10 great werewolf films

Although one of the classic monsters of the horror genre, the werewolf often remains in the shadows of Dracula and Frankenstein’s creature. Hammer made only one werewolf movie, while Universal left werewolves alone until they’d turned out multiple Dracula and Frankenstein films.

Yet while these man-wolves may not have the respected literary background of the count or the creature, their origins reach much further back than Victorian literature to the rich and strange narratives of European folklore. Through choice, a curse or a bite, legend has it that these fearsome figures are humans that turn into a savage wolf each night of a full moon. This very act of transformation has proven rich in symbolic resonance: it can suggest both the physical manifestation of the primal beast hidden within men and women, and the return of the ‘modern’ human to nature in more primitive, animalistic form. 

The appeal of the mythology for filmmakers is twofold. There’s the visual potency and visceral yuckiness of the transformation itself, but also the layers of subtext about what that transformation might signify.

With the first of the year’s full moons, the Wolf Moon, about to rise in our skies this January, we fire a silver bullet through 10 key films exploring lycanthropy on screen.

Director: George Waggner

Although it’s not the first werewolf film (the tradition goes back at least to 1913’s now lost The Werewolf), this classic entry in Universal’s original monster movie cycle presents a number of characteristics that would go on to define subsequent lycanthrope films. It sees Larry Talbot (Lon Chaney Jr) returning to Wales to help manage the family estate only to be attacked by a wolf-like creature. Soon, by night, he’s transforming into a werewolf and attacking the locals, while, by day, he pursues a romantic relationship with antique shop owner Gwen (Evelyn Ankers).

The survival from a werewolf attack coupled with a fledgling romance would become a trope of the werewolf subgenre, in which wolfmen have often been cast as tragic antiheroes whose love-lives are doomed. Universal pursued the archetype in a series of crossover monster movies, beginning with 1943’s Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man.

Director: Terence Fisher

Based on the novel The Werewolf of Paris by Guy Endore, this 1960 film from director Terence Fisher is the only werewolf film made by Hammer Film Productions. It features a brutal opening story in which a mute servant girl (Yvonne Romain) becomes pregnant through rape, then dies in childbirth on Christmas Day. These events combine to curse the surviving child, Leon, as a werewolf. 

In his first starring film role, Oliver Reed portrays Leon as a tragic figure of masterful brooding intensity, reflecting the internal struggles the character faces because of a condition he can’t control. His anguish is compounded by his desire for local girl Christina (Catherine Feller) and his longing to free himself of his curse. Fisher’s direction is typically assured, while Roy Ashton’s werewolf design, when it finally appears, is a sensitive combination of wolf and human, a balance that matches the subtle shifts in Reed’s performance.

Director: Joe Dante

What starts as a modern, urban thriller quickly changes direction when newsreader Karen White (Dee Wallace) experiences trauma while offering herself as bait to catch a serial killer. To recover, she undertakes a therapeutic break with her husband, but soon discovers the setting is more a colony than holistic retreat. 

As is typical of director Joe Dante, The Howling delivers its horrors with a tongue-in-cheek attitude, offering numerous wry moments alongside Rob Bottin’s stunning make-up effects work. Bottin invents that ubiquitous element of any subsequent werewolf transformation – the human face distending into a wolf’s snout in all its bloody and skin-stretching glory. These horrific moments are amplified by a John Sayles script that makes explicit the latent connection between transformation and sexual desire only hinted at in earlier werewolf films, with the graphic transformations occurring as a result of equally graphic sex and infidelity.

Director: John Landis

Written when John Landis was only 19 years old, An American Werewolf in London combines horror, comedy and romance in the build up to its spectacular Academy Award-winning transformation. Two American students are attacked by a monstrous animal while backpacking across the Yorkshire moors. One is badly mauled, the other killed. Upon waking, the survivor, David (David Naughton), receives a nocturnal visit from his deceased friend who informs him that they were attacked by a werewolf. Should he not kill himself before the next full moon, he too will become this supernatural creature. 

The film’s extraordinary metamorphosis sequence is shot in the mundane confines of a living room in broad daylight. It depicts a very physical and painful mutation – a spectacle which is offset by its tragedy, as this moment not only seals David’s fate but also sets in motion his uncontrollable and gore-soaked rampage through central London. 

Director: Neil Jordan

Adapted by Neil Jordan from Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber (1979), a landmark feminist reworking of traditional fairy tales, The Company of Wolves explores the dark coming-of-age of Rosaleen (Sarah Patterson) as she navigates a dreamlike world of storytelling grandmothers, forbidden fruits and a dark, winter forest through which both a handsome prince and packs of wolves hunt. 

Depicted as a Little Red Riding Hood figure, Rosaleen’s reality merges with her grandmother’s fireside stories and warnings of men who are “hairy on the inside”. The Big Bad Wolf is reimagined as werewolf and juxtaposed with Rosaleen’s emerging female sexuality and subsequent empowerment. As beautiful as it is horrific, the film is rich in storybook imagery and accessible symbolism. It features a truly unique transformation by British effects artist Christopher Tucker in which the wolf inside pushes itself free through the gaping mouth of its human body. 

Director: Rod Daniel

In this 1980s teen comedy, the werewolf is explicitly linked with puberty, extending the metaphor to make it also about the transition of responsibilities from child to adult. Teenager Scott Howard (Michael J. Fox) starts to experience a series of unusual changes, resulting in his father revealing to him that their family is cursed to be werewolves. Howard’s first transformation is created through prosthetic bladder effects, depicting shifting bones and rippling skin, growing nails and sprouting hair – all culminating in a frightening image of teenage bodily change. 

Yet the film never takes itself too seriously. Rather than being rejected, the werewolf Howard becomes popular among his peers and allowed to experience the usual trials and tribulations of adolescent life. Fox plays Howard with all his trademark innocence and appeal, making this an on-screen werewolf of unusual relatability and sympathy.

Director: John Fawcett

Although it likewise uses lycanthropy as a metaphor for puberty, Ginger Snaps could hardly play it more differently than the relatively sanitised Teen Wolf. The film sees loyal, devoted but socially outcast teen sisters Brigette (Emily Perkins) and Ginger (Katharine Isabelle) being attacked and bitten by an unknown animal, which has seemingly been provoked by the onset of Ginger’s menstruation. 

Her subsequent emergence as a werewolf is as horrific as it is empowering for her as she revels in her new body through promiscuous sexual pleasure and blood-soaked revenge upon those who bully or challenge the sisters. While she’s embracing and indulging in her transformation, Brigette fears the loss of her only companion as she attempts to manage the outcomes of her sister’s increasingly violent mutations while also trying to find a cure. Running through John Fawcett’s film is an undercurrent of sisterly love and the theme of family unity.

Director: Neil Marshall

In Dog Soldiers, British director Neil Marshall combines his werewolf narrative with the trappings of a war movie, pitting these folkloric creatures against a platoon of highly trained and heavily armed soldiers in the Scottish highlands. Despite their technology, the soldiers need to revert to more guerrilla techniques if they are to survive their ordeal. 

Written, edited and directed by Marshall, who would go on to make The Descent (2005) as well as key episodes of HBO’s Game of Thrones, this impressive debut feature blends stark horror with well-timed visual and verbal comedy. Watching a soldier fighting off a werewolf with only cutlery and a frying pan – accompanied by Creedence Clearwater Revival’s ‘Bad Moon Rising’ on the soundtrack – is as humorous as it is horrific.

Director: Len Wiseman

Although critically maligned on its initial release, Underworld was a significant commercial success and grew a fanbase that would warrant the development not only of its own franchise but also a video game adaptation. Its success is due to the film’s none too subtle blend of gothic and The Matrix-inspired imagery coupled with its high-concept storyline: cool and seductive vampire assassin Selene (Kate Beckinsale) hunts and kills werewolves as she continues to play her part in a decades-long war between the two breeds of supernatural creatures. 

Clad in skin-tight, rain-soaked black leather, Selene is the lone huntress who shoots, punches and kicks her way balletically through the werewolf hordes who seek to destroy her kind. In these acts, she dispatches them with a graceful ease, made all the more beautiful through the use of gravity-defying wire-work effects and slow motion. It’s an intensely visual film full of guilty pleasures.

Director: Jonas Alexander Arnby

Jonas Alexander Arnby’s directorial debut is set in a lonely world of soft and muted tones, whose desaturation adds to the film’s strong sense of foreboding. Like many films before it, When Animals Dream equates the transition into werewolf with the onset of adulthood. Shy teenager Marie (Sonia Suhl) is growing up in an isolated fishing village and facing bullying at the local food processing plant where she works, when she discovers rashes over her skin, which seem to be growing hair.

In some ways reminiscent of Oliver Reed in The Curse of the Werwolf, Suhl offers a controlled and sympathetic performance as Marie negotiates the emotional and physical changes of becoming a woman alongside the realisation of what she can become and the potential power this offers her. Marie’s transformations into werewolf are as subtle and nuanced as Suhl’s performance, triggered by heightened emotional events rather than moonlight.