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

I USED TO BE A WEREWOLF
(1981, USA), Teen Wolf (1985, USA) and its sequel Teen Wolf Too (1987,
USA), and Michael Jackson’s horror music video Thriller (1983, USA)
all featured male teenage werewolves in brightly coloured jackets,
using lycanthropy as a metaphor for adolescent trauma. A publicity
blurb for Teen Wolf makes these connections as obvious as possible:
‘He’s going through changes. His voice is changing. He’s got hair on
his chest. He’s stopped being a boy. At last he’s become — A WOLF!’
Even though An American Werewolf in London featured a slightly older
male, the film’s intense focus on the first-time transformation, and
the emphasis on David’s naked, disoriented awakening the following
day, also resonates with the groggy experience of ‘the morning after’
which Western culture sanctions as a form of adolescent initiation and
bachelor bravado.
Although the themes of lycanthropic sexuality, female lycanthropy
and adolescence were explored in an unprecedented fashion in the
films of the 1980s, the body of the monster still tended to be coded in
terms of excessive masculinity, as the visible extension of the aggressive
potential contained within the body of the ordinary human male.
Indeed, the aggression implicit in the masculine physique has been consistently
emphasized in werewolf films by the casting of powerfully built
actors in the role of the werewolf. Lon Chaney Jr was a huge man, and
The Wolf Man made this explicit when Larry’s father expresses pride
about the build of his son to a friend: ‘Big boy, isn’t he?’, to which the
other replies ‘Huge.’ Subsequent actors portraying werewolves, notably
Paul Naschy (who starred in, and scripted, directed and/or produced
thirteen Mexican werewolf films between 1967 and 2004) and Oliver
Reed (Curse of the Werewolf, 1960, UK), were of a similar build.
The excessive masculinity of the werewolf body also exaggerates
conventions of masculine representation described by Paul Hoch, who
notes that the villain in American films ‘is almost invariably depicted
as somewhat darker, dirtier, hairier, more dishevelled, less clean cut,
more dissolute than his white heroic antagonist’. 60 The werewolf unites
in a single body the elements of the hero and the villain described by
Hoch, and the features that mark the beast as ‘lower’ than the civilized
man correspond to the same racist and class-prejudiced conventions
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