When I was a little boy, I was plagued by nightmares about a red werewolf.  I don’t really know where that obsession came from; obviously, I liked horror movies and horror movies about werewolves were especially welcome to me, but that the werewolf was red is a weird peculiarity.  This lycanthrope never killed me in a dream or anything and I don’t remember that he actually ever chased me… he was always just there, terrorizing the neighborhood, and a few times I saw him at a distance.  And he saw me.

With the exception of muttonchopped man-wolf Quentin Collins on the spooky soap opera DARK SHADOWS – which was my favorite TV show post-BATMAN and pre-THE NIGHT STALKER – I’m pretty sure I saw most of my first werewolves in print form before I saw them strut their supernatural stuff on the big screen or my parents’ phat console TV.  Famous Monsters of Filmland was a wonderful resource for this kind of thing, chock-a-block as it was month after month with a parade of freaks and monstrosities nonpareil.  Leafing through those fearful pages was like catalog shopping for my own nightmares and I suspect this is where the red werewolf thing was born – most likely a rendering of Oliver Reed’s Spanish shapeshifter in Hammer’s THE CURSE OF THE WEREWOLF (1959).  Other significant werewolves for me were Steven Ritch’s pathetic and confused sci-canthrope (as opposed to cursed or bitten) in THE WEREWOLF (1956), Henry Hull’s dapper WEREWOLF OF LONDON (1935) – one of the very few werewolves to wear a hat – Matt Willis’ puppy-looking shapeshifter helpmeet in RETURN OF THE VAMPIRE (1944) with Bela Lugosi (in his monster mufti, Willis was an undead ringer for our dog Fritz), the hypno-thrope Michael Landon played in I WAS A TEENAGE WEREWOLF (1957) and, of course, Lon Chaney, Jr.’s agonized Larry Talbot, THE WOLFMAN (1941), who padded through several sequels seeking the sweet release of death over the course of six years, ending with a comic supporting role in ABBOTT AND COSTELLO MEET FRANKENSTEIN (1946).  Later, I grew fond of Spanish actor Paul Naschy’s dedication to werewolfery in a slew of Iberian fear films from LA MARCA DEL HOMBRE LOBO (US: FRANKENSTEIN’S BLOODY TERROR, 1968) to LYCANTROPUS (1996), enjoyed the resurrection of wolfman movies with THE HOWLING (1981) and AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON (1981) and as I type this I look forward to the release of Joe Johnston’s THE WOLFMAN (2010) with Benecio del Toro next year.

It’s not difficult to understand why werewolves had such an impact on me as a young cub.  The lycanthrope is the perfect realization of man’s unbridled Id, his primal self stripped of socialization and ethics, reduced to the base instincts of hunger and self-protection.  I got the point of The Wolfman and his kind, why they were the ultimate monster.  While Dracula could be cajoled or bargained with, and the Frankenstein monster made a friend or kept at bay with fire, the Wolfman was like a heat-seeking missile of absolute terror.  If he got his eye on you, there was very little you could do to stop him.  I think the senseless insanity of werewolfery impressed itself upon me at a time in my life when I was finding out that Life itself was insane, unbridled, arbitrary and often cruel.

I was disturbed by my dreams as a kid but now that I’m rooted in middle-age and plagued by crappy workaday fears (money, career, carpal tunnel) I find that I miss my red werewolf.  (So possessed by the visual was I that I painted my Aurora Wolfman model kit bright red, like the blood in a Sam Peckinpah movie.)  Maybe I’ve supped too full of horrors… I’ve visited (sometimes unwittingly) true crime scenes, I’ve gone into caves and caverns and graveyards (by night!), I’ve climbed to the top of the Cathedral at Notre Dame (no hunchbacks) and the Tower of London (no Karloffs) and traversed deep into Capuchin catacombs whose vaulted arches were festooned (and not just a little bit… I’m talking über-festooned) with human vertebrae, I’ve made a home in those hotbeds of crime and corruption New York City and Los Angeles and I am at this point in my life pretty much fearless.  As a parent, though, I am starting to see my children, both still under the age of 5, starting to build their scare syllabi.  Vayda hides her eyes now when Snoopy rises up out of the pumpkin patch in IT’S THE GREAT PUMPKIN, CHARLIE BROWN! and Vic turns to me  in moments of fear and dread and announces “Scare, Daddy… scare!,” confident that I can make it stop and make his world safe and secure again.  I love the assignment of protector, particularly because it’s so easy, but I also envy my kids the infancy of their own individual horror aesthetics. They already know about vampires and zombies but werewolves are as yet undiscovered country to them.  Might have to do something about that!