The same year, we received the self-explanatory Werewolf in a Girls Dormitory which was released on a double-bill with Boris Karloff’s Corridors of Blood. It starred British actor Oliver Reed in the lead, just one of his many roles for the studio in the era. Hammer studios gave us Curse of the Werewolf in 1961, based on Guy Endore’s 1933 novel The Werewolf of Paris. This patchwork film apparently inspired a surrealistic novel of the same name from author Ken Gage, first published in 2006. Footage from this film was edited into additional footage and released in 1964 as Face of the Screaming Werewolf. It’s being included here for the sheer absurdity of the synopsis, and also for featuring Lon Chaney, Jr. Both monsters appeared again, of a sort, in 1958’s How to Make a Monster, which had two young actors being hypnotized and prompted to kill while wearing their movie makeup.ġ960’s House of Terror was a low-rent Mexican monster movie about a mad scientist who attempts to resurrect a mummy, only to discover that the mummy is really a werewolf. The combination of teen angst and monster movie was a potent one, becoming one of the studio’s biggest hits and prompting them to follow it up with I Was a Teenage Frankenstein the same year. This time around, it was a serum of irradiated wolf blood that was responsible for the transformation.ĪIP released their I Was a Teenage Werewolf in 1957, starring a young Michael Landon in the lead. It wasn’t until much later that a werewolf retaining some if not all of his human coherence after transformation became an accepted norm.Ĭolumbia actually released two werewolf films in 1944, the other being Cry of the Werewolf, which starred Nina Fuch as a young gypsy woman who discovers her bloodline suffers from lycanthropy and uses it to protect her family secret.Īside from the aforementioned Universal sequels, the moon must not have shined very bright because the werewolf movie all but disappeared after this until Columbia returned with yet another feature, this one sharing the simple title with the original film, The Werewolf (1956). Bela’s assistant in this film is a werewolf played by Matt Willis, who stands out from the pack so to speak, because he is able to talk while he is wolfed out. 20 th Century Fox got in on the game the same year with The Undying Monster, based on the novel by Jessie Douglas Kerruish from 1922.ġ944 gave us Columbia Pictures’ Return of the Vampire with Bela Lugosi playing bloodsucker Armand Tesla, which may as well have been a sequel to Dracula, but they couldn’t use the name due to rights issues. released The Mad Monster (1942) in which mad scientist George Zucco turns his simple-minded test subject into a werewolf via a secret formula. The year after Universal’s famous film, Poverty Row production house P.R.C. In 2010, The Wolf Man was given a big-budget remake, with Benicio del Toro stepping into the Talbot role. On an interesting side note, this last film was given the unauthorized remake treatment in Ismail Yassin Meets Frankenstein (1954), starring famed Egyptian comedian Ismail Yassin. The death knell of the character came when he showed up in Abbot and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948)-which was basically the equivalent of launching a character into space in those days. This was the film that spawned the first werewolf franchise, and Talbot returned in Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1943) House of Frankenstein (1944) and House of Dracula (1945). as the titular character (Larry Talbot in his human form), and also featured Bela Lugosi and Claude Rains in other roles. Pierce also did the makeup for our next film, Universal’s The Wolf Man from 1941-arguably one of the most famous werewolf films of all time. It should be noted that the werewolf’s appearance was the work of famed makeup artist Jack Pierce, who was responsible for many of Universal’s most famous character designs, including Boris Karloff’s Frankenstein (1931). This was the film that introduced specific key notions that are still associated with werewolves today-namely that it is a curse that can be passed on via bite that transformations are brought on specifically by the rays of the moon that a temporary cure can be found through holistic means (in this case the mariphasa plant) and that a reluctant werewolf might attempt to lock himself up at night to prevent any further damage. It starred character actor Henry Hull as a botanist who is attacked by a werewolf, thus becoming one himself. Universal Studios released their first entry in the lycanthrope canon with 1935’s Werewolf of London, an important but often overlooked film.
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