Werewolf of London

Werewolf of London (1935)

Dir. Stuart Walker

Written by Robert Harris (Story) John Colton (Screenplay)

Starring Henry Hull, Warner Oland, Valerie Hobson

This movie opens with an intrepid, Indiana-Jones style botanist braving the dangers of cursed and forbidden valleys in the Orient and whatnot in search of a unique flower which he plans to clip and take back to England and grow in his greenhouse. When he gets attacked and mauled by a man-sized hairy monster, he basically just walks it off, just one more inconvenience in the adventurous life of a professional botanist. So far this Chainsawnukah I’ve learned the evils of Entomology and Egyptology, but damn, Botanists are hardcore as shit. You think they’re just fussy professional gardeners with their greenhouses and flowerphilia, but man, at least back in the day they were a bunch of globe-trotting wolf-punching don’t-give-a-fuck hardasses. Yet again it seems my high school career counselor let me down. Now I just need a horror movie to teach me that Geologists are all Satan worshipping baby-eaters or whatever and I’ll be set to go back to college and pick a better major.

Anyway, in the field Dr. Wilfred Glendon (veteran character actor Henry Hull), is pretty much king shit of fuck mountain, but at home not so much. His beautiful new bride (Valerie Hobson, BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN) is a very sweet and understanding lady, but Glendon is having a hard time transitioning from his reclusive bachelor ways. He keeps leaving his poor wife alone all day and night while he obsessively tries different lighting arrangements for his newly acquired flowers. He clearly loves her, but his work is getting in the way of him being a good husband. And this is made much worse when her handsome childhood sweetheart (Lester Matthews, JUNGLE JIM IN THE FORBIDDEN LAND?) shows up and starts dropping broad hints that if only he’d asked her first dot dot dot. While Glendon is occupied with his new flowers, the guy is showing his wife a great time out on the town, which would be pretty dickish except that pretty much everyone in this situation (including Glendon) can’t help but notice that, shit, this guy really is clearly a much more suitable partner for the gal in question.

Cue "Three is the Magic Number"

Man, can’t everyone relate to that scenario on some level? You’re trying as hard as you can to be the person you want to be, and then someone else comes along who’s just so obviously superior to you that just logically you ought to give in and hand over the reigns for whatever you’re doing. But fuck logic, you want it anyway, you fight it. But then you feel like a fraud for trying to cling onto something that you never really deserved but can’t let go of. That’s kinda the emotional core here; Glendon knows he’s not much of a husband, but what is he gonna do, just tell his wife (the only person he seems even remotely close to) that she obviously made a bad call in marrying him and ought to give up and go back to her old sweetheart? That’s some pretty painful shit. It turns ya inside out, exposes all your deepest insecurities and fears of your own worst qualities and most shameful failings. What could be more emotionally devastating than having fate push you into unavoidable comparison with someone who is simply and objectively better, especially when the comparison can’t possibly be missed by the one person you care about most?

Oh also he becomes a wolf man, I don’t think I mentioned that earlier so there ya go. Way to fuckin’ kick this guy while he’s down.

Fun fact: legendary Blues guitarist Howlin' Wolf was a lot scarier in person.

This was the first major werewolf motion picture ever made, and so there’s still a lot of that tweaking with the formula that you’d see in THE WOLF MAN six years later. The basic rules get retained: getting bitten by a wolf turns you, and the full moon brings out the beast. But there’s some other more unique stuff here, which wouldn’t persist further in the popular image of film lycanthropy; turns out those flowers Glendon lifted from Asia are the only magic/medicine* which can offer the burgeoning wolfman some respite and prevent a transformation. Unfortunately that’s all they do; they can’t cure the condition, just avert it for one night. And also, there’s only three of them in the entire Western hemisphere (the best hemisphere), and they’re all in Glendon’s growhouse. Oh, and there’s another werewolf around who’d really like to get in on that not-being-a-werewolf flower power action -- one Dr. Yogami (Warner Oland, from the Charlie Chan films). Interestingly, Yogami’s not a real bad guy either; he’s in the same unfortunate spot as Glendon, but their rivalry over the rare flowers makes them enemies and brings out the worst in both of them. Actually, come to think of it this conflict fits nicely with Glendon’s marital problems, too. He’s competing with another, arguably more deserving dude for both great loves of his life: his wife and his fancy Asian flowers.

It’s an interesting dynamic, and for my money actually makes for a more compelling narrative than THE WOLF MAN, where Lon Chaney is more or less a totally undeserving victim who gets his life ruined for no reason. Here, Glendon isn’t at fault for his condition, but has a lot stronger conflict over how he deals with it, becoming increasingly self-serving in his frantic effort to protect himself from discovery. Simply put, there’s a much clearer conflict here than WOLF MAN has, and it gives the whole enterprise a focus which is easier to feel invested in.

The one thing WEREWOLF OF LONDON kinda fumbles is the actual characterization of the wolf himself. First of all, Hull wasn’t about to spend hours on end with legendary makeup artist Jack Pierce while they painstakingly built up makeup layers, so they had to go with a slightly less exaggerated wolf face that ends up making him look like Tom Waits. Not a bad thing, exactly: the makeup looks cool even if it's not as exaggerated as Chaney's classic wolf man (also created by Pierce, interestingly from a design that he created but didn't get to use on this movie), and it has that fabulous widow’s peak that Pierce loved so much. But the problem is the movie doesn’t do a very good job articulating how much of Glendon is left while he’s wolfing out. He doesn’t seem to have much memory or control of his wolfman actions, but he’s not exactly pure animal either; he puts on a hat, scarf and coat before he leaves the house. In my opinion, werewolf movies got a lot better after the wolfmen stopped devoting so much attention to fashion. In fact, this iteration of the wolfman seems suspiciously similar to Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, with the werewolf a meaner but recognizably human intelligence that Glendon simply has no control over.**

Remember that time Liam Neeson punched that wolf? This is why he deserved it.

I feel like writers Harris and Colton hadn’t quite got a handle on what the concept of Lycanthropy represented yet. Werewolf tales were nothing new even then (in fact, the characters in the movie are surprisingly quick to jump to the perhaps logically dubious conclusion that werewolves are involved***) but I don’t think they necessarily thought through why the trope has remained such a compelling one. The most effective movie monsters don’t just threaten us physically, they’re also strongly symbolic of deep-seated psychological anxieties about the world and about ourselves. Vampires represent insatiable rapaciousness and sexual desire; Frankenstein represents the arrogance of irresponsible science and the fear of identity loss. Romero had zombies represent our mindless consumerism, other directors have simply had them represent the inexorable relentlessness of mortality. Obviously, it's not always a perfectly clear one-to-one symbolism, but the best uses of these ancient tropes have stayed relevant and affecting because they understand, at least on some level, that there's more to these monsters than mere teeth and claws.

Werewolves, for their part, have ultimately come to represent the repressed savagery of the human experience; Claude Rains even explicitly says so in WOLF MAN: “It's probably an ancient explanation of the dual personality in each of us,” he prattles. As I discussed in my long prelude to Chainsawnukah, the wolf man mythos plays off our discomfort with the idea that even “normal, nice” people are capable of unbelievable sadism and cruelty given the right circumstance. “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,” as the oft-repeated rhyme from THE WOLF MAN goes. “Even a man who is pure in heart and says his prayers by night, may become a member of a genocidal regime when the right demagogue plays into his insecurity over identity politics,” is a tad less catchy, but that subtext is definitely buried somewhere here. Even if it's not that explicit, the idea of a person transforming into a violent, savage beast speaks for itself; somewhere deep inside this part was always there, waiting for the right circumstance to take over. In WEREWOLF OF LONDON, though, the symbolism is a lot vaguer. The werewolvery is not the result of any specific tragic flaw, and its effect doesn’t seem to really have much to say about Glendon’s inner world either. He’s a guy with plenty of flaws, but you never get the sense that random violent murder is genuinely in his nature, that’s just the wolf talking. The transformation’s effect on the story is better handled than in THE WOLF MAN, but unfortunately its psychological effect on the viewer is somewhat blunted, probably explaining why it didn’t end up being influential in the same way.

Even so, this is a surprisingly strong film. The atmosphere is suitably eerie, the makeup effects are striking (even if it’s probably for the best that Hull’s was the only werewolf to favor a three-piece suit) and the cast is quite strong as well. Hull is both sympathetic and flawed as the nominal hero, Oland is captivating as his nemesis, and, particularly, Hobson as his wife is consummately endearing; she's ebullient and adorable but somehow also conveys maturity and a kind of muted inner sadness. The wife is a totally passive victim/object as far as the story goes, but Hobson (only 18 at the time, holy shit) does a lot to bring her to life in a way which helps motivate the whole enterprise. Toss in a couple well-constructed (but bloodless; this is 1935 after all) werewolf attacks and nice lighting (and even a little comedy, courtesy of two drunken landladies) and you got yourself a genuinely top-tier werewolf movie which was unfairly dismissed at the time and deserves to be rediscovered. Besides, even if THE WOLF MAN would go on to define the subgenre more than WEREWOLF OF LONDON DID, there are at least two indisputable classics which owe a lot to this film: John Landis’ AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON and Warren Zevon’s classic lycanthropic anthem Werewolves of London****. Between that and his legendary status as a world-class botanist/adventurer, I’d like to think Dr. Glendon has earned the right to rest in peace.

Seriously, though, parents. Talk to your kids about staying away from botany. Yes, it’s glamorous and exciting, but the danger is all too real.

*I say magic because it’s not like you have to grind them into a paste or something, or even eat them; just standing next to them will be enough.

**Audiences at the time felt the same way; the Fredric March version of that film had come out only three years earlier and arguably dulled a lot of the impact of this early werewolf tale.

***In fact, Glendon’s rival in the film immediately suspects that he’s suffering from lycanthropy. He turns out to be right, but he jumps to that conclusion (a tad convenient for him, natch) just a little too fast for my liking, asshole.

****Alas, despite the title, Zevon name-checks Lon Chaney and Lon Chaney Jr, but fails to pay tribute to Hull. No respect, I tell ya.

awww, he thinks he's people.

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2014 CHECKLIST!

The Hunt For Dread October

• LITERARY ADAPTATION: No
• SEQUEL: None.
• REMAKE: No, although this one would be a good candidate.
• FOREIGNER: No
• FOUND-FOOTAGE CLUSTERFUCK: Nope
• SLUMMING A-LISTER: Warner Oland, maybe? He was nearing the height of his career in the hugely popular Charlie Chan series at the time.
• BELOVED HORROR ICON: None
• BOOBIES: Ha. Not likely in 1935.
• SEXUAL ASSAULT: No
• DISMEMBERMENT PLAN: There is talk of mauling, but we don't see anything.
• HAUNTED HOUSE: None.
• MONSTER: Werewolf.
• THE UNDEAD: No
• POSSESSION: No
• SLASHER/GIALLO: No
• PSYCHO KILLERS (Non-slasher variety): No
• EVIL CULT: None
• (UNCANNY) VALLEY OF THE DOLLS: Still no dolls.
• TRANSMOGRIFICATION: Yes, man into wolf-man.
• OBSCURITY LEVEL: Mid. Flop at the time, but there IS a wolfman action figure featuring Henry Hull's likeness.
• MORAL OF THE STORY: Don't be a botonist, the soaring highs will never make up for the crushing lows. Also, if you're married to Valerie Hobson for God's sake pay attention to her. (interestingly, her later-husband and British Parliamentarian John Profumo failed to heed that advice, resulting in a sensational sex scandal that ruined his career and helped bring down the Conservative government in 1964. Hobson stood by and and they remained married. Man, does this chick have great taste in men or what? First werewolf botanists now this.)
• TITLE ACCURACY: There is a werewolf, he is in London. 100%.
• ALEX MADE IT THROUGH AWAKE: N/A

The Wolf Man

The Wolf Man (1941)

Dir George Waggner

Written by Curt Sidomak

Starring Claude Raines, Patrick Knowles, Evelyn Ankers, Bela Lugosi “And Lon Chaney, Jr.”

Man, Chewie was kind of an asshole back in the day.

I would have sworn to you, sworn, that I had seen this one before somewhere back in the foggy haze of my distant past. I even saw Joe Johnson’s ill-conceived 2010 remake and felt confident enough that I has seen this one to criticize what I saw as major thematic deviations from the subtext of the original. But going back and watching Waggner’s 1941 version, now I’m not so sure I ever saw it. Maybe I just read so many summaries, allusions, and parodies as a kid obsessed with monsters that I got the false impression I’d actually seen the whole thing. Or maybe I’m just older now and different things stand out. Either way, this is a pretty great one, but also a surprisingly strange film.

The film begins by introducing us to Lon Chaney Jr, as affable lug Larry Talbot. He’s Welsh by birth, but every bit the bumbling, good-natured American in style, and somewhat bashful in the face of his imperious (but tiny) father Claude Raine’s European high culture opulence. He’s back home due to the untimely death of his brother (which interestingly we never hear much about since stoic Claude Raines doesn’t seem too torn up about it) but he doesn’t seem to have anything specific to do with his time except hang around his spartan childhood room. So he fills his time by trying to charm a pretty local girl (Evelyn Ankers) into going on a date with him. She’s engaged, but he’s lonely and his Dad is kind of shitty company, so he persists in trying to get her to come with him on a date. Chaney has a genuinely endearing aw-shucks nice guy quality, completely believable as the nice guy who never quite gets the girl but at least enjoys the chase. Even by 1941, audiences had surely seen enough movies to know that the arc here is that the good-hearted hero eventually wins the fair lady away from her asshole fiance who for some reason she never noticed is an asshole, because women are dumb.

That seems like where this is headed. In fact --despite all the exposition about the werewolf myth which seems to be the talk of the town despite the fact that ha ha, we all know that’s total superstitious nonsense-- there’s kind of a romantic comedy vibe going here. Larry and Pretty Local Girl (PLG) exchange banter, she rebuffs him but he persists, there’s a wacky misunderstanding where he explains that he’s been watching her dress through his dad’s gigantic telescope (Claude Raines is a man of science, long story). And finally she relents, she’ll go on a date with him if she can bring her boring friend. Next stop: montage-ville!

Take this plot device, it will contribute nothing.

Unfortunately, Larry is as bad at picking dating spots as he is at not being bitten by a werewolf (spoiler). His idea of a fun time is to go get their fortunes read by openly stereotypical gypsy Bela Lugosi, who has some werewolf problems of his own. Next thing you know, Larry saves PLG’s friend from a wolf attack, only to be bitten himself in the process. Uh oh.

What’s weird about all this is that it causes the movie to suddenly and radically change directions. The whole rest of the movie is about Larry wolfing out and slowly coming to understand exactly what’s happening to him. PLG doesn’t really show up again until the very end when wolfie tries to eat her and Larry’s diminutive asshole father has to step in and save the day. Meanwhile, Larry becomes a ineffectual victim, gradually realizing the truth but unable to do anything about it until someone else intervenes. There’s no question of burgeoning romance, no lesson to be learned, just suffering and eventual death for all concerned parties. It’s actually an insanely bleak story: our affable hero is turned into a brutal killer by means utterly beyond his control, lives just long enough to learn that his situation is completely hopeless, and has to be [SPOILER] put down by his distant, uncaring father simply to prevent him from harming the only other person who ever treated him decently so she can go on to marry some other dude. Jesus fucking Christ, no wonder the remake ended with a ludicrous werewolf-on-werewolf smackdown.

What strikes me as particularly odd for a film of this time period is the notable lack of moralizing. There doesn’t seem to be any kind of irony or justice in what happens to Larry, nor does it change him in any way (either for better or worse). Actually the whole film is completely lacking in character arcs, making it really inscrutable exactly how this scenario is meant to be interpreted. Is Larry being punished for wanting to bone some other dude’s fiance? Seems unlikely, since he’s portrayed quite sympathetically and in fact ends up bitten while heroically trying to save someone he’s just met. In fact, the old gypsy woman (a great Maria Ouspenskaya) eulogizes the werewolves’ passing with “...the way you walked was thorny through no fault of your own.”

The original grumpy cat.

Fair enough, so it’s not a tragic punishment. Is this supposed to be a parable about the capriciousness of fate, then? If so, it seems strange that this is never discussed or even acknowledged, nor does Larry seem to have much luck to begin with (even his wealth is an embarrassment for him, not an advantage). There may be an element of cruel fate here, though, because the fiance takes one look at Larry and gives PLG a concerned “There’s something very tragic about that man, and I’m sure nothing but harm will come to you through him.” He turns out to be correct, granted, but it seems like a kinda convenient thing to say about a guy hitting on his girlfriend.

In fact, the only thing that people seem interested in discussing about the werewolf myth is how it works as a psychological metaphor. People struggle to accept the savage nature of man and so invent myths to explain this duality of nature, explains Claude Raines. When Larry starts telling everyone he’s a werewolf, they brush him off and seem to imply that he’s delusionally trying to impose this legend on his life to help him deal with the very real trauma he experienced recently (“Most anything can happen to a man in his own mind,” his father tells him). Claude Raines, a man of science, scoffs at the very idea of werewolves, but explains how it makes a fitting folk explanation for lycanthropy and, importantly, as a symbolic means to help ignorant locals understand how killers can live amongst us, seemingly normal but occasionally possessed by a murderous side (“the dual personality in all of us,” says Raines). In fact the very first image of the film is an encyclopedia entry on Lycanthropy, which is specifically defined as “A disease of the mind.” Why so much talk about the legend and its place in modern science? I mean, not since season 6 of the X-Files has there been so much labored skepticism about something which we can all plainly see is obviously really happening, right?

If this ice was any drier it would be a Doonesbury punchline. Hey-o!

And that’s where things get sticky, because all this obviously begs the question about what actually is going on. Does 1941’s THE WOLF MAN understand how meta it is for a story about a wolf man to go on and on about what the story of the wolf man actually represents, but then also depict it as a literal true story about a wolf man? I’m tempted to say no, but there’s a small part of me which can’t help turning over the evidence that maybe Claude Raines is right, there’s more going on here than meets the eye.

From the camera’s perspective, Larry’s story checks out. We see Bela exhibit signs of werewolvery, see Larry transform --hour upon hour of painstaking makeup-- and see him venture out into the night looking for victims in various remote, foggy soundstages. We see animal tracks turning into human tracks at his window. Seems kind of overwhelming. And yet, maybe there’s reason to doubt, too.

For one thing, the initial werewolf attack that gets Larry bitten is oddly coy for a movie which is literally called THE WOLF MAN. Most of it occurs behind a tree and in the shadows, but not only is the animal Larry fights clearly a wolf (or large dog) --and not any sort of wolf man-- but we also see a few frames which clearly depict Bela Lugosi, and not a dog or a man in makeup. Wha? Since when does being bitten by either a dog or a heroin-addled Hungarian ham result in a hybrid man/wolf killing machine?

But OK, maybe you can chalk that up to an odd artistic decision which was intended to create a perception, not be analyzed frame for frame on DVD. But that still leaves you with surprisingly little evidence that a transformation happens to Larry’s body and not just his mind. His victims are all alone when he sees them, and none of them says or does anything which would conclusively prove they’re seeing a wolfman. In fact, the only person who sees him as a wolf and comments on it is the old gypsy woman, who was already a believer and even seems to plant the seed in Larry’s mind as to what’s happening to him. While he’s unconscious, she transforms him temporarily back to a human, so that when a pair of hunters come across him moments later, they just see Larry. Is this starting to seem suspicious?

There, by tying you to this chair every time the moon is full, I'll prove you're not crazy!

There are other signs. Larry attributes his rapid healing to the supernatural power of being a werewolf. But wait, did anyone else even see his wounds? He comes in to the house claiming to have been bitten and covered in blood, so everyone believes his story. But the next day when they check, no wounds. Have they healed, or were they never there to begin with? If everyone is so certain that people have been dying in a series of animal attacks, why is the local constable clearly suspicious of Larry? What does he think is going on here?

There is one other person in the film who sees the werewolf: John Talbot, Larry’s father, who [SPOILERS] sees the wolf attacking PLG and bludgeons him to death at the film's end. Once wolfie is dead, though, he is amazed to watch the body transform from a wolf back into his son. Is this a physical transformation, though, or does it represent the process of Sir Talbot’s slow realization of what he’s done? After all, the whole movie is about Larry’s gradual realization about what he’s become -- maybe at the end his father finally gets to understand his son.

"Most anything can happen to a man in his own mind," right? Perhaps even a father who would rather see a ridiculous fairy tale (which he has already dismissed as bunk) than see the obvious truth which is right in front of him: his son has indeed become a monster, but the purely human kind. The veneer of the supernatural is actually a comforting lie both Talbots eventually tell themselves so they don't have to face the truth about their own inner darkness.

Obviously, this all requires a somewhat aggressively loose interpretation of a film which seems relatively straightforward on its surface. But consider: unlike Dracula, Frankenstein, the Invisible Man, and so forth, the Wolf Man is one of the few Universal Monsters which does not have its roots in some discrete source of classic literature. Screenwriter Curt Siodmak (who, by the way, is the brother of classic Noir director Robert) had the leisure to make his own rules and tell the story at his own pace. It’s his choice to include so much dialogue about the legend itself, his choice to spend so much time with characters who eloquently argue against the exact story we’re watching play out. It’s also his choice to include other intriguing details (for instance, the idea --abandoned in other tellings-- that future werewolf victims are marked with a pentagram, a symbol of their fate which evokes the Nazi use of the Star of David as a marker of death) which at first seem to fold neatly into the story but later make you wonder if they’re reflections of external or internal reality. Certainly Siodmak --a Jew who fled Germany in 1937 after listening to one too many anti-semitic tirades-- probably knew all too well the horror that even being marked with an invisible star could bring. (UPDATE 10/1/2014: An interview with Siodmak from the 90's confirms that his original script left a lot more ambiguity about how much of this was real. It was changed at the behest of the studio suites who wanted a more concrete monster.)

Seriously, though, Claude Raines is like three feet tall. This frame is a LotR-style visual trick.

Whatever the truth, the thing that makes it worth discussing is that the movie (while narratively a little ambiguous) is full of classic sequences and about the most perfect example of the Universal Monsters gothic atmosphere as you can imagine. Foggy moors, gnarled tree roots, superstitious villagers, beautiful women screaming; this film’s got it all. And of course, Unlike WEREWOLF OF LONDON actor Henry Hull (who objected to having his face covered and hence had makeup designed to make him look like Tom Waits) Chaney’s wolfman makeup (by Universal makeup artist Jack Pierce, also the creator of Karloff's iconic Frankenstein look and numerous other classic horror films) is stunning even by today’s standards and earns every bit of its classic reputation, both in its technical creation and its design. But maybe the best measure of the film’s success is how thoroughly it has integrated itself into the common culture. This would be the template, and at the very least the inspiration, for virtually every other werewolf movie which would follow it, from CURSE OF THE WEREWOLF to AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON to THE HOWLING to GINGER SNAPS. Only George Romero’s reinvention of the zombie with NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD can compete with Siodmak for creating wholesale a cultural icon which would go on to completely dominate and define the way we think about genres themselves, let alone movie monsters. For that alone --nevermind Chaney’s loveable performance, the poetic visual atmosphere, the spectacular makeup, the subtly mysterious themes and so forth-- this is definitely one for the record books. Ah-whooooo! I saw Lon Chaney Jr. walking with the queen, doing the werewolves of London.

He's the hairy-handed gent, that ran amok in Kent. Lately he's been overheard in Mayfair...