The Curse of the Wer.. - Site de Thomas - Free

I USED TO BE A WEREWOLF
refuge to British soldiers under attack by werewolves turns out to be
a werewolf herself.
Television horror has also reinforced visualizations of the werewolf
as male. As Gregory A. Waller suggests, television horror, in keeping
with its domestic suburban setting, is characterized by a more intimate
focus than cinematic horror; it is an individual, personal affair affecting
intimately characterized individual protagonists. 44 The private,
interior nature of the ‘beast within’ has thus lent itself to such modestly
scaled horror narratives, suggesting why the werewolf became a staple
theme of the made-for-television horror film in the 1970s. Waller in fact
uses a television werewolf film entitled Death Moon (1978, USA), with
its ‘focus on the fate of one reasonably intelligent, middle-class, white,
adult male’ to illustrate his point. 45 The voice-over which accompanies
the opening shot of a huge, full moon in The Werewolf of Washington
(1973, USA) condenses all the masculine anxieties deriving from a
culturally entrenched fear of the ‘beast within’ into a few fragmented
phrases: ‘That it could happen in America … that it could happen now
… that it could ever happen to me … I was the youngest member of the
Washington press corps, its fastest rising star … one of the best and
brightest, as we used to say.’ The message is unequivocal: normative
masculinity is vulnerable to the onset of sudden crisis.
Adam Douglas underlined the extent to which such narratives have
popularized a particular view of the psyche when he gave his populist
overview of lycanthropy in history and fiction the title The Beast
Within, but this text also demonstrates the acceptance of this notion
within analytical contexts. R.H.W. Dillard further demonstrates the
logic by which the dramatization of the ‘beast within’ in werewolf films
is then interpreted as a representation of the ‘beast within’ by reviewers
and critics, writing of Chaney’s performance that ‘in the Wolf Man …
we see our dual selves; his story is the story of us all, exaggerated into
parable and myth … The shock on Talbot’s face at the moment when
he sees the hair spreading on the backs of his hands is … a shock we
must all share.’ 46 Such convergence of popular and critical analysis
— particularly in relation to film — has been increasingly mediated by
psychoanalytic theory.
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