Where werewolf films came from
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The werewolf film began as a near miss. Its first screen outing was a 1913 silent short called The Werewolf, directed by Henry MacRae, and no print of it is known to survive. Roger Ebert’s site describes it as feared lost. So the genre’s starting point is a title on a list rather than a film anyone can watch.
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The creature itself is far older than cinema. IndieWire traces the modern idea of the werewolf to ancient Greek writing, from which it spread into the oral traditions of Europe. When Robert Eggers researched his 2026 film Werwulf, he went back further than the films did, to old English and Icelandic texts. He found one English source that already tied werewolves to the cycle of the moon, a link fans usually credit to the movies.
A slow start at Universal
Hollywood came late to the wolf. The BFI notes that Universal left werewolves alone until it had made several Dracula and Frankenstein pictures. GamesRadar+ points out that Nosferatu had reached screens in 1922, long before any studio gave the werewolf a starring role.
Universal’s first try was Werewolf of London in 1935. It flopped, and IndieWire says it paled beside the studio’s Dracula and Frankenstein. Empire calls Henry Hull’s turn in the lead rather underwhelming. The film did leave one mark: GamesRadar+ credits it with the first werewolf to stand on two legs.
There was also a reason the creature looked tame. Empire reports that make-up artist Jack Pierce had to scale back his designs for the 1935 film. Pierce was the same artist the American Society of Cinematographers remembers as a forgotten make-up genius of the Universal monster cycle.
1941 and the rules everyone still uses
Universal tried again six years later. The Wolf Man, released in 1941, starred Lon Chaney Jr as Larry Talbot, an American who goes home to Wales and is bitten by a wolf. This time Pierce got to build the creature he had wanted all along.
The film had no novel behind it, unlike Dracula and Frankenstein. Screenwriter Curt Siodmak and director George Waggner built their own folklore, and Empire says that became the bedrock for the werewolf films that followed. The Guardian lists what the 1941 film and its sequels fixed in place: the full moon, the danger of silver, and a man who is decent until he changes. It also gave the genre its rhyme, the one about a man who is pure in heart becoming a wolf when the wolfsbane blooms.
Eggers, for one, is wary of the claim that cinema invented the moon link. He says it is commonly stated that the moon link began in cinema, and cites his medieval sources against it.
What came before the wolf
Literature had been shaping the werewolf film before it existed. In the Guardian’s reading, Stephen King’s Danse Macabre names Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde as one of three 19th-century novels behind modern horror. Jekyll’s features melt and change when he drinks the potion, which the Guardian likens to an early cinema transformation. Guy Endore’s 1934 novel The Werewolf of Paris became the next major text, and Hammer later filmed it.
The city mattered too. The BFI ties the strangeness of Victorian London to Stevenson, Arthur Conan Doyle and Arthur Machen, a strain of urban unease the werewolf would later walk into.
A monster that never quite led the pack
From the start the werewolf trailed the vampire. IndieWire says werewolves are less common on screen than their bloodsucking rivals, and usually less successful. The Hollywood Reporter goes further, calling the werewolf film perhaps the hardest horror subgenre to pull off.
The years after the war did not help. GamesRadar+ describes the late 1940s as lean ones for horror, and singles out Universal’s She-Wolf of London (1946) as a film with barely a werewolf in it. The genre’s first stretch ends there, with one classic and a pile of near misses.
The Wolf Man still casts a long shadow. When IndieWire previewed Werwulf, it expected Eggers to reach back to The Wolf Man for inspiration. And when Max Landis was announced in 2016 to remake his father’s An American Werewolf in London for Universal, IndieWire reported that Robert Kirkman and David Albert would produce.
The people who built the screen werewolf
Three groups of people made the werewolf film what it is: the actors inside the fur, the artists who glued it on, and a handful of directors who refused to make it silly.
Lon Chaney Jr and the sad man in the suit
Lon Chaney Jr set the template for the werewolf as a tragic figure. IndieWire calls his 1941 performance charismatic, melancholy and devastatingly sad, and says it holds up both in and out of the wolf suit. GamesRadar+ put his Larry Talbot at number one in its 2012 ranking of screen werewolves, arguing that his animal habits shaped later lycanthropes.
His name carried a family weight. His father, Lon Chaney, had made pictures with the director Tod Browning at Universal and MGM. The American Society of Cinematographers records that Browning and the elder Chaney once discussed a silent Dracula, but the father was dying of cancer by the time Universal made it.
Bela Lugosi also has a part in the werewolf story. In The Wolf Man he plays Bela, the werewolf who bites Talbot.
Oliver Reed and Hammer’s one wolf
Britain’s Hammer studio made a single werewolf film, The Curse of the Werewolf, and it gave Oliver Reed his first starring role. The BFI describes his Leon as a tragic figure of brooding intensity, caught by a curse he cannot control. Terence Fisher directed. Roy Ashton designed a creature that the BFI calls a careful balance of wolf and human.
The Guardian found the film closer to a tragic fairytale than a horror picture, with the viewer’s sympathy resting on the monster. Reed’s creature, like Chaney’s and like Michael Landon’s in I Was a Teenage Werewolf, looked more like a dog-faced man than a wolf.
Rick Baker and Rob Bottin
The make-up artists are the real pioneers of the decade that followed. Rick Baker had worked with John Landis as far back as Schlock, and the BBC says Landis spotted a fellow monster-movie obsessive in him. Landis handed him the script for An American Werewolf in London and asked for a painful transformation shot under bright fluorescent light.
Eight years separated Schlock from the werewolf film, and Baker used them to work out how. Paul Davis, who wrote a book on the film, told the BBC that the pair showed David’s humanity being stripped away piece by piece. The result won Baker the first Academy Award for make-up, in 1982. He went on to win the same award six more times, for films including The Nutty Professor and Men in Black.
Rob Bottin did the make-up effects for The Howling, also released in 1981, and the Guardian notes that Baker lent a little help. The BFI credits Bottin with inventing the shot every later werewolf film borrowed: a human face stretching, bloodily, into a snout.
Joe Dante and John Landis
Two directors turned the make-up into stories. Joe Dante’s The Howling blended social satire, film in-jokes and Bottin’s effects, according to Roger Ebert’s site. The BFI points out that its script, by John Sayles, made explicit the link between transformation and desire that older films only hinted at.
John Landis wrote An American Werewolf in London when he was only 19. He arrived at it after Animal House and The Blues Brothers, both hits. The BBC says Polygram then gave him the freedom to shoot it his way. Filming largely in Britain kept Hollywood away from his shoulder, according to the film-maker Jon Spira.
The Guardian’s 2022 survey treats Landis’s film as the more successful update of the Wolf Man formula, with postmodern humour and franker sex. It describes Dante’s as the harder, more violent version, told from the side of the werewolf’s frightened prey.
The newer hands
The line of pioneers continues. Robert Eggers, director of The Witch, The Lighthouse and Nosferatu, wrote Werwulf with the Icelandic poet Sjón. In 2024, Kit Harington played a werewolf father in The Beast Within, a film IndieWire read as a metaphor for domestic abuse. The Hollywood Reporter found it intriguing, if never very frightening.
The wolf has also reached children. Flying Bark Productions announced 200% Wolf in 2022, a sequel to its animated 100% Wolf about a werewolf who turns into a pink poodle.
The films that set the rules
Ask the critics which werewolf films matter and the same handful comes back. The best-of lists from IndieWire, Empire, the BFI and The Digital Fix overlap heavily. The Hollywood Reporter offers a shorter version: The Wolf Man, An American Werewolf in London, The Howling and, for those with an 80s soft spot, Teen Wolf.
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The Wolf Man (1941)
The Digital Fix calls Universal’s second werewolf picture the standard that many others would follow. The BFI makes the same case, saying it set out the traits that came to define later lycanthrope films. Larry Talbot heals fast, turns savage at night and learns the village legends are true, and he is not the only werewolf around.
What lasts is the mood. IndieWire says the fog and dark forest, and Chaney’s performance, stand out more today than the make-up. Empire ranks it fourth of its ten best.
The Curse of the Werewolf (1961)
Hammer’s only werewolf film opens on a cruel story. A mute servant girl is raped, falls pregnant and dies giving birth on Christmas Day, and the curse passes to her son. Empire notes that Oliver Reed does not appear on screen for 45 minutes.
The film was a fight with the censor. Empire reports that Hammer tested the BBFC deliberately, lost several minutes of footage, and that the cut version stood until 1992. The film moved to Spain because a set built for an abandoned Inquisition picture was already standing. The Digital Fix calls it some of Terence Fisher’s most beautiful work.
I Was a Teenage Werewolf (1957)
The Digital Fix ranks this one second, and argues it created the blueprint for transformation as a metaphor for a troubled adolescence. Michael Landon played the lead, and director Gene Fowler Jr came to it from the editing room. It drew some resistance at the time because its central character was so young.
1981: three wolves in one year
1981 brought three werewolf films: The Howling, An American Werewolf in London and Wolfen. Roger Ebert’s site adds Larry Cohen’s Full Moon High to the count. Audiences who reached Landis’s film last may well have felt some fatigue.
An American Werewolf in London tops Empire’s list. Empire calls it a love letter to classic horror, full of in-jokes and moon songs, but with scares and sex more explicit than anything from the 1940s or 1960s. IndieWire calls it perhaps the most famous and acclaimed werewolf feature of all time. Its transformation, set to Sam Cooke’s Blue Moon, won Rick Baker the first make-up Oscar.
The BFI also lists it among its urban wyrd films, for the way it carries a rural monster into the streets of 1980s London. The moors feel like the right home for a werewolf. The city makes it strange.
The Howling came third on Empire’s list and on The Digital Fix’s. It starred Dee Wallace as Karen White, a news journalist sent to a retreat that turns out to be a colony. Dante named most of its characters after directors of earlier werewolf films. Empire reports that Rob Bottin left Baker’s American Werewolf team to work on it alone. It made less money than Landis’s film but spawned seven sequels.
Wolfen, from Woodstock documentary maker Michael Wadleigh, follows a New York detective through killings that turn out not to be wolf attacks. The Digital Fix admits purists may argue over whether it counts as a werewolf film at all.
The Company of Wolves (1984)
Neil Jordan adapted Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber, which the BFI calls a landmark feminist reworking of fairy tales. Carter co-wrote the script. Sarah Patterson plays Rosaleen, who moves through a dreamlike tale of storytelling grandmothers and a winter forest where wolves hunt. Angela Lansbury narrates parts of it.
Teen Wolf (1985) and Ginger Snaps (2000)
Both films read the werewolf as puberty, and they could hardly be further apart. Michael J. Fox’s Teen Wolf ties the curse to growing up, and his first change uses prosthetic bladders to show bones shifting and skin rippling. The BFI calls Ginger Snaps the opposite of that relatively sanitised comedy.
In John Fawcett’s film, two outcast sisters are attacked just as Ginger’s first period begins. Ginger revels in her new body, while her sister Brigitte tries to find a cure. The Digital Fix credits writer Karen Walton alongside Fawcett, and calls it a star-making turn for Katharine Isabelle.
Dog Soldiers (2002)
Neil Marshall set his werewolves against a platoon of soldiers in the Scottish Highlands. The Digital Fix calls it perhaps the definitive werewolf film of the century so far.
The odd ones
Some lists reach further. The Digital Fix puts The Beast Must Die (1974) at the top of its eleven, a werewolf whodunnit with Peter Cushing in which a millionaire tests his guests for the beast within. It also picks Wolf Guy (1975), a comic action film about a man with a werewolf’s powers but not its hair.
Comics have their own lineage. Roy Thomas, co-creator of Marvel’s Werewolf by Night, played the werewolf himself in a 1958 short he made as a teenager in Jackson, Missouri. Marvel brought the character to Disney+ in 2022, first in black and white and later in colour. Its synopsis said it was inspired by horror films of the 1930s and 1940s. The Digital Fix noted it was the first Marvel project filmed entirely in monochrome.
The next candidate is due on Christmas Day. Robert Eggers’ Werwulf stars Aaron Taylor-Johnson as a cursed man, with Willem Dafoe as a knight sent to rid the land of wolves. Eggers’ Nosferatu, made with the same three leads, grossed $180 million worldwide.
How the werewolf left the castle
After The Wolf Man the werewolf scattered. It went to Spain, to London’s streets, to suburban high schools and to pop music, and it changed shape each time.
The lean decades
Horror went through thin years after the war. GamesRadar+ suggests audiences had seen enough real horror in the first half of the decade. By the 1970s, Roger Ebert’s site says, werewolves turned up only in a handful of increasingly absurd films. They included The Werewolf of Washington (1973), a Watergate satire, and a 1975 television film called The Werewolf of Woodstock. The most memorable werewolf of the period may have been the unseen one in Young Frankenstein (1974), used purely for a joke.
Europe kept the creature busy. The Spanish actor Paul Naschy built a career on tortured werewolves, in films such as The Werewolf Versus the Vampire Women (1971). His 1975 film The Werewolf and the Yeti ended up on Britain’s video nasties list in the mid-1980s. Naschy died in 2009, aged 75. In Britain, the small company Tyburn remade Hammer’s Curse as Legend of the Werewolf in 1975, with the same writer.
Hammer itself moved its gothic monsters into modern cities during the 1970s. The BFI points to Dracula A.D. 1972 and The Satanic Rites of Dracula as examples.
The 1980s make-up boom
Then came the make-up revolution. Hector Sotomayor, who teaches film studies at Ringling College of Art and Design in Florida, told the BBC that An American Werewolf in London set off a huge earthquake in horror. He credits it with starting the 1980s renaissance in make-up effects and with making make-up a recognised film art.
Before it, the BBC explains, films showed a change through stop-trick photography, slow dissolves, silhouettes and actors dropping behind a sofa to put on a wig. The BFI says the snout stretching out of a human face, which Rob Bottin invented for The Howling that year, became standard in every later werewolf transformation. Some historians even argue the film helped create the Oscar for make-up.
The influence ran beyond werewolves. Michael Jackson, a fan of the film, hired Landis to direct the video for Thriller. Baker did the make-up, and the BBC calls the video a direct homage to the film. GamesRadar+ was less kind about Jackson’s werewolf, which it found more feline than lupine from some angles. The BBC also traces a line from Landis’s film to the horror comedies that followed, such as Gremlins, Evil Dead 2 and Beetlejuice. Edgar Wright has said its tone and practical effects changed his life.
The wolf grows up
The Guardian’s 2022 survey follows the werewolf into adult drama and the art house. Neil Jordan’s The Company of Wolves (1984) drew out the fairytale bones of the myth. Mike Nichols’s Wolf (1994) recast it as a study of male desire, with Jack Nicholson and Michelle Pfeiffer, and the Guardian finds it surprisingly romantic.
The teen film took a sharper turn too. The Guardian says John Fawcett’s Canadian indie Ginger Snaps redesigned the myth for millennial viewers in 2000. It sets that against the goofier Michael J Fox vehicle Teen Wolf (1985). IndieWire lists both among its 14 best.
Television takes the bite
Over time, much of the werewolf’s work was on television and in franchises. GamesRadar+ wrote its 2012 list of top screen werewolves with Being Human, Wolfblood and Twilight in mind, and True Blood made the list. Its picks include Russell Tovey’s George, who fights to stay human, and Seth Green’s Oz in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. David Thewlis’s Remus Lupin in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban made the list too.
The werewolf also became a superhero. Marvel’s Jack Russell first appeared in comics in 1972, carrying a family curse of lycanthropy from an ancestor. The Guardian found the 2022 Disney+ special Werewolf by Night more likeable for its retro B-movie look.
A wider map
The best werewolf film of the new century, in the Guardian’s view, came from Brazil. Juliana Rojas and Marco Dutra’s Good Manners mixes class politics and feminism into a dark comedy about a wealthy woman and her live-in maid, until a full moon intervenes.
London stayed a favourite hunting ground. The BBC’s own film history pages lead with the American Werewolf transformation as the scene that took horror to extremes. Eggers, meanwhile, went back to the countryside, setting Werwulf in England around 1300, when wolves still lived there.
Where the werewolf film stands now
The werewolf film today is two things at once. Studios keep reaching for big new versions of the old monster, while smaller films, often from outside Hollywood, do the more interesting work.
The trouble with remakes
The studio route has a mixed record. The Wolfman arrived in 2010, with Benicio del Toro as Lawrence Talbot. Andrew Kevin Walker and David Self based the script on Curt Siodmak’s 1941 original. The Guardian’s 2022 view was blunt: despite Oscar-winning make-up, the remake had already slipped from popular memory.
Another remake followed. Empire’s 2022 list was already looking ahead to Leigh Whannell’s new Wolf Man, starring Christopher Abbott.
The franchise version took a digital route. Underworld: Awakening (2012), the fourth film in the vampire and werewolf saga, built its giant werewolf partly with motion capture. Luma Pictures recorded actor Kris Holden-Reid with 12 OptiTrack cameras for the shot in which his character becomes a 13-foot beast.
Why practical effects still matter
The Landis and Dante films set a bar that digital work has not cleared for everyone. GamesRadar+ said in 2012 that An American Werewolf in London still had one of the best transformation scenes ever made. Roger Ebert’s site marked the film’s 40th anniversary in 2021.
The film also holds a place on every list. Empire puts it first and closes by saying it is hard to imagine a better werewolf film. IndieWire calls it the top dog of the genre.
Fresh blood from Europe and beyond
The newer werewolf films often travel without the monster. In Adrian Panek’s Polish film Werewolf, set in the summer of 1945, the threat is a pack of starving camp dogs the SS left behind. Eight children freed from the Gross-Rosen camp are sheltering in an abandoned palace when the dogs close in. Cineuropa called it horrifying but elegant, and it won two awards at Tallinn Black Nights.
Spain went to the historical record. Romasanta: The Werewolf Hunt is set in 1850, when people vanish from the forests and the legend of the Werewolf of Allariz spreads.
The Guardian’s choice for the century’s great werewolf tale is Brazilian. Good Manners, by Juliana Rojas and Marco Dutra, wraps class politics into the story of a rich woman and her housemaid.
Still in the vampire’s shadow
None of this has moved the werewolf to the front of the queue. The BFI says it still tends to stay in the shadows of Dracula and Frankenstein’s creature.
Even Dracula’s own film shows the link. In Universal’s 1931 picture, Van Helsing explains that a wolf seen crossing the lawn is the vampire himself. The two monsters have shared screen time from the start.
That old pairing still sells. The Guardian notes how the vampire, the human and the shapeshifter became a romantic triangle in the two decades to 2010, from Twilight to True Blood. The BFI’s urban wyrd list shows another current, the London monster film, where An American Werewolf in London sits beside The Lodger and Peeping Tom.
The next test is whether a newcomer can do what Landis did with Rick Baker, and make audiences feel the change in their own bones.
Starter guide
Eight films, in order of release. Each appears on at least two of the critics’ best-of lists cited here.
- The Wolf Man (George Waggner, 1941). Empire calls it Universal’s classic 1941 Lon Chaney Jr. film, and both Empire and IndieWire list it among the best werewolf movies.
- The Curse of the Werewolf (Terence Fisher, 1961). Hammer’s only werewolf film, which Empire calls one of the studio’s real gothic masterpieces. IndieWire also lists it among the best werewolf movies.
- Wolfen (Michael Wadleigh, 1981). A New York police thriller on the best-of lists from IndieWire and The Digital Fix, even if purists dispute whether it is a werewolf film.
- The Howling (Joe Dante, 1981). Empire and IndieWire both list it among the best werewolf movies.
- An American Werewolf in London (John Landis, 1981). The Observer calls it a much-aped classic, and it sits at the top of Empire’s 10 best werewolf movies.
- The Company of Wolves (Neil Jordan, 1984). Angela Carter’s fairy tales turned into an arthouse werewolf film, on the best-of lists from Empire and IndieWire.
- Ginger Snaps (John Fawcett, 2000). Two sisters, one bite and a first period, on the best-of lists from Empire and IndieWire.
- Dog Soldiers (Neil Marshall, 2002). Soldiers against werewolves in the Scottish Highlands, on the best-of lists from Empire and IndieWire.
