Underworld: Rise of the Lycans
Starting with the third Underworld movie, Rise of the Lycans, opening in theaters this weekend, 2009 has more movie werewolves than we’ve seen in years. We look at the history of this big-screen beast and some hairy horror classics that’ll get your lycanthropic juices flowing.
Nearly all European cultures and some non-European ones (like Native Americans) have some version of a werewolf legend. Anthropologists give many reasons for their mythical existence; ultimately, though, most of our views of them come from the movies, where they generally share the same rules as vampires: they change forms at night and can only be killed by silver bullets.
The very first mainstream movie werewolf appeared in the 1913 silent film, The Werewolf, but it was the first werewolf talkie, 1935’s Werewolf of London, that established most of what we know about movie werewolves to this day. In it, Henry Hull plays a botanist attacked by a werewolf in Tibet. He returns home to London where, like almost all werewolves in movies to follow, he goes on the obligatory killing spree at night, spending his days tortured about the monster that he has become. Dated now, it was no doubt terrifying for 1930s audiences. It was considered to be too similar to another movie at the time, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and became a box office flop.
Seven years later, Universal decided to try the idea of a werewolf movie one more time with The Wolf Man (pictured). Lon Chaney starred as an American in Wales, where he is attacked by a gypsy/werewolf played by Bela Lugosi. Early movie makeup genius Jack Pierce, who had done Werewolf of London as well, returned for The Wolf Man. The film used a much more sophisticated stop-frame technique that required Chaney to sit for hours, perfectly still, as makeup was applied, a shot taken, more makeup, another shot, etc.
Unlike Werewolf of London, The Wolf Man was a bona fide hit and inspired four sequels, each of which featured Chaney going up against other members of Universal’s “Classic Monsters.” In 1943’s Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman, Bela Lugosi, who had turned down the role of Frankenstein’s Monster in the original movie, stars with Chaney’s Wolfman, who rises from the grave looking for a way to die forever and end his werewolf curse. House of Frankenstein (1944) threw Count Dracula into the mix, and the trio continued their supernatural adventures in 1945’s House of Dracula. Perhaps ironically, the best of the “monster mash” movies was Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, a comedy hit that also featured the Wolfman and Dracula.
Dozens of werewolf movies were made over the next few decades, but for the most part, they were pretty awful. Michael Landon, far before he was the dad in Little House on the Prairie or the angel in Highway to Heaven, played a teenager who turned into a werewolf in I Was a Teenage Werewolf (1957). The Curse of the Werewolf (1961) was the only werewolf movie made by the British horror company Hammer Films, is famous for making many, many movies starring Dracula, Frankenstein and The Mummy.
The year 1981 is a seminal year in the history of werewolf movies, seeing the release of three genuinely great horror movies. The genre enjoyed a resurgence after the 1977 success of Halloween, but it was also largely dominated by psycho killers wielding sharp instruments. Werewolves gave horror movies fresh blood, so to speak. The terrifying The Howling (pictured) led to six, count ‘em, six sequels. In the original, Dee Wallace plays a TV reporter who is sent to a remote counseling center called “The Colony” following a harrowing run in with a serial killer, but of course… it’s full of werewolves. Wolfen, about wolves more intelligent than humans that terrorize New York City, is not technically a “werewolf” movie but with its wolf-POV camera view it’s close enough. Finally, Jon Landis’s An American Werewolf in London gave the werewolf movie a touch of humor without being campy. The light dialogue makes it all the more harrowing when our hero starts sprouting fur thanks to the special effects makeup by Rick Baker that won the movie an Academy Award. Its 1997 sequel, An American Werewolf in Paris, was quite awful.
Since that banner year, the werewolf’s movie return has met with scattered success. Company of Wolves (1984) starred Angela Lansbury in a fairy tale about a medieval village besieged by werewolves. Michael J. Fox and Jason Bateman starred in Teen Wolf and Teen Wolf Too, respectively, the sort of goofy 1980s teen movies you’d watched as a teen back then but today there are much better things to do with your time. In 1994, director Mike Nichols tried to make a “serious” werewolf movie called Wolf, starring Jack Nicholson and Michelle Pfeiffer, but the result was, well, exactly what you would expect from Jack Nicholson trying to play a werewolf. The 2000 Canadian independent movie Ginger Snaps became something of a cult hit with its tale of teenage female angst wrapped up in a werewolf movie, and has inspired a couple of sequels. The 2002 Dog Soldiers was a fantastically scary but little-seen werewolf flick. In 2004, Universal tried to follow up the success of their Mummy movies with the vampire hunting flick Van Helsing, but the attempt to also include the Wolf Man in the story failed like the rest of the movie. Finally, horror auteur Wes Craven tried to revitalize the genre with 2005’s Cursed, a troubled movie that sat on the shelf for over a year and did not do for werewolves what Scream had done for serial killer movies.
It’s now 2009, and like 28 years ago, we have a year with an unusually high number of werewolf movies. This weekend sees the release of Underworld: Rise of the Lycans, a medieval fantasy prequel about the battles between the vampires of the first two movies and a legion of werewolves. This fall, the sequel to Twilight, New Moon, adds werewolves to its mix of teenage romance and angst. And finally, there is Universal Pictures’ The Wolf Man, a remake of that 1941 Lon Chaney. This time around, Benicio del Toro will be wearing all that warm-looking makeup, tearing his shirt and howling at the moon, with Sir Anthony Hopkins costarring.
Greg Dean Schmitz, a native of Wisconsin, launched Upcomingmovies.com, the most thorough and widely read Internet database devoted entirely to movies before their release, in 1997. He continued the database at Yahoo! Movies from 2002 to 2007 as Greg's Previews of Upcoming Movies. Greg continues to write about tomorrow's movies today as a columnist for Fandango and Rotten Tomatoes.
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