Gregory Lamberson is both a filmmaker and author working in the horror genre. As a filmmaker he’s best known for the cult favorite Slime City
and its sequel Slime City Massacre
. In addition, he’s the author of the nonfiction filmmaking book Cheap Scares!: Low Budget Horror Filmmakers Share Their Secrets
(I’m reading this right now, and his writing really shines). Gregory is also the author of many horror fiction titles reviewed at MonsterLibrarian.com, including Johnny Gruesome (reviewed here); the occult series The Jake Helman Files (which includes Personal Demons (reviewed here), Desperate Souls (reviewed here), and Cosmic Forces (reviewed here); and, most recently, the werewolf series The Frenzy Cycle. The first book in the series is The Frenzy Way (reviewed here); the second book, The Frenzy War (reviewed here),was just released this June.
Because of his experience in both filmmaking and fiction in the horror genre, and his contributions to werewolf fiction, we asked Gregory if he’d share a little about werewolf movies and how they’ve influenced him. You can see what he has to say about werewolf movies in his guest post below. Once you’re done, scroll down to check out our suggested links!
Werewolves, Wolf Men and Lycans – Oh, My!
By Gregory Lamberson
If Rodney Dangerfeld was alive today, and he was infected with lycanthropy, his catch phrase would still be “I don’t get no respect.” Werewolves are the shaggy dogs of horror, be it literature or cinema. Some people complain about vampires, others wish zombies would go away, and both camps seem to despise werewolves. Not me, I love them, which should come as no surprise since I’ve completed two books in my Frenzy Wolves Cycle, The Frenzy Way and The Frenzy War. But this blog isn’t about my work, it’s about my influences: the moon howlers that have inspired me. There are readers and moviegoers out there who, like me, know that when treated properly, werewolves kick butt…and chew it…and spit it out. It’s their ferocity that makes them more visceral than those talky vampires and slow, shuffling zombies.
I probably didn’t know what a were-creature was until my mother bought me the Aurora Wolf Man
monster model kit. To me, he didn’t look like much: sort of a dirty, hillbilly old man. Because of the syndication packages broadcast on my local TV stations in those days before cable, VHS and DVD, I grew up on Hammer films rather than the Universal classics, but I studied film history through books and became well aware of Larry Talbot; and before The Wolf Man, The Werewolf of London. As a voracious reader, I soon discovered that wolf men/werewolves took their inspiration not from a literary classic as so many of the other movie monsters did, but that much of the lore I took as written in stone had actually been created by screenwriter Curt Siodmak for The Wolf Man; that man was a creative genius.
The wolf men I grew up with were TV movie creations, usually stunt men filmed in low light to prevent their rubber masks from showing. In Moon of the Wolf, David Jansen battled a “loup garou” in Louisiana; Robert Foxworth wore a Hawaiian shirt for his transformations in Death Moon; and Peter Graves proved that Clint Walker was just playing “The Most Dangerous Game” in Scream of the Wolf. Even Carl Kolchak got into the “Is that a werewolf? It’s too dark to tell!” game in an episode of Kolchak: The Night Stalker. During this same period, Famous Monsters of Filmland and The Monster Times made me aware of the films The Werewolf of Washington and The Boy Who Cried Werewolf; I believe this was the beginning of pop culture’s swing toward preferring “werewolf” as the correct beastly term, and Marvel’s Werewolf by Night comic sealed the deal: The Wolf Man was old hat.
For lycanthropy fans, the seventies ended on a high note with the publication of three influential werewolf novels: The Howling, by Gary Brandner; The Wolfen, by Whitley Strieber; and what remains the greatest werewolf novel, The Nightwalker, by Thomas Tessier. At the time, Brandner’s novel seemed like a less ambitious, less literary attempt to replicate King’s Salem’s Lot, substituting werewolves for vampires; it seemed ideally suited to be another TV movie of the week. In retrospect, it’s an admirable novel, tight and to the point. The Wolfen, about two unbelievable cops battling a small pack of super intelligent wolves, never really impressed me, but it was a bestseller. The Nightwalker, on the other hand, is a classic, and it’s easy to imagine John Landis reading it and thinking, “This is good, but it’s too damned serious!” It would still make a hell of a movie…
I view the 1980s as the Golden Age of werewolf entertainment. The movie adaptation of The Howling, written by John Sayles and directed by Joe Dante, made a lot of surface changes to the novel but retained much more material than people seem to remember; it also introduced the world to the first truly astounding man-into-werewolf transformation sequence, courtesy of Rob Bottin. That scene has yet to be topped, although I think the film’s spoofy moments, which seemed fresh at the time, have dated badly. Although written first, Landis’s An American Werewolf in London – despite a weak third act – was filmed and released after The Howling, but it is perhaps the classic werewolf film–filled to the brim with great comedy and horror, and astonishing werewolf effects by Rick Baker (apparently Bottin apprenticed under Baker, and Baker resented that his former pupil got to use his techniques on a werewolf film before he did). Michael Wadleigh’s adaptation of Wolfen is superior to its source novel, and the film is a different breed entirely from its fellows in this period: a smart, sophisticated, and serious approach to the subject matter, with very few special effects.
The first werewolf boom was upon us, spawning such films as Neil Jordan’s The Company of Wolves, and the less poetic Silver Bullet, based on Stephen King’s novella Cycle of the Werewolf. The advent of VHS in the 80s unleashed an onslaught of sequels to The Howling, which enabled Sybil Danning, Reb Brown and even Christopher Lee to collect paychecks. In 1987 I wrote a screenplay called The Greenwich Village Monster, which later evolved into The Frenzy Way. I briefly re-titled the script Werewolf, then abandoned that moniker when Fox TV, in its infancy, launched a weekly TV series with the same name, featuring man-in-suit werewolves created by Rick Baker. The show had a decent two hour pilot, but the weekly version’s half hour format didn’t allow the writers to develop much…anything. Michael J. Fox delivered laughs in Teen Wolf, which begat a sequel without him, and in The Monster Squad, Fred Dekker gave us the most iconic lupine reference in cinema since Curt Siodmak wrote, “Even a man who is pure of heart…” when one of his protagonists discovered, “Wolf Man’s got nards!” In the world of comics, Alan Moore wrote a daring issue of Swamp Thing which posed that lycanthropy was the result of a woman’s menstrual cycle and oppression.
The 90s were an unremarkable decade for howlers, populated by more straight to video Howling sequels and the theatrical An American Werewolf in Paris, which was a creative and box office failure. The best excursion during this decade was the novel Animals written by John Skipp and Craig Spector (I haven’t seen the recent film adaptation, but I’ve not heard good things about it).
The 21st century has been kinder to the beast, producing at least three films which could become regarded as classics in time: the feminist Ginger Snaps; the masculine Dog Soldiers, and the kinetic Brotherhood of the Wolf. Ginger Snaps, which owes a great deal thematically to the aforementioned Alan Moore Swamp Thing tale, gave birth to two sequels, both somewhat interesting but neither on par with the original.
When I sold my second novel, Johnny Gruesome, the word in publishing and movie circles was that werewolves were going to be “the next big thing” – how fortunate for me that I was in the process of turning The Greenwich Village Monster into The Frenzy Way! Unfortunately, the predicted boom hasn’t come to be. Four Underworld films, several seasons of True Blood, the entire Twilight franchise, and seven Harry Potter adventures (or eight, depending on whether you count the novels or the movies) have presented werewolves to larger audiences, but in supporting roles. Skinwalkers came and went, and squandered a good title. Joe Johnston directed a big budget remake of The Wolfman. I haven’t seen the film, but it did well enough for Universal to develop a straight to DVD sequel. Tim Burton’s recent Dark Shadows revealed a werewolf almost as an afterthought, to juice up an enjoyably haphazard climax.
I’ve pledged to avoid werewolf fiction until I’ve completed The Frenzy Wolves Cycle, which will hopefully run another two or three books, but I’m aware they’re out there. I did read Shara, an entry in Steven Wedel’s The Werewolf Saga, and I enjoyed Jeff Strand’s Wolf Hunt until a plot point similar to one in The Frenzy War forced me to put it down. I read the first book in W.D. Gagliani’s series about a werewolf cop, and Christopher Fulbright’s Of Wolf and Man is on my list of titles to read far down the road. So there are plenty of werewolf books out there to read if you’re a fan, but none of them have become bestsellers. Of course, Anne Rice could change all of that with The Wolf Gift. . .
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If you’d like to learn a little more about some of the movies mentioned above, you can check out Werewolf-Movies.com, a database of information about werewolf movies. It’s no longer being updated, but it’s still a great resource! The site also has an article listing the “The Wolfman Returneth: Essential Werewolf Movies”. It is one person’s opinion, of course, but if you’re trying to narrow the choices down, you might want to take a look.
In the past, July has been Werewolf Month at MonsterLibrarian.com, so check out our page on werewolves and shapeshifters for all kinds of reviews and lists of great (and not so great) werewolf fiction. Just scroll down the page, and you’ll find plenty of interesting material!
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