Clap for the Wolf Man

"Even he who is pure at heart
And says his prayers by night,
May turn into a wolf
When the wolfbane blooms,
And the moon is full and bright."

Although vampires have been dominating pop culture lately (when haven't they, really?) the werewolf is also keeping a steady presence. They exist in the Twilight books and films, and Benicio Del Toro is starring in a new version of the tale set for release soon. But I am drawn back to the original films--the Universal horror films of the '40s, in which the templates for these things were created.

As part of their Legacy series, Universal has released multi-disc sets of all of their monsters, and I recently took a look at those in the Wolf Man boxed set. To see all of them, it necessitated crossing over into the Frankenstein and Dracula sets as well. All told, there were five films featuring the Wolf Man, with two others incorporating the theme but were not part of the canon.

The Wolf Man was the third member of the trinity of Universal monsters, originating in 1941, well after Frankenstein's monster and Dracula. He was the only one of them who was not based on a literary source. In fact, he was mostly the brainchild of screenwriter Curt Siodmak, who took some Eastern European folk tales and remade them. Turning into a wolf when the moon is full? Can only be stopped by a silver bullet or knife? Wears the sign of the pentagram? All of these were products of Siodmak's imagination, which have carried forward to all werewolf tales that followed.

The first Universal film to feature lycanthropy was 1935's Werewolf of London. It starred Henry Hull as a botanist who gets bitten by a werewolf in the Himalayas while hunting for a plant that only blooms during a full moon. Turns out this plant is the only cure for lycanthropy, and thus the werewolf that bit him (Warner Oland, best known as Charlie Chan), comes for him. But Hull also turns into a wolf, although his makeup wasn't as elaborate as in the films that would come (he looks a bit like Eddie Munster).

The film that Siodmak wrote and was directed by George Waggner was The Wolf Man, from 1941. It starred Lon Chaney Jr. as Lawrence Talbot, and Chaney would go on to play him in five films, the only actor that would play the part (unlike Frankenstein's monster, Dracula, or The Mummy, who were played by several different actors). The story is set in Wales, and Talbot has returned as heir to the family estate after the death of his brother. He's been Americanized, and is like a fish out of water. His father is Claude Rains, and though Rains was a great actor there's no way we can believe that this slight, dapper man could be the father of the large, craggy Chaney.

This particular town has a gypsy camp, and there's a fortune-teller, played by Bela Lugosi. Turns out he's a werewolf, and while attacking a young girl Chaney steps in to help, and kills the wolf with his cane, which has a silver head, but not before being bitten himself. Chaney is shocked to find out later that he killed a man, not a wolf, and he ends up changing into a werewolf, with the then-revolutionary film effects showing in time-lapse photography his transformation (makeup man Jack B. Pierce, who worked on all the Universal horror films, created the effects, which took several hours to apply). Thus began the tragic story of Lawrence Talbot.

The Wolf Man is a dandy little horror film that I think holds up today. There's lots of great atmosphere--the fog machine got a work out--and some creepy notes along the way, particularly by Maria Ouspenskaya as the gypsy woman who lays it out for Talbot: "he who is bitten by a werewolf becomes a werewolf." The psychological subtext is largely borrowed from Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, but what remains constant for Chaney/Talbot is the wish to either have the curse removed, or die.

But Talbot can't die. In the next installment, Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, he is dug up by some graverobbers, and once the moonlight hits him he's back in business. He travels to Frankenstein's castle, hoping to find the good doctor's notes in a hope that they will help him (this is a common thing, the hunting for the doctor's notes, which makes me laugh thinking of the gag in Young Frankenstein when Gene Wilder finds the notes, helpfully titled "How I Did It"). Of course while poking around in the ruins he finds, in ice, the monster. A doctor who has been trailing Talbot gets inspired to try to revive the creature (another common theme--the hubris of science) and the two monsters end up squaring off. In this film the creature is played by Lugosi, who doesn't quite do it for me.

Next came House of Frankenstein, which added Dracula, played by John Carradine, into the mix, as well as Boris Karloff (who refused to play the creature anymore). Instead Karloff is a mad scientist, locked away for putting a man's brain into a dog's body (I'd like to see the prequel). He escapes from prison and hijacks a traveling horror show that happens to include the remains of Dracula. Karloff revives him, and puts him to work eliminating his enemies. But Dracula becomes a nuisance, and ends up getting caught in sunlight, and exits the picture at about the half-way mark.

Karloff ends up at Frankenstein's castle and finds both the creature (now played by Glenn Strange) and the Wolf Man on ice. He revives them, and this ends badly for all of them, with Karloff and the creature slipping into quicksand and Talbot being shot by the gypsy girl who loves him (she's played by Elena Verdugo, whom I remember from Marcus Welby, M.D.).

But of course, no one stays dead in the Universal horror world, and the three returned for House of Dracula. Carradine was back as the Count (I had a hard time buying him in this role, as he reminded me too much of the gambler he played in Stagecoach) seeking to cure his vampirism by visiting a doctor, played by Onslow Stevens. Of course it's just a ruse, he wants to seduce the doctor's assistant. Then Talbot shows up, his existence unexplained, but once again repeating his plaintive cry of "you must help me, there's no time." Chaney, who had showed that he could act in films like Of Mice and Men, showed no evidence of thespian skill in the Wolf Man films.

Stevens tries to help, and the two end up unearthing, you guessed it, the creature (again played by Strange), entangled in the skeleton of Karloff. Dracula, during a transfusion, gives the doctor some of his vampiric blood, and the doc goes crazy, reviving the monster, who once again goes up in flames (many horror film aficionados have special sympathy for the monster, who in film after film is revived without his permission, only to be destroyed minutes later).

The last appearance of the trinity of Universal monsters was in, of all things, an Abbott and Costello film, Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, released in 1948. Lugosi returned as Dracula (he only played the count twice, in the original film and this one), with Chaney as Talbot and Strange as the creature. This film is generally acclaimed as one of the best of Bud and Lou's films, as well as a good example of a horror-comedy: both frightening and funny. I think the trick is that the men playing the monsters are playing it strictly straight. At one point Talbot tells Lou, "When the moon is full I turn into a wolf." Lou says, "You and fifty million other guys," at which Talbot grabs him by the lapels and throws him into a wall. It's as if Chaney himself were not being taken seriously.

As with the other Wolf Man films, in this comedy Talbot is the good guy, seeking to destroy Dracula, and does so quite memorably, catching him in his paws while the Count is in bat form, tumbling into the sea, and once again the creature perishes in flames, his face a contortion expressing both sorrow and, "Not this again!" It would be the end of their run at Universal, and the Hammer studio in Britain would take the characters and remake them, and they've stayed with us ever since.

While most of the sequels are pretty silly, and basically retell the same story, they have a certain quaint charm, particularly to those of a certain age who remember watching them for the first time on late-night TV, perhaps hosted by Vampira or her later imitator, Elvira (the movie host when I was a kid in Detroit was Sir Graves Ghastly, who was a knock-off of Zacherle). These films are cheesy, yes, but also maintain a certain integrity of spirit.

The one downside of these boxed sets is that they were released at about the time Universal was promoting Van Helsing, a god-awful film directed by Steven Sommers. He is on some featurettes, telling us how he loved those films, although he seems to have no idea what made the early films resonate through time. While many will still be absorbed by watching the original Wolf Man, no one will care about Van Helsing.