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Werewolf

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Oliver Reed in The Curse of the Werewolf

A werewolf is a human who changes into a wolf, whether partially (as in the example on the right) or completely. Werewolves are found primarily in the folklore of Northern and Eastern Europe, the people of that region having felt most threatened by the wolf. The word derives from Old English wer meaning "man", and wulf, "wolf". The term "werewolf" should not be used when referring to all shapeshifters; the more appropriate blanket term encompassing all such beings is therianthrope from Greek therion (beast) and anthropos (man). Despite its folkloric heritage, the werewolf lacks the sort of mythos-establishing novel the vampire received with Bram Stoker's Dracula (1898).

1 Werewolves in Fiction and Nonfiction
2 Books
3 Related Terms and Articles
4 External Links

Werewolves in Fiction and Nonfiction

The werewolf did, however, make fictional appearances. Sutherland Menzies published Hughes, The Wer-Wolf, a fantasy about werewolves in the Kent countryside in 1838. There is a female werewolf from Transylvania who eats children in The Phantom Ship (1839) by Captain Fredrick Marrayat. In the 1840s, G. W. M. Reynolds contributed 77 sensational serial chapters of the Faustian Wagner the Wehr-Wolf for Reynolds's Miscellany. In Meneur De Loups, by Alexandre Dumas (The Wolf Leader, 1857), another pact with the Devil is made in order for a man to turn into a werewolf.

In Robert Louis Stevenson's masterpiece The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1887), Dr. Jekyll turns into the hairy, animalistic Mr. Hyde, but he remains human. Nor does Stevenson's concept apply to the archetype.

Sabine Baring-Gould's nonfictional The Book of Were-Wolves (1865) is probably the most influential of 19th-century writing on the werewolf phenomenon. Its visceral tales were graphic in tone, but then Baring-Gould could be seen as rather bloodthirsty. (Interestingly, Baring-Gould is also the writer of the hymn "Onward, Christian Soldiers.") A sample from The Book of Were-Wolves:

On another occasion they fell upon a little girl of four years old, and ate her up, with the exception of one arm. Michel thought the flesh most delicious. . . . Another girl was strangled by them, and her blood lapped up. Of a third they ate merely a portion of the stomach. One evening at dusk, Pierre leaped over a garden wall, and came upon a little maiden of nine years old, engaged upon the weeding of the garden beds. She fell on her knees and entreated Pierre to spare her; but he snapped the neck, and left her a corpse, lying among her flowers. On this occasion he does not seem to have been in his wolf's shape. He fell upon a goat which he found in the field of Pierre Lerugen, and bit it in the throat, but he killed it with a knife.

The Beast of Gevaudan, an 18th century French case, was dramatized in The Brotherhood of the Wolf.

Contemporary accounts of werewolf encounters are rare, perhaps being lost in the midst of Bigfoot and other Hairy Bipeds reports, which are sometimes reported with shreds of clothing. One of the most famous is the Beast of Bray Road, which has been the subject of both books and a cinematic adaptation.

Guy Endore perhaps approached being the lycanthropic equivalent of Bram Stoker with his novel The Werewolf of Paris (1933), but it has never become widely known. Werewolves were also frequently used in pulp magazine stories, but these stories cannot be said to have had a pervasive influence on the perception of the werewolf in general culture.

The werewolf really made its mark as a cultural and horror icon movie star, with a film debut in the silent The Werewolf in 1913. A few other silents followed. Although the German movie Le Loup Garou became the first nonsilent werewolf film in 1932, the first major werewolf movie came in 1935 with Universal's The Werewolf of London. But it is George Waggoner's 1941 Universal film The Wolf Man starring Lon Chaney Jr. that established the "laws" of lycanthropy in popular thought. The sympathetic monster, death by a silver bullet, aversion to wolfsbane, even the hint of a "baser nature" (translation: "sex") were established with The Wolf Man.

This cinematic version of were-folklore is exemplified by screenwriter Curt Siodmak's lines (intoned in the film by Maria Ouspenskaya):
Even a man who is pure of heart
And says his prayers by night
Can become a wolf when the wolfbane blooms
And the moon is full and bright.

—quoted as an "Ancient Gypsy Rhyme"

Interpretations in the 70 years since The Wolfman have made the werewolf more of a variable character—seen in turns as evil, or as a pitiable victim, or as an empowered superhuman, or as a hunk of burning beastly love, or as an empowered female, or as numerous other variations. The werewolf has even lost its "lone wolf" image and gained power in the pack. Beginning with Whitley Strieber's Wolfen (1978) and its movie version (1981), and subsequently strengthened by the role-playing game Werewolf: The Apocalypse, by the works of authors such as Laurell K. Hamilton (the Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter series—this author also makes use of were-leopards and were-rats, among other therianthropes), and by movies such as the Underworld series, werewolves have more recently been portrayed as a race apart or as part of a chosen family/tribe.