Film as dream, film as music. No art penetrates our conscience in the way film does, and goes directly to our feelings, deep down into the dark rooms of our souls.
~Ingmar Bergman
My daughter was terrified of werewolves. And of going mad. The former was a childhood reaction to scary monsters; the latter preyed on Jess until the day she died. These dual fears are similar in ways that may surprise us.
When writing The Wolf Man (1941), Curt Siodmak was only vaguely aware of themes that became clear years later. He had fled Germany in 1933, finally ending up in the United States in 1937. The moon, he writes, was the Nazi swastika. Concentration camps and an emboldened bureaucracy of hate were the horrors he put on the screen. “I am the Wolf Man,” he adds. “I was forced into a fate I didn’t want: to be a Jew in Germany. I would not have chosen that as my fate.”
Fighting against impossible odds, even fate itself, is an important part of many lycanthropy movies.
Siodmak believes that the film ran for decades not for the horror on the screen, but because its story of helplessness and inner demons speaks to audiences in a tale as modern as everyday life. Humanity has always identified with the strongest predators, he observes, such as bears, tigers, hawks, snakes, sharks, or whatever we see as particularly lethal in our own environments. In attempting to emulate them, we deny our humanity, and so unleash the forbidden and the reckless. This is why in the first draft of The Wolf Man, he didn’t want to show the creature’s face except when star Lon Chaney Jr. was looking in a mirror or a pool of water.
Siodmak admits that the cinematic change was for the best. In showing the animal, the film shows us ourselves. Humans are animals, yes, but we are also souls that are more than the sum of flesh and blood. “Life itself contains the curse of the Wolf Man,” Siodmak explains, “sufferings without having been guilty, being subjected to fates, which are decided by the pleasure of the gods.” This sense of fate and cruelty dominates the movie just as it dominated the screenwriter’s life. Yet it is precisely this ability to transcend the horrors of our worst natures that makes werewolf films resonate so deeply with us. Siodmak insists that the Wolf Man in his human form, Larry Talbot, knows he is powerless to fight fate, yet if the right circumstances arise, he might be able to change it: “It dawned on me that all of us are ‘Wolf Men,’ that fate rules our destiny.”
Fighting against impossible odds, even fate itself, is an important part of many lycanthropy movies.
This was certainly true for the most influential film werewolf of our time, Lon Chaney Jr., star of The Wolf Man (1941) and its many sequels. As a child, his father, Lon Sr., often sent Chaney to the woodshed to get a leather strap for no reason at all. He was beaten remorselessly for infractions real or imagined. When he related this to his close friend, Curt Siodmak, he confessed that it was a terrible ordeal from which he never recovered. “The energy and conviction with which Lon played the Monster’s part,” Siodmak says, “might have been seen in his own fate: a man driven, searching for a way out of his own despair, remnants of an unhappy childhood which had been deformed by his cruel father.”
Chaney had a knack for hiding his inner pain while simultaneously reaching out to those around him. He and co-star Evelyn Ankers didn’t really hit it off at first while filming The Wolf Man.. She had just come from the Abbott and Costello comedy Hold that Ghost (1941) and was fed up with the usual on-set high jinks. But Chaney understood, she says: “He was the sweetest.”
Elena Verdugo was eighteen when she co-starred as a gypsy girl with Chaney, again playing the werewolf, in House of Frankenstein (1944). While others ignored the rookie on the set, she says, Chaney went out of his way to break the ice and help her feel that she belonged. “He would have a beer and I would have a coke,” she laughs. “There he was in his makeup and I was in my outfit. He was a doll.” Universal producer Paul Malvern (House of Dracula, 1945) said of his lifelong friend Chaney: “There never was a nicer guy. He got along with everybody.”
It’s no surprise, then, that this empathetic man, a victim of domestic abuse, had strong views on his famous character: “I used to enjoy horror films when there was thought and sympathy involved.”
Facing the Beast
Werewolf tales are helpful precisely because they provide simple and often poetic descriptions of complex emotions, situations, and circumstances, suggests sociologist Roger Bartra. He notes that the werewolf is a myth of the wild man, unhindered by civilization and nearly savage in nature, with important differences. Werewolves are subject to metamorphosis; that is, they aren’t born that way. They are cursed, which is why for centuries lycanthropy was frequently associated with the devil in Christian lore. “The werewolf was often simultaneously a victim of evil and an evil beast,” Bartra says.
Hereditary ties are essential to these films: only the love of family can save the creature in the end.
Pop culture authority Brian Senn adds that this dichotomy often exists in werewolf films, creating conflicting emotions in the audience: sympathy and fear. He notes that viewers are confronted with a perfectly normal person—a friend, lover, father, son—but hiding beneath the skin (literally) is a savage beast that we don’t know exists until it is too late.
In 1941’s The Wolf Man, we are involved with hapless Larry Talbot (Chaney) as he desperately tries to protect an innocent. The first time he succeeds, but is bitten by a wolf and now shares the same curse. Most werewolf movies feature this kind of attack by an outside force that creates the affliction, says J. Robert Craig (Central Michigan University). However, the origin is not the point; rather, compelling lycanthropy pictures focus on how the main character deals with a new reality. This is why man vs. creature films like Dog Soldiers (2002) are thematically closer to Aliens (1986) than The Wolf Man..
Talbot later attempts to stop himself from harming an innocent. This time he nearly fails. “Our concern is as much for the werewolf as for its victims,” says sociologist Andrew Tudor with the University of York, causing us to root for both victim and victimizer, arousing “emotions in us that are hard to define,” according to horror novelist Anne Rice. Stacey Abbott (University of Roehampton) is impressed by the way Chaney’s portrayal of such a horrifically brutal monster evokes the greatest sympathy as an unwilling victim of his curse.
Our compassion is particularly poignant in light of what brings Talbot to Llanwelly. After eighteen years in America, he gets word that his older twin, John, was killed in a hunting accident. He rushes to the family estate in Wales. Standing before John’s portrait, Talbot and his father agree in their shared sorrow to overlook past family squabbles and begin anew. This undertone of grief saturates the rest of the film.
Ultimately Talbot’s father kills the werewolf to save an innocent, not realizing that he has taken the life of his second son. As Talbot changes back to human form, his father looks on in dawning horror as the old Romany woman Maleva offers a benediction over the body:
The way you walked was thorny, through no fault of your own. But as the rain enters the soil, the river enters the sea, so tears run to a predestined end. Your suffering is over. Now you will find peace for eternity.
Paternal themes have been around since the early days of lycanthropy movies. The beast “instinctively seeks to kill the thing it loves best,” we learn in Werewolf of London (1935). Hereditary ties are essential to these films: only the love of family can save the creature in the end.
The father/son sacrifice is overtly religious in Hammer’s The Curse of the Werewolf (1961). In that story, the love of a woman is not enough to cure the beast Leon. Ultimately he is confronted in a church tower by his stepfather, who kills him with a bullet forged from a silver crucifix. A father’s love frees his son from his curse, saving the innocents he would have slaughtered.
Complex tensions between fathers and their children dominate many werewolf pictures, according to Laura Hubner with the University of Winchester. The beast is an indeterminate creature, neither wholly human nor completely animal. “Werewolf fictions are a reminder of the wild we come from or that is within us,” Hubner says. As we side with the accursed, we wonder if societal repression itself may not deserve closer scrutiny.
This is an important theme in I Was a Teenage Werewolf (1957). A troubled teen played by Michael Landon turns to a father figure, a psychiatrist, for help with his unbridled aggression. Rather than offer counsel, the doctor injects him with an experimental serum to bring out his bestial instincts. This concoction and hypnosis turn the young man into a werewolf. He later kills his betrayer and is then slaughtered by the police who comment on the foolishness of playing God.
Landon’s performance as a repressed beast on a murderous rampage informed much of his later work, from the wound-too-tight, eager-to-please son in Bonanza (1959-1973) to a dominant patriarch in Little House on the Prairie (1974-1983). This comes full circle with his occasionally conflicted angel in Highway to Heaven (1984-1989), when Landon plays a sadistic Halloween prank on his loyal human friend by terrifying him as . . . a middle-aged werewolf.
Film before Folklore
Werewolf movies focus on a divided subjectivity that alternates between a ravenous monster and a despairing, conscience-stricken human.
Our modern conception of lycanthropy is built on various aspects of ancient lore that are now combined in film, observes historical anthropologist Willem de Blécourt. He lists the Harry Potter and Twilight series, as well as television programs like Being Human and True Blood, as contributing to a uniquely cinematic history of werewolves. Building on this thought, Michael Dylan Foster (University of California) and Jeffrey Tolbert (Penn State) note that where many horror pictures are influenced by folklore, werewolf movies do the opposite: they have created their own faux legends that then influence viewer perceptions of lycanthropes. “The werewolf’s cinematic pedigree,” they write, “therefore illustrates some of the key methods by which the folkloresque operates on audience understandings of traditional or vernacular culture.”
Werewolf movies focus on a divided subjectivity that alternates between a ravenous monster and a despairing, conscience-stricken human, says researcher Carys Crossen. This juxtaposition is evident in the popular television series Angel (1999-2004). When a character realizes that she is a werewolf, she is horrified to consider her culpability. “It wasn’t you,” Angel assures her. “It was that thing inside.”
Yet the difference is not so easy to spot. Oz, a werewolf in Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997-2003), has heightened senses that are distinctly lupine, and very cool, in his human form. This aspect was also a part of Professor Lupin’s character in the Harry Potter series, and most notably in The Wolfman (2010). “The werewolf is not purely human,” Crossen concludes, “even when they are free of the influence of the moon.” We are none of us one thing or another.
This is the paradox of the werewolf: the animal bursts forth, seeming to obliterate any sense of harmony within. In lycanthropy films, observes author Brian Frost, the dark realms of our inner selves are revealed for the horrors they may inspire.
Here we must acknowledge those pedestrian and frequently trite sexual themes that seem to inevitably make their way into lesser werewolf pictures. Yes, yes, puberty certainly carries its own shocks and horrors. Stephen King made much of the advent of an unexplained and unexpected menstruation in Carrie. Ginger Snaps (2000) also draws a thin line between the onset of puberty and lycanthropy. In these films, the throes of desire may be liberating while the accompanying loss of self-control can at first appear frightening. Both versions of Cat People (1942 and 1982) took this to an extreme in presenting women who turned into predators when sexually aroused. Modern paranormal romances, in book and film, don’t seem complete without a hot-blooded, hot-tempered werewolf, passionate, uncontrollable, and more often than not, childish.
Now I like an erotically-charged werewolf movie as much as the next person, but at this point such themes have been done to death, more parody than mature discussion. They offer few revelations about human behavior. I’ve often thought that the best response to this heavy-handed subtext is in Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948), when Costello confronts our whining werewolf with a reality check:
TALBOT
I know you’ll think I’m crazy, but in a half an hour the moon will rise and I’ll turn into a wolf.WILBUR
You and twenty million other guys.
Better werewolf films seem to take the metaphor of an internal beast far more seriously. Tom Hutchinson, film critic with the London Times, relates that 1941’s The Wolf Man terrified him with its depiction of lycanthropy that looked to his young eyes like Hansen’s disease. As an adult, he sees through the blizzard of fur to something deeper: “They touch a nerve of myth in all of us, the fear we have of what may happen if we tamper with life.”
John Landis, director of An American Werewolf in London (1981), admits that this is why he adores lycanthropy movies: “Monsters are the physical embodiment of our fears.” Sam George and Bill Hughes with the University of Hertfordshire suggest that the eerie is a response to cultural crises. They note that horror film production saw a spike after 9/11. “When people feel threatened, they either go to pure entertainment,” says George Romero (Night of the Living Dead, 1968), “or to something that might strike a chord with the fears they have in real life.”
Were They Real?
Werewolves were a very real fear to early Christians. People believed they witnessed others turning into wolves. The sightings were so prevalent, the possibility so plausible, that leading thinkers gave lycanthropy serious theological reflection. Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, and William of Auvergne all dismissed supposed transformations from human into wolf as demonic illusion. The scriptural reference to Benjamin as a ravenous wolf was mere allegory, they insisted. It was impossible for a being created in the image of God to become something else.
Werewolves may not be real, but they speak to fears that help us understand our natures.
David Shyovitz, an expert in early Jewish and Christian beliefs (Northwestern University), notes in his fascinating study of twelfth-century werewolf beliefs that Augustine and others were wrestling with the practical, flesh-and-blood mechanics of the Incarnation and the Eucharist. How can one thing simultaneously be another? The questions spurred Christians and Jews to explore the physical world for spiritual truths “and encouraged them to confer meaning upon relevant, ostensibly ‘folkloric’ beliefs, and to incorporate them into their own sophisticated theological systems.”
Early Christian writers have a point in the case of non-existent transformations from one mammal to another. Most of us would agree. Werewolves may not be real, but they speak to fears that help us understand our natures. Karen Armstrong notes that this type of fiction “teaches us to see the world differently; it shows us how to look into our hearts and see our world from a perspective that goes beyond our own self-interest.” Myth and film, she adds, may present timeless truths without being an accurate representation of events.
To clarify the difference between fact and truth we need look no further than the Bible. The parable of the Good Samaritan is recognized the world over as a story of meaningful truth. However, it does not represent facts. There was no specific Samaritan nor can we identify an inn on the road from Jerusalem to Jericho that provides documentary evidence of events that Jesus clearly intended as illustrative fiction. What is true need not be factual.
Or perhaps it’s both.
German theoretical physicist Werner Heisenberg, a pioneer in quantum mechanics, thinks truth and beauty are inextricably linked to fact. He sees beauty as the proper alignment of disparate parts with one another and the whole. Heisenberg cites the philosophical view of Plotinus, who described the One or Ground of Being as ineffable but absolute. “Without any reference to parts,” Heisenberg suggests, “beauty is the eternal splendor of the ‘One’ that shines through tangible exteriors.” The same concept had a powerful impact on young Augustine after his conversion to Christianity.
This blend of philosophy and religion is not as idiosyncratic as it seems. “Why should not we keep truth, and keep it whole?” asks esteemed Catholic philosopher Étienne Gilson. “It can be done. But only those can do it who realize that He Who is the God of philosophers is HE WHO IS, the God of Abraham, of Isaac, and of Jacob.” Gilson then explains that awareness and knowledge are separate considerations in our search for truth.
For example, a 5’4” person may say, “I am six feet tall.” This quote might then be repeated over and over in print and online, but it is still false. Awareness of the statement does not make it accurate. It fails as true knowledge. Commenting on this, Biblical scholar Jeff Gates (Cedarville University) notes our popular assumption that knowledge is by its nature accurate carries with it a responsibility of discernment.
And this leads to truth.
The meaning we seek to discern is reflected through truth while simultaneously being part of truth, says Lutheran Protestant theologian Paul Tillich, who was also influenced by Plotinus’s view of the One. Each (awareness, knowledge, truth) is dependent on the other, drawing us to our ultimate, unconditional concern with God. “Religion,” Tillich concludes, “is the state of being grasped by the power of Being itself.”
Protagonists in werewolf movies help us make sense of our lives by combining these seemingly dissimilar ideas. Perceptions of an intrinsic connection between the intangible and the tangible—between truth and fact—are not really at odds. “We need not choose between legend and fact,” says respected historian Vergil Noble, “but should embrace the complementary qualities of both.”
Such thoughts may seem out of place when viewing a lycanthrope lope across the screen. I believe the opposite is true. For example, realistic films focusing on the facts of domestic abuse may be too much for those who live with them. Horror movies provide a safe space for us to explore disturbing truths about our natures that might otherwise be unbearable to watch.
Lifting the Curse
“Sometimes when you’re a daddy, you’re so afraid of your kids getting scars,” explains the father in Wolf Man (2025), “that you become the thing that scars them.” Now we’re onto something. I know the fear of causing unintentional harm to my daughter.
The Beast Within (2024) demonstrates this theme from the eyes of a child. We witness with her the transformation of her father into a werewolf, which leads to revelations about a family curse, trauma, and violence. The girl and her mother try to break the cycle. But the film’s final moments reveal that the monster was far from supernatural in origin: her father’s curse was the generational malignance of all-too-real domestic abuse.
We cannot change the past. Those moments when we succumbed to our lesser selves are part of us now. That fate is immutable. But a thousand, thousand futures lie before us.
Hannah Priest (Manchester Metropolitan University) notes that paternal relationships have undergone a significant change in twenty-first-century werewolf films. The Wolf Man and The Curse of the Werewolf featured fathers who made the ultimate sacrifice in killing their sons. But modern werewolves are “the victims of helpless, impotent or malevolent fathers,” most notably in the 2010 remake, The Wolfman. In that movie, we are shocked to learn that Talbot’s father was the werewolf who bit and infected his own son with the curse of lycanthropy.
Compare this to older pictures in which the female leads offer redemptive love that fails to reform the beast. In 1941’s The Wolf Man, Talbot’s romantic interest Gwen realizes only after his death that he is the creature. Alex Price in An American Werewolf in London knows the lycanthrope’s human identity but can only tell the monster, “I love you,” shortly before he is killed. But 2010’s The Wolfman sees Talbot slay his sire when they are both in wolf form. It is Gwen who later kills Talbot, freeing him from his father’s curse.
I too was saved by love.
My internal werewolf was not domestic abuse or a monster with fangs and extra hair. I was on the grift, presenting myself as something I was not for personal gain. Jess was in her teens when I was arrested. Her heartbreak, hurt, and sense of betrayal were excruciating. “I’m so mad at you!” she screamed more than once. Years later, after I had confessed my crime, served my time, and paid what was owed, my little girl assured me: “I forgive you, Dad.”
Jess’s adult terror of werewolves was not based on a family curse, but a darker reality of what might lie within her. She feared that if Dad could present a convincing false persona, then her own grasp on reality might be difficult to maintain. This perilous line between the imaginary and the factual haunted her. “I know I’ll go crazy,” she told me often enough.
She did not. Mental illness was not her werewolf. Addiction was.
Jess died in 2015 of a fentanyl-laced heroin overdose. Today I clutch her forgiveness to my heart as I do her love and the memories of our time on this earth, the good and the bad. “Divinity alone could part us,” sighs German poet Friedrich Rückert when his daughter dies. “Ah, alpine death pierces my soul, drains the blood from my heart.” This passage resonates with me. If inner werewolves make our blood rise, then surely grief drains us dry.
Loss is an intensely vulnerable experience. What we imagined to be inviolate has been violated. The tearing claws of a werewolf are an apt metaphor. In the aftermath of death, even simple routines seem fraught with the possibility of catastrophe. Bereaved parents speak of losing their illusions of safety. They describe the severity of what has happened with comparisons like a global shift, the rug was pulled out from under me, or my whole world collapsed. Our expectations of security and a bright future have been destroyed. We are beset with fear, anxiety, and a concern that in our acute grief we may be “going crazy,” explains Therese Rando, Clinical Director of The Institute for the Study and Treatment of Loss. We have no control.
Paul Rosenblatt (University of Minnesota) found that 86% of bereaved parents become more protective of their surviving children after a death. This can display itself in positive ways. Practical awareness of vulnerability may lead to greater vigilance and more rapid responses to signs of trouble. Healthy families also establish reasonable boundaries, allowing themselves time to grieve privately, according to psychiatrists David Kissane (Monash University) and Sidney Bloch (University of Melbourne). However, these same tendencies can also lead to damaging overprotectiveness.
Parents may conceal their grief in a misguided effort to safeguard their children from raw emotions, which in turn cheats the family of shared memory and healthy mourning. They may subordinate personal needs for the children’s perceived benefit—more than usual, that is. This can also lead to marital strain, blaming, competitiveness for attention, and social isolation.
This is part of what the father in Wolf Man (2025) is getting at. Overprotectiveness leads to parental rigidity and an inability to support and emotionally care for our children. Out of fear, our desire to nurture and shield may have the opposite effect, causing our loved ones to live in that same fear, becoming “the thing that scars them.”
Which returns me to werewolf movies. The Wolf Man is set in a 1941 Wales that knows no geographic or chronological boundaries. Its timeless allegory still speaks to us today. Larry Talbot is cursed at his lowest moment, while mourning his twin brother. He is at once doomed, tragic, and a victim of fate. His literal metamorphosis explodes on the screen in raw and savage emotion.
We too may unleash the worst within us; we too may think we are invulnerable. But only after we have suffered terrible loss do we understand that control is an illusion. Our most crippling fears, those we harbor and dare not release, are mere chimeras. Nothing in our minds compares to what life has in store for us.
I often think of what I would do differently with my daughter were I able to go back in time. This is harmful and worse than fruitless, though quite common among the bereaved. Still, one memory returns to prevent this slavering werewolf from dragging me into its abyss of regret.
“If I could change one thing, I’d have found a way to work at home when you were little,” I told Jess as an adult. “I wouldn’t put you in daycare. I’d’ve held you close and never let you go.” She was stunned, speechless for a moment. The look in her eyes of surprise and love remains with me as I write for you now. She died a few years later. I thank God, on my knees I thank him, that I told her while we still had time.
We cannot change the past. Those moments when we succumbed to our lesser selves are part of us now. That fate is immutable. But a thousand, thousand futures lie before us. “The puzzle of freedom is resolved in the logic of love,” suggests N. T. Wright. “In the gospel God goes on smiling at us until, despite our fear and grumpiness, we find ourselves smiling back.” We are free, as hopeful and terrifying as that may seem. No curse is eternal. Our werewolves need not win.
