulls (1965), another Mexican production in which a cowboy battles evil forces one of which is a werewolf; another Mexican wrestling film, El Demonio Azul, The Blue Demon (1965) in which Mexican wrestler the Blue Demon (playing himself) challenges a mad scientist who can turn into a werewolf; he’s back again, teaming up with El Santo in Santo y Blue Demon contra los monstruos, Santo and the Blue Demon Against the Monsters (1969 but released 1970) where again, one of those monsters is a werewolf; Munster, Go Home! (1966) in which the monstrous family inherit an English manor house and title, but after much shenanigans end up deciding the American life is the life for them, and the American-made stop-motion animation Mad Monster Party? (1967), a musical horror comedy featuring a whole host of monsters, including a wolfman.

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Blood of Dracula’s Castle (1967/69) was another cult horror B-movie in which a couple and a murderous werewolf show up at Dracula’s castle. At this point, werewolves and vampires seemed to be the standard monstrous two-for-one in cinema, and apparently audiences couldn’t get enough of either. The 1967 theatrical version didn’t include the werewolf scenes, and the serial killer character Johnny didn’t transform but was motivated to kill during the full moon. In the 1969 late-night TV version, the werewolf element was added for… obvious reasons of improvement. The plot sounds absolutely amazing so I’m going to just reproduce the summary for you to enjoy here. It hits you in waves.

Count Dracula (Alexander D’Arcy) and his vampire wife (Paula Raymond) are occupying Falcon Rock Castle in modern-day Arizona, hiding behind the identities of Count and Countess Townsend. When the castle’s owner dies, the property passes on to a photographer named Glen Cannon, and Glen has decided to live there himself with his fiancée Liz. He drives out to the castle to inform the Townsends that they will have to move out. But his car breaks down when he gets there, and he and Liz are forced to spend the night with the Townsends. The Townsends are actually vampires who sleep in coffins and lure pretty young girls to the castle to be drained of blood by their butler George (John Carradine), who then mixes real Bloody Marys for the couple, which they drink from martini glasses. George and Mango the hunchback keep mini-skirted women chained up in the basement, occasionally sacrificing one of them to “the Great God Luna” by burning them at the stake. Then there is a guy named Johnny, who becomes a serial killer when the moonlight strikes him (or a werewolf, depending on whether you watch the theatrical version or the late-night-TV version, the latter of which added a few quick and cheesy werewolf scenes). Glen and Liz accidentally witness one of the women being sacrificed in the cellar. Dracula and the Countess try to force Glen to sell the castle to them. In the final confrontation, George the butler is killed, the remaining women prisoners are freed, Mango the hunchback gets shot, hit with an ax and set afire before dying, and the vampires wind up exposed to sunlight and dissolve away into dust. Glen and Liz decide not to live in the castle after all, and drive off together. However, two bats emerge unseen from the ashes and fly away. The End?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_of_Dracula%27s_Castle

La Marca del Hombre Lobo (1968), (lit. The Mark of the Wolfman, but also known as Hell’s Creatures: Dracula and the Werewolf, The Nights of Satan and Frankenstein’s Bloody Terror despite it having nothing to do with Frankenstein), features a resurrected werewolf wreaking havoc on a village. This was a 3D Spanish film that was apparently very effective with high-quality lenses, but the investors only forked out for shoddy cheap acrylic ones and ruined the star-studded Hollywood premiere (according to the Wikipedia entry).

When Count Waldemar Daninsky is bitten by Werewolf 1 (called Imre) when he kills him, he becomes Werewolf 2. He turns to a medical couple for help but – surprise! they are vampires. They resurrect Werewolf 1 again and get the werewolves to fight each other. Waldemar kills Imre (yay!) then gets shot by his lover Janice (boo? yay? um) who is ‘the one who loves him the most’, thus going along the ‘love conquers all but also kills werewolves’ lines. BUT IT DOESN’T END THERE. No. This became a series of films that went on into the 1980s, linked by the character of Count Waldemar but without a coherent overarching plot and with a number of conflicting origin stories, one of which was that he was actually bitten by a yeti in Tibet, reminiscent of Werewolf of London (1935). I’ll give the full 1960s-70s list of the series in the next post.

Yet another horror comedy de-fanging the werewolf was The Maltese Bippy (1969), featuring American comedians Dan Rowan and Dick Martin. Rowan plays a porn producer and Martin is his insomniac star who thinks he’s a werewolf. To verify this, they get tangled up with Julie Newmar in a Gothic mansion on Long Island, and there are a few murders and a missing diamond for some reason.

In summary, the 1960s did a lot to sex up, de-fang and domesticate the werewolf, establishing elements of werewolf lore that had a huge influence on the popular conceptions of the monster. Arguably these films did much to cement a ‘canon’ of folklore that moved away from the earlier French-Canadian loup-garou constructions and the psychological crime horror themes.

While they could be used to explore social anxieties, the spirit of the Sixties was more about embracing these ‘basic’ instincts as natural, and mad scientists were also now an entertainment staple rather than a reflection of mainstream concern.

Horror comedies were a better fit for the limited special effects that often made werewolves laughable on screen. Vampires, too, were no longer frightening but entertaining, and werewolves found themselves paired up with them primarily but also with all sorts of things that go bump in the night, part of the generic monster milieu.

NEXT TIME:

More #WerewolfTalk posting on Thursday!

Let's Talk About Wolves #5: Werewolf Talk with Becca Lynn Mathis

[image error]Becca Lynn Mathis

In this latest instalment of #WerewolfTalk, I got to hear from author Becca Lynn Mathis. Born and raised in Texas, Becca Lynn Mathis has been writing since she was a little girl, and could often be found sitting among the branches of a tree, reading a book. She even used to get in trouble in high school for writing stories after her work was done.

Today, she is a graduate of Lynn University with her B.S in Psychology. On weekends, she plays Dungeons & Dragons (or Pathfinder) with her friends and trains with the Royal Chessmen stage combat troupe, who perform at renaissance festivals and pirate faires all across Florida. Her debut novel, A Place to Run, is available now. Find her on Twitter @DR34MR.

Werewolf Talk with Becca Lynn Mathis

I’ve been writing stories since I was in elementary school, and even have a trunked sword and sorcery novel from my high school days. About four years ago, as I was working on some of the worldbuilding for what would eventually become my debut novel, I realized that almost all of the stories I have in my head could fit in the same universe if I worked out the details right. So I did. Last year, I finally became a published author (albeit self-published). 

I consider myself a pretty thorough geek, and any look at the walls of our home would support that, as they are covered in swords, wands, house banners, lightsabers, and mythical creatures. I also get to express that geekery with my husband through our stage combat troupe, The Royal Chessmen. We perform a fierce and fun living chess game at our home faire and play at being family-friendly pirates for a number of other faires and festivals across Florida. I’m also SUPER addicted to Beat Saber on the PlayStation VR (think DDR meets Guitar Hero, but with lightsabers).

WHAT ARE YOUR IMPRESSIONS OF THE WEREWOLF IN FICTION/FILM? DO YOU HAVE FAVE WEREWOLF BOOKS/MOVIES?

I have always been fascinated by the duality of man and beast within werewolves, but I’ve always seen werewolves depicted as these hyper-aggressive alpha males (sometimes females too, but those are so rare to find). The thing that always struck me in these films is how UGLY they try to make the werewolves in their wolf form. Twilight moved away from that by making them beautiful big wolves, but they still had the aggressive alpha-male personality to go with it.

The thing that always gets me too, is that anytime werewolves are introduced, there is also something else within the universe that is also keeping themselves hidden from humanity. So I’m never really surprised when something else pops up (like witches or fae or vampires). And honestly, it sort of makes sense to me that there would be other things, or else where would all of our folklore and fairy tales have come from? There is a saying that my muse simply loves to play with: all legends/stories have a hint of truth to them.

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My favorite werewolves are actually in the Mercy Thompson series by Patricia Briggs. In that series, the werewolves are very secretive and pack-centric, which really made sense to me as they are running around in our world. I know a lot of my own lore is inspired by concepts first introduced to me through Mercy Thompson. In this series, the werewolves are beautiful big wolves, and while there are female werewolves, all of the ‘wolves are hyper aggressive. I liked the portrayal of pack dynamics and power throughout the books, and how they all react to Mercy, a coyote shapeshifter who doesn’t go by the same rules the ‘wolves do.

I also very much enjoyed a Canadian TV show called Bitten, which I found on Netflix one day a while back and pretty well devoured. It has three seasons and features a female werewolf protagonist who starts out trying to leave her pack life behind. As you can imagine, things go a bit sideways and she ends up embroiled in pack business. I understand there is a book series that the show was based on (called Women of the Otherworld), but have not had a chance to read it yet (though it is on my TBR pile).

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I also am a huge fan of the Underworld (2003) movie and the Lycan lore set up there, which is probably where I first got the idea of “if werewolves, then vampires” (because they sort of go hand-in hand, thematically speaking). As a stand-alone movie, I really enjoyed Blood and Chocolate (2007) (which finally features a female werewolf trying to live a more normal human life). There’s also a short in the Love, Death & Robots series from Netflix that features werewolf soldiers, which I also feel is really well done.

Believe it or not, I haven’t actually seen a lot of the classic werewolf movies like An American Werewolf in London (1981) or the original Teen Wolf (1985) (though I did watch the show, which was okay, but was a bit too disjointed and all over the place for my tastes). I also haven’t read a lot of older werewolf fiction, as I prefer my werewolves to be less aggressive (and less ugly) than they have classically been portrayed.

WHAT’S SO INTERESTING TO YOU ABOUT THE WEREWOLF CONCEPT? DO YOU THINK IT HAS AS MUCH POWER TO FRIGHTEN OR HORRIFY AS IT ONCE DID? [WHY/WHY NOT]

I think we’re starting to move away from werewolves as scary horror constructs. I think there are still some pretty horrifying tales to be told about werewolves out there, particularly ones where they completely lose their humanity, but I think that there is a growing number of people who are becoming more conscious of wildlife and the state of the world. As the number of wild wolves dwindles, we seem to be coming around to the idea that wolves are creatures who are as vital to an ecosystem as any other predator, and I think that is feeding into why we are seeing more and more werewolf lore with a positive spin. I think the addition of the wolf pack to Yellowstone National Park has been a great example of this change in the narrative surrounding wolves.

Personally, I really enjoy playing with characters who have animalistic senses, and I like the idea of a built-in sort of found family that a pack would be. I like diving into pack dynamics and, in building out the world and lore for my own series, I was fascinated by the differences in how we used to think wolf packs in the wild worked versus how we have now come to understand things. Namely, that we used to think that there was a strict hierarchy of pack alpha all the way down but now, we know that’s something that is more commonly seen in captive packs of unrelated wolves and that wild wolves actually work more in family groups, with different members taking the lead in different situations.

WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT THE MORE MODERN TREND OF MAKING THE WEREWOLF A TRAGIC OR HEROIC FIGURE?

These are kind of my favorite tales – particularly the ones with the werewolf as the hero. I like that we are modernizing the way we talk about werewolves and I really like being a part of diversifying and changing the narrative.

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Most of the werewolves in my series are the heroic types. They are actually designed to be protectors of humanity (and were created that way), so most of my werewolves are very friendly and helpful types. They’re likely to stop and help you change a tire on a lonely road, or they’ll tell that guy harassing the girl in the bar to back off. The only exceptions to this are the crazed wolves, which are humans who were turned, but couldn’t make peace with what they are. In my world, normal werewolves have to kill the crazed ones to protect the people that they would otherwise kill.

DO YOU SEE WEREWOLVES AND THE TRANSFORMATION AS A FORM OF BODY HORROR? HOW DO YOU THINK OF TRANSFORMATION IN YOUR OWN WORK?

I see the transformation portrayed so often as body horror (with the “carrot sticks” sound effect of bones breaking and the squelching noises of body parts moving around), and while it makes sense to me that this would be the case, it also made sense to me that werewolves wouldn’t really focus so much on that in between moment as they’re shifting. When you have creatures that could live to be 800 years old or more, it makes sense to me that they wouldn’t even give a second thought to the handful of moments that changing forms is in their lifetime. That is to say, that yes, there is definitely an element of body-horror that I could portray in my stories, but I prefer to focus instead on how being wolf brings these disparate people together – how they find a new family in each other because the rest of the world is now theirs to protect.

In my first book, you get an up close and personal view of how a human becomes a werewolf. In doing this, I’m able to show how yes, there’s a physical transformation, but there’s also a lifestyle transformation as well. If you had a family or a close circle of friends before you became a werewolf, none of them can really know what you are, because if you told them, they wouldn’t believe you, and even if they did, others wouldn’t believe them. I like to play a lot with the blinders of society (along with that quote from Men in Black about how a person is smart, but people are dumb and panicky). People don’t know about werewolves because they don’t want to. So when you become a werewolf, who becomes your new family or circle of friends? Well, your pack would, of course, because they know what you’ve gone through. They know how hard leaving one life behind for another is. Worse, they know what it’s like to outlive everyone you ever cared about in your human life.

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I’ve mentioned before about the ugliness of traditional werewolves too, which honestly feeds right into the body horror element. Lets face it, that huge, ultra hairy, two-legged form with a vaguely canid head is the stuff of nightmares. If I wanted werewolves to be agents of good in my stories, then I needed a form for them that wouldn’t be so…. repulsive. So I let the wolves in my books be more like the beautiful big wolves of the Mercy Thompson or Twilight persuasion. (I should note here that the Twilight series was not one that I could finish, and that goes for both the books and the movies. I do, however recognize their popularity, and appreciate that people are looking for a different kind of narrative for our classic horror monsters.) While I do gloss over the transformation sequences in my first book – and will continue the trend in future books – I do have a moment where the main character in my first book is terrified that she will get stuck in a misshapen half form like she’s seen in movies.

FINALLY: WHAT ARE THE BEST TRANSFORMATIONS YOU’VE READ OR THAT ARE DEPICTED IN FILM/OTHER MEDIA?

Oh this is such a hard question for me because I don’t really like a lot of the transformations I’ve seen, though I do like elements of what I’ve seen. For example, I liked that the Mercy Thompson series werewolves had a sort of smooth transition, but I didn’t like that it made them even more grumpy and irritable than they already are. The carrot sticks and squelching from the first Underworld movie was interesting to watch and definitely gave an air of “uh oh” to the scene in question, but I like the way it’s visually portrayed in the Twilight movies better: where in one step they are human, and the next they leap into their wolf form. That said, it’s a little too clean for my liking (I feel like they should at least have to remove their clothes first). They did a similar thing in the movie Blood and Chocolate, but as they leap (with their clothes still on), they glow with moonlight and land as regular wolves. I like that in the Bitten TV show, they had to at least take their clothes off before the carrot sticks and squelching transformation, and I like that the switch from one form to the other didn’t take a protracted amount of time. In the end, I decidedly prefer transformation sequences where they end as quadrupeds over the vaguely canid bipedal form.

WEREWOLF SOCIETY: HOW DOES IT INTERACT WITH HUMAN SOCIETY?

In all of the movies and the books I’ve seen and read, werewolves have had to keep themselves secret from the rest of society lest they be wiped out (even when there is only one). That makes a lot of sense, honestly, since so much of the world has a “shoot first, ask questions later” mentality about things that they either fear or don’t understand. So I kept that element when I was writing about werewolves myself. I gave them an origin that links both the werewolves and the vampires to the same historical figure, but put the creation of the werewolves firmly in the hands of the Catholic church. But the church, as ever-present as it is, still doesn’t have the firmest grasp everywhere. So I decided that, as time wore on, some werewolf packs would decide to stop following the church’s orders and kind of go their own way. Still, in my world, werewolves are forces of good, and whether they follow the Catholic church or not doesn’t change that. There’s definitely a pack or two out there that do things like protect families escaping spousal abuse and such. There are even some rehab centers run by either the Catholic church or by a faction of werewolves that take in the humans that vampires have been feeding off of – the ones that survive, at least. And no matter which type of pack you run into, they all have an undeniable instinct to fight vampires.

Now what about the military, though? Or the CDC/ WHO? Since my books are all set in America (write what you know, yes?), it made sense to me that the American government would figure out a way to have their own ‘wolves. So I worked them in as I was worldbuilding. The army has a secretive branch of werewolves based out of the Colorado Springs area, and the CDC is aware of both vampires and werewolves in my stories. It follows, of course, that the WHO would as well, but all of them know that people panic about things they don’t understand, so they don’t make it public (and make any whistle blowers who would try to expose it look crazy and unhinged). Additionally, the creation of the werewolf program in the military was done via executive order by a former president, and then promptly forgotten about and swept under the rug. They keep getting their funding and keep making progress, but their only oversight now is through the werewolf they put in charge when the program started. The army-based werewolves also fight vampires, but they are usually the strike teams for more serious missions (usually related to anti-terrorism measures). The military is actually SUPER close to cracking the code on how to determine whether two werewolves will have viable offspring, but they haven’t quite got it figured out yet (though, it meant that I needed to know, so I worked with a friend of mine who is a biology major to come up with at least a rudimentary genetic explanation for werewolf inheritability).

You can check out werewolves in Mathis’s work in her debut novel, A Place to Run, Book 1 of the six-book TRIALS OF BLOOD series. What do you think about wolves? Join in the discussion using #WerewolfTalk.

Werewolf Films: 1950-1959

Perhaps because no one likes thinking about basic human unpleasantness, and everyone had had quite enough of that thanks very much, the werewolf film and its themes saw a repression in the 1950s. The rise of the teenager in Britain and America was a cause of much social anxiety in the post-War period, while older people struggled through repressed trauma and clawed back a sense of conservative ‘normalcy’ against which their offspring (who had not really lived through the War) rebelled and developed their own culture and subcultures.

Teenager culture arguably developed in the 1920s (though the term ‘teenagers’ or ‘teens’ wasn’t used very much at this time despite being coined in the 1900s), but the 1950s was when it really took off. So it’s unsurprising that although there were few werewolf films in the 1950s, the one that became a cult classic was I Was A Teenage Werewolf (1957) starring Michael Landon and Whit Bissell. It’s interesting that this one captured the imagination more than its counterpart (also starring Whit Bissell), I Was A Teenage Frankenstein (1957).

1950s

In 1953, Haram Alek was released, the Egyptian remake of Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein. Made during the Golden Age of Egyptian cinema, this horror-comedy was black and white, in Arabic with English subtitles. In this remake, the Frankenstein monster is more like a mummy, and the vampire is the uncle of a girl whose love interest has been turned into a werewolf. One reviewer noted that in this version, lycanthropy is talked about as if it’s a form of epilepsy.

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The Werewolf (1956) was a Sci-Fi medical horror in the Jekyll and Hyde/mad scientist vein, where an amnesiac man has been injected with “irradiated wolf serum” (your guess is as good as mine) by unscrupulous doctors and transforms when under emotional stress. This was the first of three American-made werewolf films that came out in this decade.

Following up this science fiction creature feature was The Daughter of Dr Jekyll (1957), a black and white horror film thematically related to Stephenson’s novella, it made Dr Jekyll’s alter-ego a werewolf, and suggested that this was inheritable. While this is all pretty implausible, it does make this another film where the werewolf is both explicitly linked to the savage alter-ego of man, and is something that can be created through drugs and unscrupulous medical trials.

Vaccines were a growing concern for the American public, where the Cutter Incident in 1955 had undermined public faith in them to an extent. Cutter Laboratories had accidentally produced polio vaccines containing the live polio virus, leaving some people paralysed. The incident led to the creation of a better regulatory system and government oversight of vaccines. It is not surprising that medical horror involving vaccinations and drugs began to capture the attention of the public in this way.

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The cult film, I Was A Teenage Werewolf (1957), was also a type of medical horror, but this time it’s the combination of an angry, volatile teenager and an unscrupulous doctor who practices hypnotherapy that creates the monster. As Tony Rivers (played by Michael Landon) has his sessions with the psychotherapist, he is experimented upon with a serum which helps people regress to their baser, most primitive instincts. The companion piece, Blood of Dracula (1957) also features a problem teenager (this time a teenage girl) and a mad scientist (the chemistry teacher), and also features hypnosis and the power of suggestion. In both cases, the teenagers are the victims of the adults, but they are already ‘outside’ the norms of society by their behaviour. Had they not acted out, neither would have been put in their respective situations, and in their transformations they both hurt and kill innocent people, leaving them with greater dilemmas about the nature of their (inherent?) monstrosity.

How To Make A Monster (1958) is not technically a werewolf film: it’s another psychological crime horror that gets a bit meta. In it, a make-up artist is fired and gets revenge by hypnotising the actors playing, respectively, a teenage werewolf and a teenage Frankenstein’s monster, who unwittingly become his pawns and kill the new managers under hypnotic suggestion.

There was also a Mexican horror film that came out in 1958, El castillo de los monstruos, where a couple are forced to stay in a creepy castle full of monsters, including a werewolf and a vampire.

NEXT TIME:

I was going to do a 1960s list in this post too, but there was an explosion of werewolf films in that decade, so I’ll save it for another post! Unsurprisingly, from this point, we get into the kind of werewolf films where everyone’s naked, so I’ll take one for the team and enjoy researching those for you. Sleep well.

Let's Talk About Wolves #4: Hopeless, Maine

[image error]Volume 1: THE GATHERING

In this next installment of talking about wolves, I got to chat with Tom and Nimue Brown, the co-creators of the Hopeless, Maine graphic novel series. Tom Brown is also the illustrator for The Crows, and there are three of Tom’s original illustrations in the eBook version and five in the paperback!

Hopeless is a mist-shrouded island off the coast of Maine, and a creepily gorgeous example of New England Gothic. Check out their website for a whimsical and deeply Weird introduction to this world, enjoy the art, and maybe row out to where you can load up with all the creative goodies. Just be careful: there’s a lot of things that can get you when you’re not watching.

Right! Let’s get to it. Here’s Nimue Brown on Werewolves in film and lit, and Hopeless!

Nimue & Tom Brown on Werewolves

Tom and Nimue Brown share a love of gothic decay, poetry, wild landscapes and strange creatures. They have been collaborating for years, brought together initially by a publishing house. In the summer of 2009 they launched The Hopeless Vendetta – a weekly newspaper charting life on the fictional island of Hopeless. Many new members of the Hopeless, Maine creative family have since joined them there. The Hopeless, Maine graphic novel series is now published by Sloth Comics. There are also illustrated novels, an RPG soon to be released, and a film project in the works. Their tentacles continue to spread…

The Browns are collectively influenced by Robert Holdstock, Lord Dunsany, the pre-Raphelites, folklore, the modern Druid tradition, Steampunk, Miyazaki and things gothic and gaslit. Both have worked separately in their respective fields. Tom has created covers for Professor Elemental and Steven Savile and art for games, as well as charming illustrations for C.M. Rosens. Nimue writes pagan nonfiction, poetry, songs and fantasy novels.

Nimue: Tom admits that werewolves have always been his least favourite monster, they never caught his imagination. I think this is because he didn’t do enough hair sprouting rage in his teens. Dog Soldiers (2002) has to be my favourite werewolf film, it genuinely spooked me and for some time afterwards, I could only walk in the woods at night while singing, which is wholly irrational in so many ways. I enjoy monsters that are too powerful for humans to overcome, I think we need that. I also have a trashy love affair with really bad special effects, I take great joy in terrible transformation sequences.

Tom: When I was growing up, werewolf special effects in movies were shit, and that didn’t do it for me.

Nimue: For me, the werewolf is all about the monster on the inside getting visible on the outside. Whether that explores the horror of our own monstrosity, or the wonder that is someone accepting the unacceptable self… there are lots of good places to go with this.

I’m uneasy about the monster as romantic hero stuff we keep seeing more of. It feels too often like a loss of claws, a taming of what should be wild. All those paranormal romances with the bite removed from the monsters, bothers me. We need our monsters to be properly monstrous, even (or perhaps especially) if we want to have sex with them.

We do have some werewolves on Hopeless, Maine. This is in part because we have a situation in which things folkloric tend to show up as real.

Tom: I only started enjoying drawing the werewolves when I realised that I could make them look tragic and starved and then they became frightening to me when I could draw them as half-starved things with a lot of their skeleton showing.

Nimue: There’s the horror of something suffering and not in a good shape that calls on a person to end its suffering – that kind of horror is in the mix with our werewolves. They aren’t thriving. They are pitiable, the intrinsic demand there is horrific. Also, it allowed me to do a gag about reoccurring lunar hirsute disorder.

In many ways, the werewolf’s curse has always partially been about tragedy and pathos. What do you think about turning the werewolf into a figure of horror in this way? Feel free to comment or join the discussion on Twitter #WerewolfTalk!

While you’re here: you might want to check out the Kickstarter project, and Nimue has a Patreon page where you can be anything from a small thing in a bottle to a glass heron. All levels are worth it.

Werewolf Films: 1910-1949

Like the vampire scare of the early 1700s, eighteenth century Europe and Russia also saw genuine panic about marauding beasts. The most famous case was the Beast of Gevaudan, a case that could have inspired Conan Doyle’s famous story, The Hound of the Baskervilles. Since the werewolf was a staple of European folklore, it is unsurprising that it also travelled to the New World, represented in novels, short stories and plays, and eventually found itself part of the growing moving pictures industry. Here’s a look at the werewolf films made between 1910-1950! More decades to follow in future posts.

CW// whitewashing, dated/racist/offensive language and attitudes, one reference to sexual assault

1910s

In 1913, the first werewolf film, The Werewolf, was released, directed by innovative Canadian silent cinema pioneer, Henry MacRae. It was scripted by Ruth Ann Baldwin, another pioneering screenwriter and director of the 1910s, and based on the short story The Werewolves (1898) by Henry Beaugrand. It is now a ‘lost’ film, thought to have been destroyed in a fire at Universal Studios in 1924.

[image error]Some stills of this two-reel film still exist but the film itself was lost in a fire in 1924.

The plot positions Native Americans as werewolves, something picked up in modern American werewolf fiction too, where blood quantum laws echo fictional preoccupations with purity of werewolf heritage. This is something addressed in one of the essays in Wolves, Werewolves and the Gothic (open access reviews here, here and here).

In this case, the plot relies on the Othering of the Native American characters and positioning them as adversaries of the White settlers driven by vengeance and dark magic.

The official synopsis of the film (which had a running time of 18 minutes) is as follows [expect dated/offensive language and phrasing]:

The play opens in pioneer days. Kee-On-Ee, an Indian maiden is married to Ezra Vance, a trail blazer. When her child is five years old, Kee-On-Ee is driven back to her tribe by Ezra’s brother, who scorns all squaws. Ezra is killed by an old enemy and Kee-On-Ee, thinking his failure to return to her to be indifference, brings up her child, Watuma, to hate all white men. When the child is grown, Clifford and a party of prospectors appear. Kee-On-Ee, now a hag, sees her way to be revenged. She sends her daughter to Clifford’s camp and he is driven nigh mad by her beauty. Clifford finds her in the arms of a young Indian. She taunts him. Enraged beyond control, Clifford shoots the buck. He flees to the mission. Watuma leads the enraged Indians against the Friars. When one of them raises a cross, Watuma slowly dissolves into a slinking wolf. A hundred years later, Clifford, now reincarnated in the form of Jack Ford, a miner, receives a visit from his sweetheart, Margaret. Hunting with her he comes upon a wolf which he is unable to shoot. The wolf dissolves into the woman of old, and there appears before his puzzled eyes the scene where he slew the Brave. The “Wolf-woman” would caress him, but he throws her off. She returns again as the wolf and kills his sweetheart. Clifford’s punishment for the deed of past life is made complete at the death of the one he loved.

Official synopsis of The Werewolf (1913)

Kee-On-Ee and her daughter Watuma were both played by White actresses: Marie Walcamp (younger Kee-On-Ee) and Lule Warrington (older Kee-On-Ee) and Phyllis Gordon (Watuma). Ezra Vance was played by Clarence Burton.

1920s

Wolf Blood was released in 1925, also known as Wolf Blood: A Tale of the Forest. It has a running time of 68 mins and is available to view via the linked title on YouTube (at the time of posting) on ClassicMoviesHQ‘s channel. It was written by Dr C. A. Hill, and edited by Bennett Cohen, and directed by Bruce Mitchell and George Chesebro (who also played the lead).

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This film plays upon anxieties around surgical and body horror, following the school of thought that criminality (particularly violent crime) was inherent and hereditary or somehow physically transmittable, like disease. This played into racial stereotypes and anxieties around human evolution, and was evoked in other horror films well into the mid-twentieth century, like Hands of a Stranger (1962).

In Wolf Blood, this time it’s a White Canadian man who becomes the werewolf after an accident leaves him in desperate need of a blood transfusion. The doctor has no donors, so uses a wolf. While nothing has probably happened to him, rumours fly post-transfusion and our hero goes mad, isolated and ostracised, and comes to believe he really is a monster. It doesn’t matter whether he or the wolves are responsible for the mauling of another character after this point: if everyone around you has decided you’re a monster, who’s to say you aren’t one? Film Dirt Blog has a more detailed review of it here.

1930s

In 1933, Guy Endore’s novel The Werewolf of Paris was published. This novel was arguably as influential for werewolves as Bram Stoker’s Dracula was for vampires, but is far less widely known. Typical of Gothic Horror novels, it uses a framing device before getting into the historical fiction narrative. The origin story for Bertrand Caillet’s lycanthropic condition is once more hereditary but also superstitious, the conjunction of his conception (the result of rape by a priest descended from a notoriously brutal, violent family) and his birth, on Christmas Eve. Consequently, Caillet is born with both a human and a beastly nature, and transforms into a wolf. The novel follows his travels around nineteenth-century France at a socio-politically turbulent time, and uses lycanthropy as a metaphor for human aggression and ‘man’s inhumanity to man‘.

[image error]Makeup artist Jack Pierce perfected his lycanthropic craft in WEREWOLF OF LONDON (1935) before working on THE WOLF MAN (1941)

In 1935, Werewolf of London was released by Universal Pictures, which established the common origin story of werewolves being bitten by pre-existing werewolves, and often in foreign locations (similar to infection by vampire bites). In this case, the antagonist is Dr Yogami, who meets the lead character, botanist Wilfred Glendon, in Tibet. The choice to make the antagonist Asian rather than European is perhaps indicative of U.S. relations and attitudes towards China, Tibet and other Asian countries at the time (not to mention contemporary attitudes towards Asian-Americans).

Despite the popularity of Endore’s novel and the similarity of the title, Universal went with an original script but made the lead an antihero, ‘brutish and inattentive to his wife’ even before his transformation, according to Nige Burton, and was criticised for being too similar to the transformation pattern in Paramount’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1932).

[image error]FACE AT THE WINDOW, Tod Slaughter, 1939

In 1939, British horror film The Face at the Window was released. This is a crime horror which doesn’t feature a real werewolf, but can be included here because of the way the wolf is used to represent sinister elements of society, and the savagery of a killer. This was the second adaptation of the stage play of the same name, penned by F. Brook Warren and first performed in 1897. The setting is 1880s Paris, so the usual distancing is employed as per British Gothic traditions of Othering Europeans and making the setting more ‘exotic’ or ‘foreign’ and therefore more interesting for audiences.

The first adaptation (1932) had the criminal ‘Le Loup’, ‘The Wolf’, as a masked killer peering through windows, but in this adaptation the ‘Wolf Man’ aspect was played up a little more. Donato Totaro’s audio-visual essay on the 1932/39 version is available from this link, asking why the image of a face at the window has been so prevalent in horror. The full 1939 film is available to view on Dailymotion.

1940s

During and after the Second World War, the werewolf film really took off and captured the public imagination. There are probably many reasons for this, but the impact of war and the realisation that people have base survival instincts, even if they did not themselves engage in combat, must have had at least something to do with it. Even on the Home Front people preyed on one another, looting was common during the Blitz, and people did what they could to get by in times of rationing. It is no wonder that of all the cinematic monsters, the wolf – or rather, the fear of becoming the wolf – really took off.

The makeup used for Werewolf of London was reprised for Universal’s 1941 release, The Wolf Man, starring Lon Chaney Jr, and developed further into the now-iconic image. The setting for this classic is Wales, a wild and savage place for many American visitors in Gothic fiction (and for many English visitors, too). Lawrence Talbot returns to his family home (a place of stifling values, superstition, and sinister rural pursuits) from America (his chosen ‘new life’ of freedom, sophistication and modernity).

[image error]Lon Chaney Jr, make-up and design by Jack Pierce

The classic film had a number of sequels, and was also responsible for a lot of lycanthropic lore, and the sequels had Talbot rise from the dead during a full moon, retrospectively changing the villagers’ rhyme from ‘autumn moon’ to ‘full moon’ so that this resurrection twist made sense. The first of these sequels was Frankenstein Meets The Wolf Man (1943), but you have to wait until the second half of the film for the monster to actually show up. The first half is concerned with Talbot’s resurrection and continued transformations, his killing spree in Cardiff (which I nod to in Real Meat for those who might get the reference), and escape across Europe. The big showdown comes at the end, so it’s something you either have to fast-forward to get to or hang on in there to see.

The other mashup monster sequels featuring Lon Chaney Jr’s Wolf Man were The House of Frankenstein (1944), House of Dracula (1945), and the horror comedy Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948).

[image error]THE MAD MONSTER, Johnny Downs, Glenn Strange, Anne Nagel, George Zucco, 1942

Between The Wolf Man and Frankenstein Meets The Wolf Man, there was The Mad Monster (1942), which picked up on the themes of Wolf Blood and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. In this one, a mad scientist takes revenge on his peers by creating a formula that transforms – wait for it – his ‘simpleminded’ gardener into a werewolf. It picks up on the idea that wolf blood transfusions can give people wolf-like traits, but here we see it actually working with Cameron the scientist as the puppet-master and Petro the gardener as his unwitting weapon.

That same year, The Undying Monster (1942) came out, this time a 20th Century Fox production. This film features a doomed upper class English family and their dark, creepy manor. Also known as The Hammond Mystery, it was adapted from the novel by Irish novelist Jessie Douglas Kerruish by and (as Michel Jacoby). Werewolves and their associated curses are equal opportunities monsters, and the English upper classes (gentry to aristocracy) seem to be particularly prone to this condition.

French cinema was not to be outdone, and the werewolf was proving to be a perfect conduit for anxieties around human savagery throughout World War II. Guillaume Radot’s Le Loup des Malveneur (The Wolf of the Malveneurs, 1942/3) featured a governess investigating mysterious disappearances at a castle, but borrowed elements of Universal Pictures’ 1930s monsters franchise and Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles. It plays with the mystery elements most, adds in the family legend that one of the family sold his soul to the Devil (this trope appears in The Undying Monster too), and leaves the question as to whether there was a werewolf or not as an open one.

A werewolf appears in The Return of the Vampire (1943/4), set during the First World War. This is the first time a werewolf assists a vampire on-screen, and is cured of his curse when the vampire is staked.

Even the three stooges got a werewolf encounter in Idle Roomers (1944)!

[image error]

The Cry of the Werewolf (1944) echoes The Werewolf (1913), but in this case the at-will transformation is enacted by a Romani princess who kills to protect the secret location of her ancestress’s tomb. Here, Native American ‘magic’ is swapped for Romani magic, as in The Wolf Man where Lawrence Talbot contracts lycanthropy from Bela, played by Bela Lugosi.

[image error]

1946 saw the noir crime horror, She-Wolf of London, hit the screens, another offering from Universal Studios. Its UK title was the more Gothic and less sensational The Curse of the Allenbys. This is the first female werewolf since 1913, but has more in common with Wolf Blood in terms of themes. In this case, Phyllis Allenby believes she is a werewolf and has succumbed to ‘the curse of the Allenbys’, and is responsible for a series of frenzied attacks. However, picking up on the ambiguity of Wolf Blood and the fact that this is supremely unlikely, it turns out that she is being manipulated into insanity by her conniving Aunt Martha for her own ends.

This film capitalises on the werewolf’s savagery – all victims of the ‘Wolf-Woman’ are found with their throats torn out – and positions the feminine as monstrous. In the same way that Dracula’s infection inverts and undermines Victorian ideas of motherhood and domestic stability by creating baby-eating, overtly (and therefore indecently) sexual Brides, this might be seen to do the same thing with hereditary lycanthropy (also an allegory for inherited mental illness).

However, it could also be interpreted as a cynical or realistic post-War recognition that women, as well as men, are capable of viciousness and animalistic savagery. It’s worth noting that if this is the case then it’s British women who are capable of this, not American women. Moreover, once again it’s upper class British women – stereotypically, the keystones and gatekeepers of an out-dated class system with hereditary problems caused by in-breeding – reinforcing American views of Britishness as Other.

How these themes developed and were represented in the following decades will be considered next time! And after that… we have vampires to look forward to! (My favourite!)

NEXT TIME:

Werewolf films of the 1950s and 1960s, posted on Thursday!

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