The Ultimate Werewolf (39 page)

A SELECTED FILMOGRAPHY

First, a note and then a disclaimer.

The filmography that follows does not pretend to be complete. Rather, it is a representative list of those films which,
taken together, display the range of treatments the movies
have given to the theme of the werewolf.

Now, the disclaimer. "Lycanthropy in the Movies" or "The
Werewolf Cinema" ought properly to be the title of this
filmography but, since this volume celebrates the fiftieth anniversary of the appearance of " The Wolf Man," I have decided
to let the title stand as it appears above.

It is clear, even from the most cursory look at the horror
cinema, that, of the three great American film monsters in the
pantheon of horror, the wolf man occupies the least glorious
pedestal. There are hundreds of films dealing either with
Dracula or vampirism; scores that retell the Frankenstein
story, but not more than a couple of dozen films with a werewolf theme. The reason is fairly obvious. Dracula, Frankenstein, and his creature have specific identities. Filmgoers who
come to see a Dracula or Frankenstein movie expect to become reacquainted with monsters they know. The "Wolf
Man" film treated its protagonist, Larry Talbot—not the first
werewolf to appear in the movies—as an instance of a man
suffering from the disease of lycanthropy; and it is the disease
as it afflicts each new hero around which subsequent werewolf
films have revolved. The result is that the force of the werewolf imagery, unattached to a person with a name, has been
dissipated; and werewolf films, with a couple of weak exceptions, have, more or less, to establish themselves each time on
their own instead of building on the film lore that previous
films have created.

WOLFMAN FILMOGRAPHY

The Werewolf of London

1935 (B & W) U.S.A. 75 minutes Universal Pictures Director: Stuart Walker Producer: Stanley Bergerman Screenplay: Robert Harris Photography: Charles Stumar

An eighteen-minute "Werewolf" silent film made in 1913 in which a Navajo witch-woman, wanting to avenge herself against men, raises her daughter to be a werewolf was actually the "first" film with a werewolf theme. "The Werewolf of London" is the first full-length treatment of the myth.

The film tells the story of the botanist Henry Hull who, searching a rare plant, the
marifasa lupina
in Tibet, is bitten by a werewolf and so turned into a werewolf. We learn that the werewolf that infected him is also the Japanese Dr. Yogami, played superbly by Warner Oland (of Charlie Chan fame).

Yogami follows Hull to London determined to get the flower, which is the only known remedy for lycanthropy, from him. Dr. Yogami is killed in the ensuing struggle. The botanist in his guise as a wolf is killed by policemen.

Warner Oland is smooth and oily and properly evil-looking, but almost everything else about this film is hesitant and unconvincing. A couple of its elements, however, have become part of the stock formula of every subsequent werewolf film: the reluctance of the human to become the werewolf, and his remorse when he discovers that he has shed blood. It is a formula that, by defining the monster as victim, leaches moral authority from werewolf films. An innocent monster is essentially a contradiction in terms.

The Wolf Man

1941 (B & W) U.S.A. 71 minutes Universal Pictures Director: George Waggner Producer: George Waggner Screenplay: Curt Siodmak Photography: Joe Valentine

Cast:
Lon Chaney Jr., Claude Rains, Evelyn Ankers, Warren William,
Ralph Bellamy, Bela Lugosi, Maria Ouspenskaya

Lon Chaney Senior was known as "the man of a thousand faces"; Lon Chaney Jr. evidently inherited only one. That one has immobile, lugubrious features on which is stamped a look of hangdog bewildered sorrow for which nothing in any of the films in which he has appeared can account.

And yet that slightly pudgy woodenness serves Chaney well in this classic film. He is the truly woebegone werewolf with the look of a man who does not deserve the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune that have been discharged against him and who is unequipped to take arms against them.

The story of the film must by now be known to almost everyone who goes to the movies or who owns a TV set: Larry Talbot, a Welshman who has lived in America, returns to his family home in Wales where, one full moon night, as he is struggling to save his fiancee Gwen's friend, Jenny, from the attack of a werewolf, he is himself bitten. The bite turns him into a werewolf.

Knowing that the only metal that can kill a werewolf is silver, and fearful that he, Larry, may attack Gwen, Larry gives his father his silver-headed walking stick. When he does attack Gwen, Larry's father, wielding the stick, beats the werewolf to death and Larry, now an innocent corpse, can be buried with honor.

Rarely in horror film history has a simple-minded story been so buoyed up by a director's lyric treatment of it. The film, in George Waggner's hands, becomes profoundly atmospheric and is made to seem like a dreamlike fairy tale with its roots in distant primordial times. Even the fake poetry that Maleva, the Gypsy fortune teller, declaims as she warns Talbot of his future, has the wonderful ring of fake truth ringing down the ages:

Even the man who is pure at heart And who says his prayers at night

May become a wolf when the wolfsbane blooms And the autumn moon is bright.

No doubt.

And of course.

The Undying Monster

1942 (B & W) U.S.A. 63 minutes

20th Century Fox

Director: John Brahm

Producer: Bryan Foy

Screenplay: Lillie Hayward, Michel Jacoby

Photography: Lucien Ballard

Cast:
James Ellison, John Howard, Heather Angel, Heather Thatcher

Instead of starting with a dark and stormy night the way a proper "old dark house" film should, this one begins on a clear night on the coast of Cornwall as we hear a family retainer, Walter, worrying: "I only hope Mr. Oliver doesn't come through the lane tonight." The reason for his anxiety is that for several generations members of the Hammond family have been involved with mysterious deaths. The family curse goes:

When stars are bright

On a frosty night

Beware thy bane

On a rocky lane.

And indeed, once again, there has been violence. A young woman, Kate O'Malley, has been ferociously attacked. A couple of Scotland Yard detectives show up, and the rest of the film plays off their scientific investigation against the possibility that there is a dark, occult explanation for the family violence. As the film ends, the solution turns out to be a hereditary disease that turns the afflicted person into a werewolf on clear, frosty nights.

Static and cold, this is not by any means a great film. What it does have are a couple of great sets and direction so shrewd that it transcends the mediocrity and the scientific banality of its script. Brahm has his camera in constant nervous motion, implying, by glimpses of sky and cloud, sea and cliff's edge, that whatever the clever folk from Scotland Yard discover, ominous ancient presences are ineradicably part of the real world.

Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man
[1]

1943 (B & W) U.S.A. 74 minutes Universal Pictures Director: Roy William Neil! Producer: George Waggner Screenplay: Curt Siodmak Photography: George Robinson

Cast:
Lon Chaney Jr., Bela Lugosi, Lionel Atwill, Ilona Massey, Maria Ouspenskaya

Here is a film that is important only because it marks the signal decline in film of the compelling "Frankenstein" idea. The wolf man theme does not fare much better. If the film proves anything it is that one can not make a fine horror movie by simply throwing great old horror regulars together. Lugosi as the monster, elicits pity, but only because his performance is so shabby. Nobody cares that Lon Chaney Jr. (as Laurence Talbot) wants medical help to escape the curse of werewolfism. Everybody is grateful when both monsters (so far as the law of sequels will permit) are destroyed at the end of the film. That end comes none too soon.

IWas a Teenage Werewolf

1957 (B & W) U.S.A. 76 minutes Sunset Production Director: Gene Fowler, Jr. Producer: Herman Cohen Screenplay: Ralph Thornton Photography: Joseph La Shelle

Cast:
Michael Landon, Yvonne Lime, Whit Bissell, Tony Marshall
Dawn Richard

This is the superior twin production meant to exploit Hollywood's discovery in the fifties that there was a market for movies about teenagers.

There are a couple of things to be said in the film's favor. One of them is that it has one truly memorable scene set in a school gymnasium in which we see Tony, the highschooler who is afflicted with the werewolf disease, provoked into turning into a beast by the sight of the tights-clad and lissome Theresa doing stunts on the parallel bars. The other, related to this scene, is that, unlike
I Was a Teenage Frankenstein,
I Was a Teenage Werewolf,
has some psychological validity in its favor.

The unwelcome transformation of human into wolf that is embodied in the image of the werewolf is well understood by the developing adolescent whose own body is going through surprising new changes which, often enough, can feel monstrous.

In any case,
I Was a Teenage Werewolf,
with its vaguely antiscience theme, deserves an audience for two reasons. It is indispensable for students of film werewolf lore and it is something of a time capsule in which we can find persuasive glimpses of how young people experienced the vapid fifties.

Curse of the Werewolf

1960 (Color) Great Britain 91 minutes

Hammer Films

Director: Terence Fisher

Producer: Anthony Hinds

Screenplay: John Elder (Anthony Hinds)

Photography: Arthur Grant

Another of Hammer Films' colorful revitalizations of the horror images Universal Pictures introduced to the world in the thirties. This one, however, is not directly based on Universal's
The
Wolf Man.
Instead, its source is Guy Endore's novel
The Werewolf of Paris,
whose main theme is that no cruelty committed by a werewolf can match man's inhumanity to man.

The story, spanning generations, begins with an injustice committed by a Spanish marquis who imprisons a beggar and has him fed on raw meat which, presumably, brutalizes him. When, some years later, a servant girl who has spurned the marquis's advances is pushed into the beggar's cell, he rapes her. The child begotten by this rape is born on ! Christmas Eve—ironically the birth date of Christ and of werewolves— i and becomes the werewolf of the film's title. For a time, his werewolf instincts are kept under control by the care he receives from his adoptive parents, but a trip to a whore house unleashes his sexual and his werewolf instincts. Though the love of a good woman calms him for a while, the beast in him bursts out when his father forcibly keeps him from seeing her. Again, as in
The Wolf Man,
it is a father who kills a son afflicted with the werewolf curse. This time the weapon, instead of

being a silver-headed walking stick, is a gun that shoots a bullet made from a silver crucifix.

As with Hammer films generally, production values here are high. Oliver Reed in the title role manages, despite makeup that gives him a nearly cuddly look, to be both frightening and dignified. Fisher, as he has in his previous ventures, respects the folklore materials on which his film is based. The result is a first-rate, but by no means great film.

The Howling

1981 (Color) U.S.A. 91 minutes Avco Embassy Director: Joe Dante

Producers: Michael Finnell, Jack Conrad Screenplay: John Sayles, Terence H. Winkless Photography: John Hora Special Effects: Rob Bottin, Rick Baker

Cast:
Dee Wallace, Patrick Macnee, Dennis Dugan, Christopher
Stone, Belinda Balaski, Kevin McCarthy, John Carradine, Slim
Pickens, Elizabeth Brooks

1980 was a great year for special effects. It was then that David Cronenberg's
Scanners
stunned its audiences with scenes in which one could literally see someone's skin crawl (or at least bubble) and in which a man's head is seen to explode on camera. Like
Scanners, The
Howling's
first claim to our attention is its special effects.

This film version of Gary Brandner's pulp novel has a young woman TV reporter, Karen Beatty, walking the streets as a decoy, hoping to make news by attracting the attention of a sex maniac who has been terrorizing Los Angeles women. Her efforts are successful. The maniac attacks and she is raped. To recuperate from the ghastly experience she and her husband Roy, on the advice of a psychiatrist, join a psychotherapeutic colony somewhere in the northwest.

There, the second nightmare begins as we learn that the psychiatrist
and
the members of his colony are all werewolves. From here on the film becomes more and more graphic about the sex life of werewolves. We are treated to one scene in which Roy and Marcia, a nymphomani- cal member of the colony, begin their lovemaking as people but, as their passion moves toward orgasm, they turn into snarling, snapping werewolves.

A strange film, that on several occasions crosses the line that separates the erotic from the obscene. Much of the obscenity, strangely enough, derives from the special effects which, as they allow us to watch the transformation of human into beast, make both humans and beasts look like the kinds of caricatures adolescents encounter in pornographic booklets passed around in locker rooms and at slumber parties.

The film is graced by the presence of John Carradine howling a little bemusedly along with the other werewolves.

An American Werewolf in London

1981 (Color) Great Britain 97 minutes

Poly Gram Pictures-Lycanthropy Films/Universal

Director: John Landis

Producer: George Folsey

Screenplay: John Landis

Photography: Robert Paynter

Special Effects: Rick Baker

Cast:
David Naughton, Jenny Aguter, Griffin Dunne, Brian Glover
,
John Woodvine

Sometimes touching, sometimes terrifying, sometimes very funny,
An
American Werewolf in London
is a sophisticated film that stands head and shoulders above the werewolf films that preceded it.
The Wolf Man
might be an honorable exception to that generalization, though atmosphere, not psychological truth, is its strong point.

An American Werewolf in London
begins with a beautifully photographed scene in which we see a couple of young Americans making | their way across a countryside on a walking tour through England. When they encounter a werewolf, one of the youths, Jack Goodman, is killed. His companion, David Kessler, is bitten and is of course infected with the taint of the werewolf.