The werewolf of the last 100 years is largely the product of Hollywood. The first big werewolf film was The Werewolf Of London (1935) starring Henry Hull as the unfortunate shapeshifter. Better remembered is Lon Chaney Jr. in The Wolf Man (1941) and sequels with the other Universal stable of monsters like Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1943) and The House of Frankenstein (1944). The man-wolf who can be killed with a silver bullet has become a staid cliché, more likely to generate groans than fear. But if we turn to its history, we can see the werewolf is and has been more than just a guy with fuzz on his face.
Shapeshifter stories appear in just about every culture on Earth. Where wolves did not live, the role of the monster was often filled by another meat-eater such as the tiger, crocodile, shark or bear. The Greeks and Romans included the werewolf in their mythology, in the story of Lycaon, the Tyrant of Arcadia. Lycaon served Zeus human flesh at a banquet. In return the god transformed the vile man into a wolf, reflecting the shape of his soul. The very first transformation scene in werewolf literature was penned by the Roman poet, Ovid. Written in the 1st Century AD, the scene shows even the ancient writers knew what readers wanted to see:
…There he uttered howling noises, and his attempts to speak were all in vain. His clothes changed into bristling hairs, his arms to legs, and he became a wolf. His own savage nature showed in his rabid jaws, and he now directed against the flocks his innate lust for killing. He had a mania, even yet, for shedding blood. But though he was a wolf, he retained some traces of his original shape. The greyness of his hair was the same, his face showed the same violence, his eyes gleamed as before, and he presented the same picture of ferocity.
From Lycaon’s name we get the word “Lycanthropy” or the state of being a werewolf.
From mythology, the werewolf entered legend. In the works of Herodotus and Petronius, the werewolf goes from being a mortal cursed by a god to a shape-shifting witch or warlock with evil intentions. In Petronius’ The Satyricon is a segment sometimes called “Niceros’ Story”. Niceros is going to woe the beautiful Melissa when he meets a soldier on the road. The man “… pissed a ring around his clothes and suddenly turned into a wolf … then I went to collect his clothes — but they’d turned to stone.” Later a wolf attacks Melissa’s stock and is stabbed in the throat. Once home, Niceros sees the soldier again, gravely injured in the throat. Stories like “Niceros’ Story” were common well up to the feudal times. The werewolf was a man, transformed into the animal with all its vulnerabilities.
The monks and story-tellers of the Middle Ages didn’t change the outward appearance but the inside, with the first sympathetic werewolves. Geraldis Cambrensis tells about two Irish folk cursed by an abbot, to be wolves for their ungodliness . After seven years penance as wolves, they were to change back into humans and return home. The Rawlinson Manuscript tells about “King Arthur and Gorgalon”. Gorgalon is another poor individual cursed to be a wolf. These medieval werewolves did not kill men or livestock, and could even speak the Name of God to prove their goodness. They are victims of priests, witches and often their own sin.
The Renaissance ushered in a new era, that of the literary werewolf. John Webster wrote of moral werewolves and vampires in his play The Duchess Of Malfi (1613), figurative creatures rather than literal ones. William Beckford, writing a century later during the Age of Reason, briefly mentions the lycanthrope in his arabesque tale Vathek (1787) as does Charles Maturin in his masterpiece, Melmoth the Wanderer (1820). Other literary figures like Mrs. Crowe and Alexandre Dumas wrote works with werewolves central to the plot. Even the prolific and sanguine Penny Dreadfuls — semi-illiterate, often plaguaristic, newspapers sold for a penny a page — produced one lycanthrope: Wagner the Wehr-Wolf (1846) by G. W. M. Reynolds. With the exception of Wagner, more often than not, the werewolf was used as a metaphor for the beastly sins of glutton, cruelty and avarice than as an actual creature.
Despite works with Romantic tonalities like George MacDonald’s “The Gray Wolf” and “The Romance of Photogen and Nycteris” as well as Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Ollala”, the majority of Victorians — perhaps the single period to produced the greatest werewolf classics — preferred the supernatural approach, in adventure stories like Rudyard Kipling’s “The Mark of the Beast”(1891), moral tales like Clemence Houseman’s “The Werewolf”(1896) and the masterpiece of vampirism, Dracula (1897) by Bram Stoker. More interesting to the lycanthrophile is the excised first chapter, published as “Dracula’s Guest” in 1914. In this chapter — cut because of the novel’s length — Jonathon Harker leaves his carriage, which is taking him to Transylvania, and gets lost in a snowstorm. The graveyard he takes shelter in is inhabited by the undead. Only Dracula’s appearance as a great, red-eyed wolf, saves Harker, so that he can go onto Castle Dracula and the well-known events there. It is with Stoker and the other Victorians that lycanthrope returns to its true state as a supernatural creature, but retains some allusive qualities as a literary device.
The Twentieth Century brought many works about werewolves, more than in any preceding era. Early on these works resemble their Victorian counterparts in the works of writers like Algernon Blackwood and Eden Phillpotts, dealing largely with moral evil embraced in traditional ghost story techniques. It took a novel by New Yorker, Guy Endore (Harry Relis), to change the werewolf theme forever. The Werewolf of Paris (1933) as Robert Bloch writes in the introduction to the 1992 edition, was important:
… for the legends and literature of lycanthropy prior to the publication of his novel contain no observations on society or the human condition — only the inhuman condition of werewolfery itself. It remained for Endore to elevate the penny-dreadful approach of a Wagner: the Wehr-Wolf and its Victorian counterparts to new heights which combined the frightful with the insightful …
Before Endore, the only werewolves to comment on social ills or the state of humankind, were the allusive villains of Webster, evil men but not in actuality flesh-eating monsters. Endore combine the “actual” werewolf and the “literary” werewolf to create a modern classic.
During the years that Endure wrote The Werewolf of Paris, the greatest explosion of entertainment writing in American history was taking place. During the 1920-50’s the pulp magazines dominated popular entertainment. Titles like Weird Tales and Strange Stories produced dozens of works about werewolves and other monsters. Some of these stories were at the very least entertaining; many fared worse. The average “one-penny per word hack” did nothing to re-invent the lycanthrope, but a few tried.
One writer who exemplified an imaginative use of the werewolf, was Robert E. Howard, the creator of Conan the Cimmerian. One of his very first stories was the vignette “In the Forest of Villefere” (1925) which first introduces de Montour, a man who meets a werewolf and kills him in wolf form. By so doing, he assumes the curse from the last victim. When we meet him again in “Wolfshead” (1926) we get to see how the curse comes on him like a ghost, possessing him and turning him into a “wolf man”.
De Montour was standing, legs braced, arms thrown back, fists clenched. The muscles bulged beneath his skin, his eyes widened and narrowed, the veins stood out upon his forehead as if in great physical effort. As I looked, to my horror, out of nothing, a shapeless, nameless something took vague form! Like a shadow it moved upon de Montour.
It was hovering about him! Good God, it was merging, becoming one with the man!
It should be noted that Henry Hull had yet to appear as The Werewolf of London and set Hollywood’s werewolf mold for all time. Across many stories, Howard sets down the idea that the wolf people, the harpies and other mythological creatures are ancient survivors of a time when man had yet to evolve from the trees.
Contemporary with Howard was H. Warner Munn who penned The Tales Of The Werewolf Clan. Beginning with “The Werewolf of Ponkert” (1925) he creates a different image of the lycanthrope, not a man who becomes a wolf but another creature who only shares some of the wolf’s features:
Far from being wolves, as my first thought had been, they were great grey animals, the size of a large hound, excepting the leader, who was black and more the size and shape of a true wolf. All, however, had the same general characteristics. A high intelligent brow, beneath which gleamed little red pig-like eyes, with a glint of a devil in their glance; long and misshapen hind quarters, which lent them a rabbit lope when they ran; and most terrifying of all, they were almost hairless and possessed not the slightest rudiment of a tail.”
“…inspired by a letter from H. P. Lovecraft which was published in WEIRD TALES. HPL asked … why someone had not attempted a werewolf story narrated by the werewolf himself”, Munn tells the decline of a man who is selected against his will to join the wolf clan that is led by the fearsome Master, a vampire-like being who feeds on victims’ souls. The sequel “The Werewolf’s Daughter” (1928) tells of the Werewolf of Ponkert’s daughter who is unjustly prosecuted for his crimes. The series was cancelled before completion, but Munn did publish the rest in the 1980s.
H. P. Lovecraft, whose fame lies with monsters on such a gigantic scale as to make the werewolf look trivial, himself used the werewolf in a collaborative story called “The Ghost-eater” (1923), in which the werewolf has been murdered but returns as a ghost, reliving over and over its revenge. He also used the lycanthrope in the poem, “The Howler” (1929).
With the coming of pulps like Astounding Science Fiction and Amazing Stories in the 1930’s, Science Fiction writers would eventually get around to explaining the werewolf in scientific terms, in magazines like John W. Campbell’s Unknown. Three of the most intriguing are “The Wolves of Darkness” (January 1932, Strange Tales) and the novel Darker Than You Think (1940, Unknown) by Jack Williamson and “There Shall Be No Darkness”(1950, Thrilling Wonder Stories) by James Blish. Instead of a being which can not be explained, only in religious terminology, the SF writers created logical-appearing beasts who had set rules like the alien creatures they invented in science fiction stories. These rules applied to all “supernatural” beings like witches and demons as well.
Recent horror writers have used this same approach, playing fast and loose with the traditional werewolf but creating consistent, terrifying monsters. Whitley Strieber disposed with the shapeshifter altogether and gave us The Wolfen (1978), ancient wolf-like spirits who have been on the Earth longer than humans. Preying off the unwanted and derelict, the Wolfen are the top of the human food chain, taking the sick and the weak. Other 1980s paperbacks include Stephen King’s The Cycle of the Werewolf (1983), The Changing (1985) by F. W. Armstrong, The Dark Cry of the Moon (1986) by Charles L. Grant and probably the best, Gary Brandner trilogy The Howling 1-3 (1977-1985).
The new millennium saw the lycanthrope enjoying a new popularity as a figure of romance. Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997-2003) then Twilight (2005) and other paranormal romance series made all kinds of supernatural beings hot (in a much more carnal sense). Vampires and werewolves were getting into bed all over in shows like True Blood (2008-2014) and Penny Dreadful (2014-2016) until the zombie craze stumbled over them. The future of the werewolf is assured, and readers can be sure the old lycanthrope has a few surprises left up his furry sleeve.
