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80 THE CURSE OF THE WEREWOLF
of a ‘natural’ order in which power and authority are conferred by
birthright — a line of thought which led to the French Revolution. In
keeping with the new focus on subjectivity or the development and perfection
of the self, male power was now constructed not as the ‘natural’
right of a man but, rather, as something that must be entered into or
acquired through processes of quest, crisis and resolution. Because
male subjectivity was increasingly imagined in terms of psychic division,
this process of accession became linked to the success with which
a man was able to ‘discipline’ his bestial, unconscious drives, through
narratives such as The Wolf Man. Subsequent cinematic representations
of the werewolf have regularly depicted masculine protagonists
who suddenly find that the crisis of subjectivity represented by the
eruption of the ‘beast within’ also calls into question their social
identity and authority.
As a result, the cinematic werewolf has become a perennial figure
of masculine crisis; Hammer Film’s Curse of the Werewolf (1960, UK),
starring an anguished Oliver Reed, encapsulates in its title all that
lycanthropy had come to signify for masculinity. So familiar has this
narrative become that the incidental werewolf character in The Monster
Squad (1987, USA) is introduced in the background at a police station
while two more important characters engage in dialogue, but the man’s
insistent ‘Lock me up — I’m a werewolf, I’m a werewolf’ is all viewers
require to grasp the scenario. Around two-thirds of films featuring
werewolves have relied upon the narrative structure established in
the 1930s and early 1940s, in which a respectable, white, heterosexual
man is accidentally afflicted with lycanthropy, suffering trauma and
anxiety as a result. The presumption that a werewolf must be male
(‘Who ever heard of a girl werewolf?’ asks Cindy, a character in a
children’s werewolf story 42 ) is most manifest in films which feature an
incidental werewolf as a minor or supporting character. Because these
films are not exclusively focused on the werewolf theme, they tend to
resort to a shorthand iconography of lycanthropy, presenting viewers
with a default version of the werewolf that is invariably male. 43 Just
as tellingly, other films reveal female lycanthropy as a ‘twist’, as in
Dog Soldiers (2002, UK), in which the local Scottish girl who gives