Vampires vs. werewolves: let's get ready to rumble

Lon Chaney, Jr.  as The Wolf Man with victim

Are you ready for the coming war? There seems to be a rumble brewing in Hollywood. Vampires and werewolves are getting ready to duke it out for global box office domination.

The Wolfman will finally make it to multiplexes in February of 2010. But before then, The Twilight Saga: New Moon opens in November of this year, and as fans of the series already know, this installment is Jacob-intensive. Jacob, played by Taylor Lautner, is a very popular character, who, thanks to Native American mysticism, turns into a wolf and does battle with evil vampires. Werewolves also pop up in Charlaine Harris’ Sookie Stackhouse novels, basis for the HBO series True Blood.

The animosity between celluloid vampires and werewolves isn’t all that new. The Underworld movies have been doing it for years. Even earlier than that, the HBO series Tales From the Crypt aired an episode entitled “Werewolf Concerto” in 1992, in which Beverly D’Angelo took a vacation from the National Lampoon’s Vacation movies to play a very sexy, and lethal, vampire who gets the upper hand over Timothy Dalton’s werewolf hunter (who is actually a werewolf himself).

About the earliest werewolf movie you’re likely to find is The Werewolf of London, which starred Henry Hull, Warner Oland and Valerie Hobson, from 1935. It’s pretty creaky by today’s standards, but many of the familiar elements are established.
 

The Curse of the Werewolf Poster

But the quintessential werewolf movie probably is The Wolf Man, from 1941, with Lon Chaney, Jr. The movie, directed by George Waggner, has a fiercely loyal fan following. Benicio del Toro, star of the remake, is said to be a fan of the original, and collects its memorabilia.

Lawrence Talbot, sensitively played by Lon Chaney, Jr., returns home to his ancestral estate and is reunited with his father, Sir John, played by Claude Rains, after the mysterious death of his brother. Talbot meets and becomes interested in a local girl named Gwen (Evelyn Ankers). He takes Gwen and her friend Jenny out for an evening, and has his fortune told by a gypsy (Bela Lugosi). When one of the girls is separated from them in the woods afterwards, she is attacked by a wolf and Talbot tries to save her. Though he succeeds in the killing the wolf, the girl is also killed and Talbot is severely injured.
Bitten, you know.

No wolf’s body is found, although the fortune-telling gypsy is found dead. Talbot doesn’t have a mark on him, which doesn’t do a thing for his credibility. The dead gypsy’s mother, Maleva, played by Maria Ouspenskaya, who had a monopoly on playing old gypsy women at the time, explains the truth to Talbot: her son was a werewolf, and now, of course, so is Talbot.

Virtually every werewolf convention you know comes from this movie, with the interesting exception that the full moon does not trigger the werewolf’s transformation. That came in the sequel. Several times during the film, villagers recite a poem that all the apparently known by all the locals:

          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.

In the sequels, the “autumn moon” becomes “when the moon is full and bright.”

Universal’s legendary makeup artist Jack Pierce was responsible for Chaney’s transformation, awe-inspiring in its day. Chaney would hold still while the makeup was partially applied, and a few frames of film shot of him. Then more makeup would be applied, and a few more frames shot. The process continued until the entire transformation was captured by this variation on stop motion photography. This explains why werewolf Lawrence Talbot tended not to move while he was changing into the title monster.
 

The Wolf Man reappeared in a number of sequels, duking it out with Frankenstein’s monster and Dracula along the way. Various actors played Frankenstein’s monster and Count Dracula, but only Lon Chaney, Jr. played Larry Talbot. Interestingly though, Chaney played both Frankenstein’s monster in the 1942 sequel Ghost of Frankenstein, and Count Dracula in Son of Dracula, made in 1943. Neither film featured the Wolf Man. Universal continued to play mix and match with their horror stars, as Bela Lugosi, their original Dracula, played Ygor in Son of Frankenstein and Ghost of Frankenstein, but then played Frankenstein’s monster, a role he’d originally turned down, in Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, also released in 1943.

Although the English company Hammer Films did Technicolor remakes of both Frankenstein (Curse of Frankenstein, 1957 and Horror of Dracula, 1958), and in fact made longer series with each than the Universal originals, they didn’t have much truck with werewolves.

The one exception is Curse of the Werewolf (1961), starring the then-unknown Oliver Reed. The movie was directed by Hammer’s big gun, Terence Fisher, from a screenplay by producer Anthony Hinds, writing under his frequent pseudonym of John Elder from the novel The Werewolf of Paris by Guy Endore. The movie, needless to say, takes place in Spain. Curse of the Werewolf takes the hardnosed and unpleasant view that a child born on Christmas to rape victim is pretty much cursed out of the starting gate. This being said, the screenplay is intelligent and unusually adult, and the performances are excellent. Like most werewolf movies, it has a tragic ending, and (SPOILER ALERT), like The Wolf Man, it is the werewolf’s loving father (or father figure) that has to kill him.

It is quite possible to take the view that in many werewolf movies, lycanthropy (the practice or condition of werewolfism) is a metaphor for the out-of-control adolescent male.

1981 saw two of the best werewolf movies ever made. Joe Dante’s The Howling, with a superb screenplay by Schenectady native John Sayles and Terence H. Winkless from Gary Brandner’s novel, managed to mix dark, wry humor (for example, Patrick M with horror and some sensuality that was very, very new to the genre. In Dante’s movie, the werewolves change at will, and they like it. The parallels to drug addiction are interesting, to say the least. The same summer, John Landis’ An American Werewolf in London came out. More comedic than The Howling, it was also, paradoxically, more graphically violent. Rick Baker did the makeup effects for both films, using moving prosthetics that allowed the audiences to see the transformation without the lap dissolves used decades earlier.

In more recent years, the Underworld movies have already depicted an ongoing war between werewolves and vampires. In Stephen Sommers’ Van Helsing, werewolves alone have the power to destroy Dracula. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban did one of the best werewolf transformations ever, although no vampires got involved. And as Stephanie Meyers fans scarcely need to be told, the werewolves are on their way in that series. The upcoming Dark Shadows movie is apparently featuring vampire Barnabas Collins, but fans are well aware that werewolves got involved in the TV show on a fairly regular basis, and if the first one does well, sequels will probably follow.

So, clearly, the time is at hand to choose sides. Team Edward or Team Jacob? No prisoners will be taken.