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Popular Culture Review
new ground regarding werewolf mythology, the good minister most properly
appears to fall into the ranks of the cursed.
The remaining five releases find their werewolves attributable to the
machinations of another character in the story. This form of werewolfery has
thus far been depicted in a couple of general ways. Columbia’s The Return o f
the Vampire (1943) finds its title character, Armand Tesla (Bela Lugosi),
mesmerizing Andreas Obrey (Matt Willis) into his fiendish alter ego whenever
Tesla needs an assistant to help carry out his revenge-based plans. Following a
somewhat similar line, the Lycans in 2003’s Underworld were created by that
film’s vampires to keep an eye on things during the daylight hours when their
undead masters have to sleep.
A different permutation of this type of background story finds the
major character injected with a formula developed by a requisite overreaching
scientist. The serum naturally causes the main character to revert into “a more
primitive state” that is manifested by their werewolfery. Creation of a werewolf
by a Shelley an scientist is the fundamental plot device in the 1942 Poverty Row
production The Mad Monster, along with the 1950s chillers I Was a Teenage
Werewolf and The Werewolf Interestingly enough, the first two titles find their
scientists creating their wolf men with malice aforethought, albeit for different
reasons. The Mad Monster's Dr. Lorenzo Cameron (George Zucco) hopes to aid
the Allies’ cause in World War II by creating wolf men who can attack the
enemy fearlessly without concern for the consequences. Dr. Cameron’s motives
are not entirely altruistic, however, for he hopes his discovery will initiate a
return to the faculty post from which he was denied tenure at the local
university. Whit Bissell’s Dr. Brandon in I Was a Teenage Werewolf is also
seeking acclaim from the scientific community for what he perceives as the need
to return humankind to a more primitive state that will allow us to better tackle
contemporary problems. The hirsute menace in The Werewolf is created
unintentionally when scientists attempt to save an accident victim (Steven Rich)
from succumbing to radiation poisoning. What the benevolent scientists do not
realize is that the formula for the life-saving serum they inject into the accident
victim includes wolf blood. As a result, this release’s lycanthrope can change at
will, without the pull of the full moon. Indeed, his changeovers tend to take
place whenever he is cornered and his life threatened.
While there has been little alteration in how the werewolf s origin is
incorporated into various plotlines, one cannot help but notice how the featured
creature’s depiction evolved during the seventy-odd years werewolf films have
been with us. The Universal thrillers found head makeup denizen, Jack Pierce,
relying on copious amounts of yak hair, glue, and lap dissolves to realize his
conception of the werewolves played by Henry Hull and Lon Chaney, Jr. These
portrayals also found their respective wolf men maintaining the general physical
characteristics of the person who transforms during the full moon, a trait that
would reappear through the release of Hammer’s The Curse o f the Werewolf in
1961. By 1981, when Rob Bottin and Rick Baker created their respective