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This month
Jay Stone
Movie Entertainment
February 2010
The werewolf is taking over from the vampire in popular culture. I say this because The Wolfman comes out this month, with Benicio Del Toro in the role of the half-man/half-wolf character. (This is not to be confused with Wolverine, who is half a wolf and half a song-and-dance man.) Del Toro’s Wolfman is on the far end of the Hottie Scale by which movie beasts are measured these days, but he’s still up there among women of a certain disposition. A few years ago, Del Toro might have been considered for a remake of some vampire classic, but the fact that he’s heading into lycanthropy is good enough for me.
The werewolf has been in the ascendant for a while – the book The Girl’s Guide to Werewolves was published last September – but the defining moment in the new cult probably occurred a month later, when Taylor Lautner took off his shirt in The Twilight Saga: New Moon and showed what howling at the moon can do for the pecs. Suddenly, Robert Pattinson’s sensitive, New Age vampire began to look a little wan.
The werewolf myth has been around for hundreds of years.
My favourite explanation for the way a person turns into a man-eating beast was put forward by a 16th-century Swedish writer who said a certain kind of beer would do the trick. That has certainly brought out the beast in many of us, often followed by that other mythic monster, the hangover.
The first movie werewolf was a woman, a Navajo witch in the 1913 silent film The Werewolf. You don’t often think of women as werewolves – vampiredom seems like a more natural home, possibly because of the greater possibility of cool shoes. The modern rules that accompany the werewolf myth – that they die if shot with silver bullets, they’re kept away with wolf bane, they come out at the full moon – were introduced in the 1941 classic The Wolf Man, of which the new movie is a remake.
Since then we’ve had a long series of werewolves, including the Hells Angels-inspired Werewolves on Wheels. They always played second fiddle to the vampire. However, this may have been because blood-sucking was a more useful metaphor for the half-sexual, half-destructive notions of the id that monster movies often incorporate. Channelling the inner beast is a more limited notion, although Jack Nicholson made good use of it in Wolf (1994), and the 2000 Canadian film Ginger Snaps used it as a perfect symbol for the onset of menstruation.
Werewolves and vampires battled for ascendancy in a series of underworld films that postulated a long history of conflict. Vampires certainly had the edge in the elegance department, but the new werewolf bespeaks a move toward more traditional virtues: strength, stolidity, body hair. Werewolves are the beast of 2010. So long, Dracula, and fangs for the memories.
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