The early 1970s saw two films that offered werewolf mysteries. One was a TV movie and the other a theatrical release. Both hid the werewolf’s identity until the final act of the story. The first was Moon of the Wolf (1972) based on the novel by Leslie H. Whitten. The second was The Beast Must Die (1974), which was not based on Nicholas Blake’s novel but “There Shall Be No Darkness” by James Blish, a Science Fiction piece.
Moon of the Wolf starred David Janssen, Barbara Rush, Geoffrey Lewis and Bradford Dillman. The book was set in Mississippi but the film changes the location to Burnside, Louisiana. Janssen plays Sheriff Aaron Whitaker, our ghostbreaker, though a lawman who wants to solve a series of murders. Barbara Rush is an old flame and the love interest, Louise Rondanthe. Her brother, Andrew, is the town’s richest man, from an old plantation family. He sends a message to Whitaker that he is not welcome to re-ignite any old romances. While this mild relationship takes place the sheriff investigates the death of a young woman. It turns out she was pregnant after an affair with the town doctor, easily twice her age. Our first suspect.
The townfolk are suspicious of the doctor despite the fact that it looks like she was killed by an animal. Her brother, played by Geoffrey Louis, gets himself locked up for attacking the doctor. The werewolf comes for him in jail, ripping the bars off. There can now be little doubt that the killer is not human. Louis’s dying father says it is the Loug Garog. He can also see the werewolf’s next victim by looking at their palm. A pentagram will appear there. The next victim is Louise Rodanthe.
The final act has Louise locked up, waiting for her death. Whitaker won’t let that happen. He runs around in the dark but it is Louise who saves herself. She shoots the werewolf with a gun from her bedroom dresser. The werewolf is her brother, Andrew. Only bullets blessed by a priest can kill a werewolf. Andrew must have had them blessed, knowing his sister would put him out of his misery.
My favorite scene in this film, the one that stuck with me over the decades, was when Andrew Rodanthe is about to visit the dying old man but he collapses on the porch. The family has put sulfur and wolfsbane out as a protection from werewolves. Andrew has a fit and is taken home. This is the only real clue we are given as to who the werewolf is. Not the most clever mystery but Dillman really sells the revulsion he feels from the sulfur. Moon of the Wolf is still a fairly watchable hour and fifteen minutes.
The Beast Must Die is by far a much more dated affair. (They have a good version on Tubi.) It is an Amicus production so it has the feel of that British company. It starred Calvin Lockhart, Peter Cushing, Marlene Clark, Charles Gray, Anton Diffring, Ciaran Madden, Tom Chadbon, and Michael Gambon. Lockhart plays millionaire, Tom Newcliffe. He has assembled seven people who might be a werewolf, so he can hunt the ultimate game. “The Most Dangerous Game” meets the supernatural. You only have to wait ninety minutes to find out who. The film had a gimmick called “The Werewolf Break” where the audience would be allowed to consider all the evidence before deciding who they thought was the werewolf. This device was borrowed from Ellery Queen, the mystery writing duo who had a detective of the same name. We saw it a little later on TV when Jim Hutton played EQ.
The suspects are a weird collection of folks. Some you may recognize. We have Arthur Bennignton the diplomat (Charles Gray), who you may remember as a Bond villain from Diamonds Are Forever. You have Peter Cushing, who played Dr. Who for Milton Subotsky back in the 1960s but would appear as Abner Perry the next year in Subotsky’s At the Earth’s Core. The Beast Must Die was his last appearance at Amicus. He is mostly wasted as Professor Lundgren, a Scandinavian anthropologist. And you have Michael Gambon who got this big break in Othello (1965) but now is Jan Gilmore, a pianist who hasn’t played in a year because of an illness. I will always remember him as Maigret, a detective who could have solved this werewolf thing without any trouble.
Newcliffe’s plan is to subject the assembled to various werewolfian tests. The professor explains for our benefit that there needs to be certain factors in line for the transformation to happen. There needs to be a full moon. (There is.) There needs to be pollinating wolfsbane (It is the wrong time of year) but Newcliffe has some in his greenhouse. Then there needs to be silver. A silver candlestick is passed around but it fails because of the lack of wolfsbane. Later it is a silver bullet in the mouth. This causes Newcliffe’s wife, Caroline (Marlene Clark) to transform. One silver bullet later and the divorce is complete. But wait, Caroline couldn’t be the werewolf because she had been with Tom when a dog was attacked by the beast. There are two werewolves! Caroline contracted lycanthropy from the dog’s wounds.
Soon everyone is dead except the real werewolf and the millionaire finally gets his hunt. The final solution (I hate to tell you) is pianist and monster, Gilmore. We see the wolf’s head dissolve revealing the second Dumbledore as the killer.
There is lots more to this film, such as the lengthy intro about the security system Tom Newcliffe puts in to keep his guests on the reservation. The man who invented and supervises the expensive system is Pavel played by Anton Diffring. Like Gray’s Blofeld, Diffring is immediately recognizable from a dozen war pictures as a German officer. He doesn’t believe in werewolves and gets killed by one. It is Diffring and Gray along with some very dated tech that gives this film a slight James Bond feel at the beginning.
It should be noted that the original story by James Blish is much stronger piece. The film drops much of the SF backing that was largely the point. Blish wanted to explain all the supernatural aspects logically as only a Science Fiction author can. One of the ideas that the film ignores is the existence of witches, an important co-participant in the wolf magic. Blish was working from a place inspired by John W. Campbell and his long defunct Unknown Worlds magazine. By 1950 Campbell was going down the rabbit hole of Dianetics so the story did not appear in Astounding but Thrilling Wonder Stories, April 1950. Had Unknown still existed, this story would have been right at home there. The film version loses much of what makes Blish’s story a classic.
The character of Tom Newcliffe is our other ghostbreaker, though a very special kind. Of all the characters in the film, Professor Lundgren most fits the idea of supernatural sleuth. Peter Cushing certainly had played his share of these over his career, including the iconic Professor Van Helsing, Dr. Who, and another personal favorite, Dr. Wells in Horror Express (1972). Newcliffe is a monster hunter, that special ghostbreaker who wishes to find and kill monsters, not study them. We more often see this with vampire hunters but there was a comic called “The Werewolf Hunter” back in the 1940s.
The idea of not revealing the werewolf caught on in fiction. Basil Copper wrote two like this, “Cry Wolf!” (1974) and The House of the Wolf (1983). In his introduction to The House of the Wolf, Copper admits:
My only short story on the theme, ‘Cry Wolf’, was published by Robert Hale in my collection When Footsteps Echo in 1975, while at the same time appearing under the aegis of St. Martin’s Press in New York. For this wintry tale set among superstitious peasants in Eastern Europe, I did not reveal the identity of the werewolf until the end of the narrative, and the tale has received a number of airings in various anthologies since.…Later, I envisaged a werewolf tale plotted rather like a detective novel, in which the creature’s identity is not revealed until the very end, preferably in the last few sentences.
Charles L. Grant did likewise for his Universal Monsters-inspired series with The Dark Cry of the Moon (1986). In his Foreword to the first volume he wrote:
I miss Universal Pictures, Val Lewton, Hammer Films. George Zucco, Hazel Court, Lionel Atwill, Ralph Bates, Barbara Steele, Boris Karloff, Elisha Cook, Jr., Tom Conway, and Vincent Price. I miss the old-fashioned frights, the chains, the bats, the storms, the heroines who opened that door and the heroes who didn’t, the fog, the rats, the carriages thundering through midnight, the laboratories, the swamps, the old castles, the mumbled incantations.
Grant doesn’t mention The Beast Must Die and Amicus but he does recall Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee at Hammer. And he is as good as his word. The trilogy of novels, vampire, werewolf and mummy are old-time fun. In The Dark Cry of the Moon he has you reading to the last page to see who the werewolf is.
Conclusion
To this day, thanks to movies like these werewolf mysteries, I prefer my monsters on the bad guy side. I like to champion the human detectives and hunters who fight against the supernatural. Today all the heroes are monsters. Or they are in bed with them. (Don’t get me wrong. I watched every episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel too.) But I like the old school approach where the monsters are not sexy but evil and repellent. One of my favorites still is Stephen King’s Salem Lot (the TV movie from 1979) because it is really about the humans who must face off against the legacy of vampiric evil. To become a vampire hunter is a terrible commitment (yes, I watched at least six seasons of Supernatural before it became a soap about angels and devils.) and one you won’t survive for long. These old films have some of that dying tradition.
