Everybody's Got a Wolf Man

The late 19th and early 20th century brought about a newfound interest in human nature within the field of psychology. Of particular note from this era was the development of Sigmund Freud's theory about the human subconscious. This surge in interest in human nature overlapped with another leap forward for mankind, this one of the technological sort, that of moving pictures, and it wasn’t long until the two converged. Film theorists have long typed the medium as a sort of glimpse into the human subconscious, displaying human desires and fears through code in a form that almost resembles a dream. In December 1941, these two innovations converged as Universal released what has become a signature face of horror filmmaking, The Wolf Man.

    In this film, Lawrence “Larry” Talbot returns to the house of his father, Sir John Talbot, for the first time in years. He quickly becomes smitten with local antique shop owner, Gwen Conliffe, and asks her out on a date. That night, a wolf-like creature attacks them and bites Larry, and he beats the creature to death with his cane. Police investigation later uncovers the body of a man at the site, but no wolf, leading the authorities to believe Larry mistakenly killed a man amid the confusion, though Larry insists he killed a wolf.

    

Maleva, a travelling gypsy, confronts Larry and reveals that he was bitten by her son in the form of a wolf and that he has inherited his curse and will become a ravenous wolf himself at the rise of the next moon. Larry at first dismisses the idea, but as a stream of grisly murders sweep through the village at nightfall, when Larry is unable to account for his whereabouts, he is forced to confront the frightening possibility.

Larry confides his fears to his father, who quickly grows impatient with his son’s irrationality. “There’s no such thing as monsters, son!” Despite Larry’s attempts to wrangle his inner beast, including chaining himself to a chair, The Wolf Man overtakes Larry, and he prowls into the woods in pursuit of Gwen. Just as The Wolf Man is about to kill her, John strikes the creature with his cane, and Sir John Talbot watches the werewolf melt into the form of his son, dead at his feet.

    Unlike most other monster movies of the 30’s and 40’s, The Wolf Man had no direct literary ancestor like Dracula or Frankenstein. Wolves as archetypes have a place in pop culture as symbols of predatoriness or ravenous indulgence, and werewolves draw upon that collective memory bank to comment on a growing understanding of psychology and behavior. Most of the established mythology that we refer to today draws not upon European folklore about the monsters, but from cinematic depictions of the creature.

       Attempts to use werewolf mythology as the basis for big screen entertainment go as far back as 1913 with the short film, The Werewolf, about a Navajo woman who transformed into a wolf at night to attack white settlers. This film is believed to have been permanently lost. 1935's Werewolf of London stands as the first feature film on the subject, and it remains available for viewing today.

    A lot of tropes and touchstones also emerged here. We see the human Wolf Man as a standing pillar of civility and good manners whose inner beastliness is brought about by werewolf curse. This is also where you see the beginnings of the Wolf Man as an agent for the character's latent desires for violence, with the monster rising in our main character as he grows more jealous of his wife's affection for an old flame who may just be a better lover for her after all.

    But though the movie was intended to join the likes of Tod Browning's Dracula and James Whale's Frankenstein, Werewolf of London didn't hit the same nerve as the other signature monsters of the day, and so it faded into relative obscurity shortly after. But Universal gave the werewolf another chance in 1941 when it enlisted Curt Siodmak to pen the script for a new approach to the creature.

    Siodmak was influenced by his time as a Jew living in Germany just as Naziism was on the rise. He was unnerved at the capacity good upstanding men had for transforming into something monstrous, which he saw as Hitler’s ideology began infecting his neighbors. The Jewish sign of the pentagram even marks the Wolf Man’s next victim. Moreover, the ostracizing Larry experiences within his own community after he is linked to the mysterious murders paralleled Siodmak’s experience watching his community turn against him with the rise of Naziism. Siodmak has been open about how his experience in 1930s Germany informed his vision of a monster living in the human mind, saying, "I am the Wolf Man. I was forced into a fate I didn't want: to be a Jew in Germany.”

    The Wolf Man was a smashing success for the studio and spawned several follow-ups, including sequels wherein lead actor Lon Chaney Jr. donned the Wolf Man garb to prowl the woods again. But this was only the beginning of the Wolf Man’s cultural second life. We’ve seen him appear as player in dozens of films and Halloween TV specials. Werewolf episodes feature in TV shows ranging from Psych to Boy Meets World to Highway to Heaven. As of this writing, Ryan Gosling is suiting up to follow in the pawprints of Chaney to bring the monster back to the big screen. [EDIT: Okay, I guess I'll take Christopher Abbot instead.]

    This begs the question, why do we keep returning to the werewolf figure? What fears does this monster holds for us?

    Patterns in media depictions of the monster portend it has something to do with the good old subconscious, the fear that the worst monsters are found within us. According to the Wolf Man, the thing we fear the most is that our unspoken cravings, our shameful vices, our human weaknesses, make us unfit to live in this world.

     The Wolf Man is a recurring character across cinema, so while I do want to anchor this discussion on the 1941 film, this overview is going to canvas a lot of interpretations of the icon. This will also be more of a thematic survey than a chronological one. We're going to look at the Wolf Man as a challenge to rationality, a threat to human civility, and a tragic literary figure.

“I do Believe that Most Anything can Happen to a Man in His Own Mind” The Wolf Man as Insanity

         Professor Barry Keith Grant of Brock University says of monsters in the horror genre, “Thematically, monster movies posit a conflict between values deemed as normal and those that threaten normality, as represented by the monster . . . the monster represents a challenge to all those normative value sets that structure ‘civilization,’ such as patriarchy, heterosexuality, and monogamy, and so must be defeated by the (typically male) hero in order for him to take his place in society.” To that list, I would add "empiricism."

         There’s a reason why our seminal wolf man hails from the educated, aristocratic upper class. This is an austere society, reflected in the heavy gothic design of both versions of The Wolf Man, especially the formidable Talbot Hall. Even Wolf, set in the 1990’s, uses the prestigious Alden estate as a backdrop. The notion that a well-mannered gentleman could transform into something so abased, uncivilized, and violent is repulsive to this society, and they don't react amicably to our wolf man and his delusions about turning into a wolf at night. This is also a part of the reason why the Wolf Man must always die--he represents an intolerable deviation from the strict norms of this society--but we'll get to that ...

    Again, like a lot of central bits of The Wolf Man mythology, this theme was latent in the 1935 film, but Siodmak really helped elevate this from an undertone to part of the text. There are multiple points in the 1941 movie where human logic is the central subject of the conversation. Sir John says to his son at one point, “Now you asked me if I believe a man can become a wolf. If you mean ‘Can you take on physical traits of an animal?’ No, it's fantastic. However, I do believe that most anything can happen to a man in his own mind.” (Indeed, the original vision of the film played more like a psychological thriller where we never saw the Wolf Man transformed, so we were left to wonder whether or not this was just happening inside Larry's mind.) But even Sir John's patience wears thin when his son won't abandon these childish notions. As the wolf man grows increasingly abhorrent to civilized society, civilized society grows more eager to shut him out.

    In these films, there’s usually some character or party representing an aberrant, uncivilized perspective on the matter that flies in the face of reason and science. In the original film, it’s the band of traveling gypsies. Their pagan witchcraft is almost as much an affront to reason as the werewolf itself, but they are the only people who seem to know what’s going on and who might be able to help our Wolf Man. They usually help by gifting him some charm that will suppress his werewolfness, and all he has to do to keep the wolf at bay is keep the charm on his person.

    And this role can be filled by a number of different characters. In An American Werewolf in London, the gypsies’ role is filled by the undead victims of the werewolf, including David’s friend who was killed in the initial werewolf attack. David starts to see said victims after he is cursed--victims who may or may not be PTSD hallucinations--and they tell David he needs to kill himself before the next full moon and he starts the next round of murders. (If you're wondering why John Landis seemed to think that suicide would work as the basis for a running joke in his movie, I'm honestly still wondering about that too ...) Of course, our Wolf Man almost never follows their counsel because the whole thing sounds like a bunch of superstition anyway, but by disregarding their perspective, the Wolf Man only leaves himself vulnerable to the curse. His insistence that this thing can’t be happening to him is his undoing.

         2010 Wolf Man doubles down on the madness motif by actually tossing Larry into a mental hospital not once but twice. Larry is institutionalized first as a child after being traumatized by his mother’s violent (and mysterious) death. He is thrown in a second time when he is linked to the violent killings, and he is subjected to all manner of torturous experimental rehabilitation procedures as science ravages his body to attempting to extricate the wolf from his mind.

    This second stay culminates in Larry, strapped to a chair, being presented to a board of leading medical minds as part of a demonstration by the institution’s leading doctor. Said doctor intends to cure Larry, but after Larry transforms and breaks out of his restraints, the wolf slaughters him and the room full of doctors. Not only can science do nothing to hold back the inner wolf, the inner wolf mutilates our scientific understanding of the world.

The Wolf Man is terrifying because he confronts the civilized age with the horrifying prospect that underneath whatever fine exterior we build out of science and good manners, there is ultimately a monstrous animal lurking within us that no amount of rationalism can suppress. It's unacceptable to the educated mind, but no less inescapable. Civility is just a draping that can be shredded with the bite of an animal or the rising of the moon.

 

“Even a Man Who is Pure in Heart . . .” The Wolf Man as Unrestrained Animal Impulse

         The 1941 film introduces a couplet describing the werewolf’s condition. It, like most other contributions from Siodmak, did more to inform werewolf mythology than folklore or fairy-tale, and is even recited in Van Helsing. “Even a man who is pure in heart and says his prayers by night / May become a wolf when the wolfbane blooms and the autumn moon is bright.” (Later versions of the werewolf story will revise that last bit as "when moon is full and bright.")

    As a human, the wolf man is an upstanding citizen and well-loved within his community. He’s charming and bright, yet unassuming. Sympathetic. A real swell guy. But the werewolf curse tears back his humanly restraint to give way to his most base appetites forcing him to kill without control. Underneath all the symbolism and metaphor, this appetite for bloodshed is what makes the Wolf Man such a frightening creature.

         This creature of violence lends itself to a comment on hypermasculinity, made explicit in the 2010 remake. In this version, our werewolf prime is none other than Larry’s father, Sir John himself, who has surrendered to the wolf’s capacity for violence, even as a human. His ideology, “The beast is the beast—let it run free.” Sir John, then, represents all that is monstrous about the werewolf, and it is up to the more gentle Larry to eliminate him. In the film’s climax, Larry returns to the mansion to do away with Sir John once and for all. When Larry pulls the trigger (we discover the gun was empty) Sir John cackles gloatingly, “You were always the fragile one ... Finally, you’re the man I always wanted you to be,” linking the ravenousness of the wolf with some twisted form of masculinity.

      Often the wolf man’s devolution rises in tandem with the sexual tension between him and the leading lady. David’s first transformation in An American Werewolf in London happens the night after he is intimate with Alex for the first time, suggesting that his wolf-ness is unlocked because he is feeding his sexual energy. This is common within horror films in general which frequently question the links between sex and violence, mankind's two most primal urges. The suggestion here is that even something as instinctive as the need for sex leaves the gate open for our inner monster to run free.

    Because in addition to connoting ferocity and violence, wolves also convey power or even nobility and majesty. Occasionally we’ll see a romanticized depiction of the werewolf that frames this shedding of civility as a liberating return to nature. This picture of the werewolf is common among properties like Twilight or Underworld with clans of werewolves, as opposed to just one individual afflicted with a werewolf’s curse. In these cases, transforming into a wolf is code for unleashing raw sexual energy. This is noteworthy because the werewolf’s monsterness is linked to sexual indulgence as much as violence.

         Wolf straddles the line between the werewolf as a romantic figure or a monstrous figure. This film sees an aging New York publisher, Will Randall, (played by a 57-year-old Jack Nicholson) who faces being booted out of his job by his own protégé, Stewart (James Spader).

    

    The film also functions as a critique of the workplace, which it likens to one big dog fight. Will’s publishing office is busy and loud, and the brick is stained with an aged yellow tint. The wire elevator taking Nicholson to his office even suggests a cage. Meanwhile nature is framed as tranquil, mysterious yet inviting. The film opens tracking our wolf man in utero driving through the peaceful wintery mountain landscape, painted in dark blues that celebrate the unknowability of the forest country. (That our wolf man is played by Jack Nicholson does underline the scene with echoes of another drive through the isolated mountain range . . .)

    It is in these mountains that Will is bitten by a mysterious wolf. Following this encounter, Will unearths in himself a newfound aggression and vitality. By night, he romps through the woods in a dreamlike haze. By day he pushes back against the turning of the wheel. His senses are keener, he has energy again, and this awakening fuels his fight to keep his job.

    At the same time the question lingers, just how much animal has been unleashed? Here our love interest, Laura (played by Michelle Pfieffer), wrestles with the question of Will’s potential for violence when we learn that his wife, from whom he was recently separated, was gruesomely killed as if by an animal. (This murder happens the same night Will and Laura are intimate for the first time, again linking sex to violence.) Their separation was spurred on by him learning she was having an affair with Stewart, and so Will has motivation to kill her. Though Laura spent the night with him, she can’t shake the possibility that wreaking violent vengeance on his adulterous ex-wife was just another latent desire liberated by his inner wolf.

         We eventually find out that Will’s wife was actually killed by Stewart, whom Will accidentally afflicted with werewolfism. Stewart then embodies the darker, violent aspects of the wolf-man not inherent in Will, much in the same way Sir John does in the 2010 Wolfman. Each werewolf is simply embodying the inner animal of either man be it benign or monstrous. And like the 2010 film, Wolf culminates with the two of them battling it out as werewolves, with Will ultimately emerging victorious.

    In doing so, however, he allows the wolf curse to take him over completely, irreversibly, and so he must leave civilization forever. There are shades of tragedy in this ending, but Will is also free to live out his days away from the circus of corporate living and to experience the thrill of the wolf for the rest of his days. With the hinted possibility that Laura, who has recently awoken her own inner wolf, will soon join him, this is probably the best ending we can expect for a wolf man character.

         The common denominator between all wolf-men is this unbinding of the character’s suppressed impulses. Once the beast is unleashed, there’s no telling what appetites the inner animal will follow or who it will mow down along the way. But unlike other monsters like Dracula or The Mummy, you can’t just eliminate the monster and expect everything to go back to normal—the monster is you. This is one reason why this monster is so terrifying and why fighting him seems an uphill battle that our protagonist cannot possibly win.

    And here’s the thing: he usually doesn’t.

 

“The Way You Walked Was Thorny . . .” The Tragedy of The Wolf Man

       From the moment he first learns of his condition, the Wolf Man starts to ask exactly how dangerous this inner animal makes him. The answer always seems to be "too dangerous to live." Though the Wolf Man is almost always a good person, his inner animal makes him uncontrollable, and so he must be killed. The third act of these werewolf films typically has the human Wolf Man desperately searching for some way to stop the curse or else a way to get his loved ones out of the warzone, but the animal cannot be contained, only eliminated. The only thing that will save his loved ones is his own destruction.

   Poetically, this destruction comes at the hands of a loved one. 1941 Wolf Man has Larry struck down by his father while the remake has Gwen shoot him. His death is always followed by the wolf fading away as he returns to human form in death, leaving his executioner to behold him dead at their feet.

         One motif we’ve seen in a couple of werewolf films is the lover confronting the wolf man in his wolf form and making one last appeal to the human heart that might recognize her beneath the animal. Both An American Werewolf in London (1981) and The Wolfman (2010) employ this feature. For a fleeting moment, she appears to have gotten through to the man she loves, such that we’re ready to watch the beast dissolve into a human. But some incidental noise spooks the monster just long enough to extinguish that flicker of humanity, and she helplessly watches him gunned down. The Wolfman (2010) even lets Larry as a human die in Gwen's arms, thanking her for releasing him from his pain. Her inability to recall him leaves her with the sad truth that not even Beauty could save The Beast.

(Content Warning: Some gunshot wounds and obscured nudity in the clip below).

         In the original film, Maleva the gypsy offers this prayer over Larry's 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. Now you will have peace for eternity.” The Wolf Man is too inherently sinful to live in this world, and so expulsion from it is the only release.

    This is a rather grim appraisal of human nature, though one that makes sense from the pen of someone processing his experience witnessing the rise of Naziism. According to the Wolf Man mythology, our unrighteous desires, whatever vice they take the form of, will eventually break through our fortresses and tear down our lived reality. The struggle is ultimately futile because the evil is inherent within us. And with only the right push, this latent evil will devolve us into creatures incapable of answering to anything but our most beastly instincts. And what predestined end could such a creature possibly meet, or even deserve, but the bite of a silver bullet?

But we still have one more Wolf Man I want to talk about.

    Stephen Somners's 2004 film, Van Helsing, is a melting pot for classic Universal monsters, like “The Avengers” with Dracula, The Wolf Man, and others. Whenever anyone accidentally remembers this film, it's usually for having some of the worst CGI of the 21st century, but I maintain the film has a lot more going for it than it's given credit for.

         This owing largely to how creatively the film blends its mythologies, particularly that of the Wolf Man, whom Somners likens to a drug addict. Van Helsing is a fascinating case study for the Wolf Man figure in part because of the striking contrast between the human persona of our wolf-men. Prior to being cursed, Van Helsing (played by Hugh Jackman) is not your friendly neighbor whom everyone wants to be pals with. He is this gargoyle of a person whom everyone hates for his sinister affect and his dealings with unholy monsters. He has no memory of his past, and he works in service of the church to receive atonement for his forgotten sins. Unlike Larries Talbot, Van Helsing’s “goodness” is not a thing that gets disrupted by the werewolf curse: his “goodness” is something he is trying to find—if he has any to begin with.

         Van Helsing’s latest assignment sends him to Transylvania to hunt down a mysterious Count Dracula and discover what vicious plot he has in store for humanity. He is joined by Anna Valerious (Kate Beckinstale), the head of a long-line of monster hunters whose entire ancestry is locked out of heaven until Dracula is killed. Through their shared goals, trauma, and sexual appeal, Anna and Van Helsing inevitably become romantically linked.

    Another stark difference between this werewolf film and others is how the werewolf curse hot-potatoes between three different characters through the course of the film, including Anna’s brother. This creates one of many moral impossibilities for Van Helsing. If he wants to stop Dracula, he has to kill this creature with a human soul, the little brother of someone he loves. Van Helsing is already wrestling with his shades of evil even before the werewolf curse inevitably afflicts him. This film marks one of the rare instances in which the wolf man, Van Helsing, not only survives but is actually cured of his werewolfness, but if anything his tragedy is only greater for it.

    Similar to Will in Wolf, Van Helsing has to embrace the werewolf curse in order to defeat Dracula, but while in his frenzied werewolf state he kills Anna in the very moment she administers the cure to him. He devolves back into human form and weeps over Anna's body, dead because he let his monster out for one moment too long.

    Now in every other werewolf film, our wolf man is always haunted by the possibility that he might kill Gwen/Alex/Laura, but for all the tragedy of their respective deaths, they are allowed one grain of solace: their deaths ultimately spare the ones they love from a grisly end. No such mercy for Van Helsing. Unlike the other wolf men we discuss here, Van Helsing actually crosses that line, seemingly confirming that his yearning to be good and heroic will never overpower his inherent darkness.

         But the film ends with Van Helsing giving Anna a proper funeral procession, and it is here that he glimpses into the clouds and sees the entire Valerious family crossing into heaven, liberated from their curse at last because of Van Helsing's heroism. Last in line is Anna, who knows both of the fires he'd walked through and of the purity of his heart. She turns back to face Van Helsing and gifts him a gracious, loving smile thanking him for freeing her and her family. Van Helsing has been reaching for heaven all his life, and for the first time he feels heaven reaching back offering angelic absolution for the most shameful parts of himself. “Through no fault of your own,” Anna silently assures Helsing, and all wolf-men like him, “now have peace for eternity.”

"When the Autumn Moon is Bright"

    The role of Larry Talbot was something of a turning point for OG Wolf Man, Lon Chaney Jr. Prior to being cast in this film, he had no luck in securing anything more than throwaway parts in B-pictures, but he was immediately celebrated for giving life to this monster. Much of the acclaim centered around Chaney bringing humanity and vulnerability to the role, not a natural instinct for horror actors classic or contemporary.

         Behind the camera, though, Chaney battled his own internal monsters, owing in large part to traumas from an impoverished childhood, a fraught relationship with his parents, and the fires of Hollywood life. As he struggled to find success early in his career, and especially to step out from under the shadow of his famous father, he sought refuge in the drink. This resulted in some wayward behavior that stole a lot from his personal life, including his first marriage. Late in life, his drunken fits left him cantankerous and occasionally violent. His final films revealed a husk of a man hollowed by all his internal scars.

    But despite all that, Lon Chaney Jr is remembered for his gentleness. He was especially praised by his co-stars for being warm and personable. In 1995, actress Patricia Morison, Chaney’s co-star in the 1943 film Calling Doctor Death, said of working with him, “I remember when the film was over and we had the wrap, he came over and he put his arm around me and said ‘Thank you so much. It was lovely working with you.’ I was very touched.” Lon Chaney Jr died happily with a wife, children, and grandchildren who adored him, and he is fondly remembered to this day.

    The real-life human underneath the skin of the Wolf Man was a kindhearted gentleman. He was loved. He struggled with alcoholism all his life—he never truly “conquered” this demon—but he did temper it enough to keep himself from falling into the abyss. Underneath the wolf and in between all the scars, a genuinely good human shone through.  

         There’s an emerging movement in psychology known as Acceptance Commitment Therapy. I won’t go into details because I am a student of film, not psychology, but the basics focus on learning to reconcile oneself with unwanted desires rather than trying to suppress or expel them. By not declaring war against the subconscious, one learns to mitigate his or her impulses in a way that doesn’t conflict with one’s values or the social order. The idea isn’t to let the beast run unfettered, but to not shame oneself for failing to strap down something that just can’t be caged.

         The interesting thing about The Wolf Man is that even when he “wins,” he never quite overcomes his inner beast. He only ever learns to live with it. This is because victory over the inner animal comes not from declaring one’s vices unacceptable, but from understanding that this is a part of one’s self and resolving to fight the fight as long as is needed.

         The Wolf Man reminds us that sometimes our greatest battles will be fought inside ourselves against our own unrighteous appetites. If his ending is often tragic, it’s because the inner animal is powerful and so the cautionary tale must be dire. But the struggle itself, the fight to discipline the inner animal, does not make us monsters.

                    --The Professor