Yesterday I mentioned how Dracula was the scariest out of the three old monster movies I had. The Wolf Man was a close second because unlike Dracula who possessed intelligence and could have easily found another way to not hurt people but still survive. The Wolf Man had no choice and was purely driven by nature to fulfill his animal needs.
This film came out in 1941 ten years after Dracula had started the whole monster craze at Universal. This time the studio approached a young second generation actor to don the hairy make up and scare people in a whole new way. Lon Chaney Jr. was a man who had very big shoes to fill after his father had terrified the world nearly 20 years before in the silent film The Phantom of the Opera. Chaney Senior was a master of making himself disappear into a character not only physically with makeup but with the genius of acting. His son was no slouch either when it came to separating man from monster.
The movie follows a Larry Talbot (Chaney Jr.) who has returned home to his home country when he is attacked and bitten by a great wolf. He thinks nothing of it until a fortune teller (Maria Ouspenskaya) tells him that he will change into a beast and kill with no regard for human life. Talbot ignores this until the first full moon when he is changed into the beast and goes on a mad killing spree. The towns folk in typical old horror movie fashion set out to hunt him down and it becomes a race against time for Talbot to find a cure for the disease.
Unlike modern werewolf movies of today this film had no fancy CGI or other modern technology to rely on when it came to making the monster. All it had to rely on was some make up and an amazing performance from Chaney Jr. The transformation is very simple and is just a progression of time as more hair and animal features are added to the man. The movie is also quite ahead of its time in the way we see how people react to something they don't understand. Monster movies for generations would copy and try to recapture this magic. For being such a scary movie of its time now it is quite funny to watch especially the way the Wolf Man murders his prey by strangling them instead of biting or eating them. The movie is a remarkable achievement in horror for its day.
Well that closes the book on the classic monster segment for the month. Join us tomorrow when we delve into the fairer sex of horror and the miracle of birth. For High Weirdness I"m Benjamin Kolton reminding you "It's Only a Movie." "It's Only a Movie."
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