Werewolf of London (1935)

Film: Werewolf of London (1935)
Stars: Henry Hull, Warner Oland, Valerie Hobson, Lester Matthews, Spring Byington
Director: Stuart Walker
Oscar History: No nominations
Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

This month we are devoting all of our classic film reviews to Golden Age Horror films that I saw for the first time this year.  If you want to take a look at past titles (from this and other seasons of this series), look at the bottom of the page for links.

We continue on with our month devoted to classic Hollywood horror with a move into some of the deeper cuts of the Universal Monster canon; while we'll interject other classic horror throughout the next few weeks (and move away from this motif into 1950's horror in the last week leading up to Halloween), this is where we're going to stay with the series for the next two weeks, entrenched in the Universal Monster movies of the 1930's & 40's, and here we're going to investigate a strange flick.  One of the most iconic universal horror films was The Wolf Man, with Lon Chaney, Jr. as the title character, but this wasn't the first foray that Universal did into werewolves.  While other films had used werewolves dating as far back as 1913, Werewolf of London is considered to be the first major motion-picture from a Hollywood studio to feature a werewolf, and as we'll see below, was highly influential in the 80 years that followed on what would become a staple of horror cinema.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is prototypical of the werewolf genre.  We have Dr. Wilfred Glendon (Hull), who is a brilliant-but-distant botanist who is visiting Tibet in search of a rare plant that flowers due to moonlight.  While there, he is bitten by a creature who turns out to be a werewolf, and he also when he returns meets a strange man named Dr. Yogami (Oland), who claims to have met him in Tibet (which we learn later is because Dr. Yogami was the man who bit him).  Both men are werewolves, and Glendon starts to terrorize & murder young women around London.  He tries to put distance between himself and his wife Lisa (Hobson), as he is told that a werewolf will hunt the one he loves the most, which of course is his wife.  The film progresses to Glendon eventually running out of cures (Yogami steals the flowers that are supposedly the anecdote), and before he can kill Lisa, is shot by a police officer, thus stopping him and turning him back into a man, as Lisa looks on in grief.

The movie is hard to gage in some respects because it would become so prototypical of the werewolf genre-the more successful The Wolf Man would borrow heavily from this film, even using the same makeup artist.  Hull is not that impressive as the creature (originally Boris Karloff was supposed to be paired with Bela Lugosi as Dr. Yogami for this film, but scheduling precluded both men from appearing in the film), and you get why this film was kind of a dud at the box office-its lead is boring, and the only really good performance in it is by Spring Byington, taking on the role of a wealthy, wisecracking aunt (she would have made a far more fascinating werewolf).

That being said, the film, along with The Wolf Man and some of Universal's other horror movies, basically defined the rules to what we normally assign to "werewolves."  Before the Universal monster movies, werewolves were a part of folklore, but they were more associated with witchcraft, specifically that you became a full wolf and could do so through magic.  Here, though, the tropes of a werewolf becoming a werewolf through biting another person (adding a tragic twist to the process), that they are triggered by full moons, and that they are not full wolves but human hybrids are all became established as horror movie canon.  As a result, while this movie isn't that good, it's deeply influential on future horror films, including several we'll see later this month.

Past Horror Month Reviews (Listed Chronologically): The Golem, The Phantom of the Opera, Dracula, Frankenstein, Freaks, The Mummy, The Old Dark House, The Invisible Man, The Black Cat, The Bride of Frankenstein, Mad Love, Son of Frankenstein, The Wolf Man, The Ghost of Frankenstein, The House of Frankenstein, Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, It Came from Outer Space, Creature from the Black Lagoon, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Masque of the Red Death