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86 THE CURSE OF THE WEREWOLF
that mark out the villain in other films. Ever since the transformations
achieved by Jack Pierce in Werewolf of London (1935), for example,
the skin of the actor playing the werewolf has been blackened (Pierce
used a make-up sensitive to light so that the serialized removal of
filters over the camera lenses appeared to darken the skin). 61 Similarly,
the werewolf is regularly depicted as dirty and unkempt; his feet are
bare, if he wears clothes they are torn and stained, and his mouth,
hands and chest are frequently covered in blood. The hairiness of the
werewolf is another clear signifier of inferior masculinity, associating
the figure with an earlier stage of evolution as well as the instinctual
animal world. Hoch emphasizes the importance of hair as a signifier
of debasement when he notes that dark facial hair and a ‘shaggy’ appearance
are often signs of male villainy in film. 62
The most central scene in The Howling, the lengthy transformation
celebrated in the fan magazines as a triumph of special-effects technology,
focused attention on the masculinity of the werewolf’s body
in unprecedented fashion. Before his wide-eyed female victim, Eddie
slowly metamorphoses into hyper-masculine form, a monolith of sinew
and chiselled muscles flexing under all the body hair, 7 or 8 foot tall
and moving bipedally. The centrepiece of John Landis’s An American
Werewolf in London (1981, UK), released the following year, was also
the transformation scene in which American youth David Kessler
(David Naughton) undergoes an agonizing metamorphosis into an
equally muscled (but quadrupedal) monster, which won Rick Baker
the inaugural Academy Award for Best Make-up. Three years later,
The Company of Wolves (1984, UK) directly addressed the werewolf
subgenre’s fixation on the masculine body in a lingering transformation
sequence in which the camera dwells upon the undulating
curves of a werewolf’s muscled back during his metamorphosis. More
recently, An American Werewolf in Paris (1998, USA) acknowledged
the importance of the hyper-masculine physique in a restaurant scene
which marks the beginning of the American youth’s transformation. A
shot of a man reading a newspaper reveals that the back page of the
spread features the figure of a strongman in an advertisement for body
building, presaging the imminent transformation of the young man.