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76 THE CURSE OF THE WEREWOLF
the conventions of psychological characterization typical of the realist
novel, Endore had developed Bertrand (based upon Sergeant Bertrand
of Paris) as a rounded character with a flaw — lycanthropy. This approach
was emulated in The Werewolf of London, with the film tracing
Dr Wilfrid Glendon’s passage through confusion, denial, acceptance of
responsibility for the mysterious killings, abortive attempts to control
or cure his condition, spiritual torment, desperate efforts to warn
potential victims of their danger, despair, and a tragic death. Subsequently,
werewolf films have typically explored the mental anguish
depicted by Hull’s 1935 prototype. This trend was crystallized with the
1941 release of Universal’s The Wolf Man, scripted by Curt Siodmak,
a close friend of Endore’s.
The Wolf Man is Larry Talbot, played by Creighton Chaney, billed
as Lon Chaney Jnr because he was the son of Lon Chaney, the famous
horror actor of the 1930s 31 (Figure 8). According to the film’s narrative,
Larry has spent most of his adult life in America and is reunited with
his aristocratic father in Wales following his brother’s death. Bitten by
a Gypsy werewolf, he becomes cursed with lycanthropy, causing havoc
in his ancestral village. The years following the film’s release in 1941
witnessed the consistent return of the Wolf Man character (played each
time by Chaney) in a variety of monster-assembly movies, as well as a
number of imitations of the werewolf theme by other studios. 32 Indeed,
the Wolf Man quickly became as popular as the Frankenstein monster,
eclipsing Dracula and enjoying the most screen time in the films he
shared with other monsters. 33
Endore’s The Werewolf of Paris, The Werewolf of London, The
Wolf Man and its sequels forged a new synthesis of mythologies about
lycanthropy that would transform the werewolf into a powerful new
icon of the twentieth century. Indeed, because the werewolf lacks a
generating text as famous as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Stoker’s
Dracula, or even Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr
Jekyll and Mr Hyde, twentieth-century authors of werewolf stories,
rather than referring to a single nineteenth-century literary text for
inspiration, have consistently alluded to the cluster of texts which
defined the subgenre in the 1930s and 1940s. Yet, ironically, the ico-