[HorrorScience] The Wolf Man (1941)

Reading time: 7 minutes

Qualification

The Wolf Man

Year

1941

Duration

70 minutes

Director

George Waggner

Distribution

Lon Chaney Jr, Claude Rains, Bela Lugosi, Warren William, Patric Knowles, Maria Ouspenskaya, Evelyn Ankers, J. M. Kerrigan, Fay Helm, Forrester Harvey

Script

Curt Siodmak

The werewolf is one of the most classic characters in horror cinema and many films have used this character, whose curse causes him to go from being a normal and ordinary human to becoming a monstrous being with murderous instincts. The Wolf Man (The werewolf) was not the first film to use this type of characters, but it was certainly one of the most influential and popular.

Larry Talbot (Lon Chaney Jr), the youngest son of the influential Talbot family who owns land in a small town in England, returns home after spending 18 years living in the United States. The reason for his return has to do with the death of his older brother, who was going to inherit all the family lands as well as the responsibility that his surname gave him.

[HorrorScience] The Wolf Man (1941) — Larry's father will try to get his son to follow in his footsteps

Larry's father knows that his adventurous son will have to get used to the change in life, but he trusts that his ideas can help in one way or another the pride of his family and the town in which they live. However, Larry is much more interested in flirting with the pretty girls in town, especially with Gwen, the saleswoman at the antique store, from whom he buys a cane whose handle is shaped like a wolf's head made of silver.

The mythology of the werewolf is present in every corner of the town, even those who say they do not believe this superstition know perfectly well the story of how the werewolf stalks his victims, who will know their fatal fate in advance, since the wolf's mark (a star) always appears on their hands before their death.

Larry manages to convince Gwen to accompany him to a fair organized by the gypsies. Jenny, a friend of Gwen, will join them to have her fortune told by the gypsy Bela (Bela Lugosi), who seems overwhelmed when looking at the girl's hands. While Larry tries to seduce Gwen, they both hear a woman's piercing scream in the woods. Larry comes to her aid and sees Jenny being killed by a wolf. Thanks to the silver handle of his cane, Larry manages to kill the animal, but not before receiving a bite from it on the chest.

While Larry recovers from his injuries, the police investigate what happened, because next to the young girl's corpse (which shows marks of having been attacked by a wolf), The gypsy Bela is found with a broken skull, due to the blows he received with Larry's cane, which causes the police to investigate the case in depth. Although it is assumed that Larry accidentally killed Bela trying to kill the wolf that attacked the girl, the whole town begins to whisper about the intentions of young Talbot, who feels confused, as he begins to feel strange at night and does not remember anything of what he does during that period, until he wakes up the next day in his room, with the windows open and his entire room full of wolf tracks.

The solution to this enigma seems to lie with the gypsy Maleva, who tells Talbot that the night she killed the wolf she actually killed a werewolf, who was none other than her own son, Bela. Having been injured during the fight, Larry has been cursed and now he is the werewolf. Totally confused and with practically the entire town against him, Larry tries to flee but his father does not allow him, since he considers that everything is his hallucinations, caused by the gypsy's gossip and the feeling of guilt for having killed Bela.

However, the crimes continue and the entire town has mobilized to search for the wolf. The hunt is held relatively close to the Talbot castle. What will happen to Larry that night?

The werewolf It is a film that stands out from other products that Universal Pictures made during the 1940s, so it is not unusual for it to be considered “the last of the classic Universal monster movies” or “the first and best of the new Universal monster movies.”

To understand this definition you have to stop and think about how Universal used its horror characters on the big screen. After having managed to terrify and amaze half the world in the 1930s with works of undeniable quality such as Dracula (1931), Frankenstein (1931) or The Mummy (1932), the company began to exploit these characters with sequels of varying quality while creating new films that lacked the inspiration of the first ones.
In the 1940s, Universal began making crossovers between characters from various films, trying to compensate for the lack of quality of the product with the quantity of monsters on screen, and it all started with Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1943), which coincidentally is the sequel to this film. Which is why The Wolf Man is halfway between the greatness of the first films and the decadence of the later ones.

The Wolf Man I think it's a good movie and maybe it's because of Lon Chaney Jr's portrayal of the lively and party animal Larry Talbot (the bad tongues say that it's not that he played well, it's that Lon Chaney Jr was like his character). I find the pace of the film adequate for its short duration and I think that the terrifying atmosphere of the forests surrounded by fog is very well achieved, although it is true that it has many moments that could be improved and that little juice is taken from the character of the werewolf, but you cannot have everything.

Curiosities about the film:

This film was released just a few days after the attack on Pearl Harbor and turned out to be Universal Studios' highest-grossing film of 1940.
Although Universal Studios already used the werewolf in the film Werewolf on London (1935) This 1940 version is considered the “classic” Universal Studios werewolf.
Strangely enough, Larry's transformation into Werewolf does not seem to have anything to do with the full moon, as it is not mentioned or appears in the entire film.