Sunday night I watched The Howling first the first time in decades, long post about that film to come, and it got me thinking about the changing nature of werewolf transformations in cinematic history. My thoughts are guided by the films I have actually seen and should not be construed as an exhaustive study.
1935’s Werewolf of London preceded that other Universal werewolf film by six years. It shares almost none of the mythology that the next film planted solidly into popular thought and in many ways plays more like a retelling of Dr. Jekyll and Mister Hyde. The transformation from man to hybrid wolf and man takes place during subtle cuts. The character passes behind foreground objects such as pillars and emerges partially transformed going through successive stages until fully changed in a werewolf in tails and top hat.
1941 changed werewolves forever with Siodmak’s script for The Wolf Man. This is the film that introduced silver as a werewolf’s bane and many other lasting tropes. Talbot’s transformation, unlike Werewolf of London, happens on-screen by way of lap-dissolves where in succeeding shots, dissolved into each other to create the illusion of a single take, hair and appliances are added to the actor until the change is complete. The process was time consuming and difficult for the actor and never fully convincing but remained the method of onscreen werewolf transformations for the next 40 years.
1981 witnessed the release of two werewolf films, The Howling, with transformation effect by Rob Bottin, and An American Werewolf in London whose transformations were designed and created by Rick Baker, both men would go on to produce some of the most legendary make-up effects in the last sixty years.
Both men utilized bladders, puppets, and vanguard make-up techniques and appliances to create on-stage, in-camera, transformations that had never been seen before. Audiences watched as body parts swelled, extended, pushed out from human to wolf proportions, in elaborate and minute detail. However, it was Baker’s An American Werewolf in London that changed the paradigm not only for film but for literary werewolves.
While both transformations achieve similar on-screen effects, Baker’s imbued the changes with bone cracking agony for the tragic character afflicted by this curse. David’s first and most elaborate transformation in the film is a grueling, painful, and terrifying ordeal because nothing about it appears even remotely tolerable. He suffers, and the audience along with him, through every moment of the change.
And just like that the agony of transformation became canon. To this day I read werewolf stories where the author takes the time to describe the breaking and reforming of bones and he painful shift from human to wolf. Authors I am sure that have never seen An American Werewolf in London follow the template that Rick baker laid out 40 years earlier.
