"There have been many werewolves in literature and film, but the defining popular image of the classic werewolf comes from Universal's The Wolf Man, starring Lon Chaney." "This is a replica of the wolf's-head cane that's featured prominently in the film." "Unlike the original prop, this one's made of genuine silver, so you could actually kill a real werewolf." "The rules and regulations surrounding werewolves and the wolf man owe less to folklore than to the fertile imagination of screenwriter Curt Siodmak, who took over an abandoned project once intended for Boris Karloff and made it his own." "Lon Chaney also put his uniquely personal imprint on the character." "The wolf man is the only classic Universal monster played by one actor alone over a series of five films." "Interested in learning more?" "Then grab your wolfbane, your silver-tipped cane, and come along with me into the Universal vaults, where we'll uncover the secrets of a monster by moonlight." "There's an old poem:" ""Even a man who is pure in heart" "And says his prayers by night," "May become a wolf when the wolfbane blooms" "And the autumn moon is bright."" " So you know that one, too, huh?" " Of course." "Everyone knows about werewolves." "Legends about people who cross the boundary between the human and the animal are as old as recorded history." "Primitive cultures often projected human characteristics onto the animal world, resulting in a rich folklore of shape-shifting tricksters, monstrous changelings and even the story of Little Red Riding Hood." "In Victorian times, real human oddities displaying unusual body hair were frequently presented to the public as sideshow attractions, missing links between modern civilisation and its shadowy animalistic past." "Wolf people, dog boys and other fantastic beings became objects of dark fascination for a public both disturbed and attracted by the theories of Charles Darwin." "In European folklore, the idea of the werewolf was intimately linked with the legend of the vampire." "The Victorian novelist Bram Stoker, a contemporary of both Charles Darwin and P T Barnum, combined both legends in the title character of his classic novel Dracula." "Listen to them." "Children of the night." "What music they make." "Dracula's affinity for wolves went far beyond mere musical appreciation." "Did you see the look on his face?" "Like a wild animal" "Wild animal?" "Like a madman" "What's that, running across the lawn?" "Looks like a huge dog" "Or a wolf?" "In Dracula, the studio was extremely reticent in depicting human animal transformations, which occurred only in discreet cutaways, if shown at all." "But following the success of Universal's Frankenstein," "Hollywood woke up to the commercial potential of spectacular horror make-ups, the more beastly the better." "Island of Lost Souls featured a whole stampeding herd of animal people, including Bela Lugosi as the Sayer of the Law." "You made us in the house of pain." "You made us "thing"." "Not man." "Not beast." "Part-man, part-beast." " Thing." " Thing." "Thing." " Part-man." " Part-beast." "Eager to develop a new project for its horror superstar, Boris Karloff," "Universal toyed with a screen story called "The Wolf Man" by Robert Florey, a French émigré director deeply committed to the principles of European expressionism." "In Florey's striking treatment, set in the Bavarian Alps," "Christoph, a boy kidnapped and raised by wolves who had slaughtered his family, becomes a werewolf upon his rescue." "But the ensuing story, including his animal transformation in a confessional, was considered too extreme by Universal executives, who worried about the reaction of the Catholic Church." "Werewolf of London, produced by Universal in 1935, originally began as a variation of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, but soon began sprouting aspects of Florey's "Wolf Man"." "It also took liberal inspiration from James Whale's The Invisible Man, especially in the person of a busybody landlady who lets rooms to a scientific monster." "What would you say if I were to tell you that it was possible for a man to turn into a werewolf?" "I'd say I was Little Red Riding Hood." "The noted stage actor Henry Hull played Dr Wilfred Glendon, an English botanist who becomes infected with the curse of the full moon during a research expedition to Tibet." "The original werewolf, Dr Yogami, played by Warner Oland, follows Glendon to London in pursuit of the rare plant that can provide a temporary antidote for lycanthropy." "Yogami, you brought this on me." "That night in Tibet." "Sorry I can't share this with you." "Remember this, Dr Glendon:" "The werewolf instinctively seeks to kill the thing it loves best." "Once more concerned about the censors, the studio took pains to make sure that the werewolf transformations weren't too horrifying or too hairy." "A very different make-up." "A much more subtle make-up." "I've heard people describe it as the Elvis werewolf, because he had this little widow's peak and these sideburn things." "I did see a picture once that was supposed to have been a make-up test for the werewolf of London." "It looked much more like the wolf man, the Lon Chaney Junior make-up." "It was a much hairier face and a kind of a dog snout." "And I don't know why they changed it." "It was probably some executive." "Or maybe they were afraid." "Maybe they thought it was too much." "You gotta pull back." "That happens to me sometimes." "The make-up artist who created the werewolf of London was Jack Pierce, the man responsible for all of Universal's classic monsters." "He got his start at Universal when silent superstar Lon Chaney, the legendary "man of a thousand faces" who created all of his own make-ups, walked off the set of the lavish costume drama The Man Who Laughs." "The task of creating a masklike grin for actor Conrad Veidt fell to Pierce, who quickly became Universal's official sculptor of living gargoyles." "Chaney had a son named Creighton who also wanted to act, but his father strenuously opposed the idea." "After the older Chaney's untimely death," "Creighton began acting under his own name and later, under studio pressure, as Lon Chaney Junior." "Chaney scored an acting triumph in the film version of Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men." "But the role of the simple-minded, hulking Lennie typecast him in other hulking roles." "At Universal, "hulking" meant one thing and one thing only:" "Monsters." "In Ghost of Frankenstein, Chaney proved he could fill Boris Karloff's shoes - at least in the wardrobe sense." "But the following year, Universal gave Chaney his own signature role that would complete the studio's stable of classic horror characters:" "Larry Talbot, aka the wolf man." "The title's called The Wolf Man." "But that's not our title - it belongs to Boris Karloff." "But he cannot play in it because he has another assignment." "But we have Lon Chaney." "Chaney was backed up by a distinguished cast, including Claude Rains, Ralph Bellamy," "Evelyn Ankers, Patric Knowles," "Bela Lugosi and, in a part that would become her own signature screen role," "Maria Ouspenskaya as Maleva, the Gypsy crone." "Chaney's most dramatic support didn't come from another actor, but rather from make-up artist Jack Pierce, who contributed one of his most inspired creations." "Again, Lon Chaney Junior had that thankless job of sitting in the make-up chair and having all these torturous things put on him." "It's funny, the things I read about Pierce." "He would say he didn't like using rubber pieces." "He would fabricate things out of his kit, and that was how the make-up was done." "But the wolf man has a rubber nose." "I think it was made by Ellis Burman Sr, who made rubber props at the time." "So the wolf man's snout was a nose piece that came like this." "And you can very clearly see the edges of it through most of the film." "Because he used materials much less flexible than those make-up artists employ today," "Pierce didn't try to create realistic wolf features, which would have been stiff and unconvincing." "Rather, he used small appliances which only suggested a wolf's face and snout, while allowing Chaney to retain facial mobility and expression." "The result was uniquely frightening." "The hair was yak hair, I believe, which is hair that we still use today." "It's a nice coarse hair, which was laid onto his face." "You would paint spirit gum onto the face, with hunks of this hair - lay it on, cut if off, keep laboriously building up layers of hair, as they would do beards in those days as well." "Then he would singe the hair with a hot curling iron - he would dress it first, and then heat up the iron too much and singe it to give it more of an animal look." "He had rubber gloves that had hair on, and the rubber feet that he wore as well." "And the teeth, of course, the lower teeth." "It had to be an uncomfortable make-up to wear." "The spirit gum and the coarse hair glued to your face is not a comfortable thing." "I know." "I've made myself up like that many times." "And I know that Pierce and Chaney would butt heads somewhat." "Lon Chaney Junior was a much bigger man than Jack Pierce, and I'm sure he didn't like sitting in the chair." "In fact, I've seen a photo of him making a fist like he was gonna punch Jack." "And I'm sure he really felt like that many times." "I went to the commissary and poor Lon Chaney was down there." "Took him six hours to put on the make-up and three hours to take it off." "He was sitting at a little table by himself." "And he glowered at me and wanted to kill me." "I said "Don't kill a poor rat who just does his job."" ""Why don't you kill Jack Pierce who made you into a wolf man?" "Leave me alone."" "Something that fascinated me about werewolf movies, or even "Jekyll and Hyde" films, was the transformation." "And many times what they did in those days was a series of lap dissolves." "Chaney Junior would have to sit in the same place - he was fortunately in a chair when you saw the big transformation - you would put a little bit of make-up on, photograph a little bit of the scene," "add a bit more make-up, photograph a bit more, and overlap the two pieces of film." "They'd fade out one and fade in the other." "So he would always move a little bit." "They perfected it later on in some of the later movies." "Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man had a nice one." "He's in the hospital bed and his head is on a pillow." "I'm sure it was a plaster pillow that he could fit perfectly in like a mould of the back of his head." "And I understand they actually used a big-format still camera, and they had a front view and a side view, and they actually traced a profile to try to make sure he lined up better." "I think Pierce's downfall - and I think this is such a sad story, and it's something that I learned from Jack's mistakes - was that he didn't progress with the times." "He was continuing to do these out-of-the-kit make-ups when at other studios people were doing make-ups with new materials." "They were making foam-rubber appliances." "The Wizard of Oz was one of the first foam-rubber-appliance films." "It sped up the process and it kept the continuity better." "It was more comfortable for the actors and took a lot less time to make them up." "Pierce would continue to use the same cotton and collodion techniques." "He eventually was booted out, like Dr Pretorius, out of the studio." "After he created these films that helped save that studio, he was very unceremoniously fired." "And then they brought in Bud Westmore to be the department head who, in Abbott  Costello Meet Frankenstein, used foam rubber." "They used a foam-rubber nose for Chaney Junior, they used a foam-rubber forehead, from under the brow to the top of the head, for Glenn Strange, the monster, and greatly sped up the whole make-up process." "And I always felt that Jack was unrecognised for most of his life." "Even though he got that credit on the film, I felt he didn't get the credit he deserved, in the public's eyes." "But he kept this amazing scrapbook that had every letter ever sent to him, and all these articles that were done on him." "And it gave me a different impression." "He was recognised in his time." "There were articles about him calling him this make-up genius." "But unfortunately he had that sad departure from the studio and that must have been a very difficult time for Jack, to have been the head of that department and the make-up god at that studio and all of a sudden to be looking for work." "Screenwriter Curt Siodmak used only the title of Robert Florey's original "Wolf Man" treatment, and created his own werewolf mythology, very little of which was based on actual folklore." "Basically, all of my pictures have some scientific background, somewhere, which makes them authentic." "That's why they are still alive today." "Siodmak, who had fled Hitler's Germany, knew full well the real-world significance of people marked for death with the sign of a star." "What's the matter?" "I can't tell you anything tonight." "Come back tomorrow." "What did you see?" "Something evil?" "No, no." "Now go away." "Go quickly" " Go" " Yes" "Yes, I'm going" "Siodmak was a German Jew who had had a very successful career, both as a science-fiction author and as a scriptwriter, in Germany up until 1933, and, of course, with the advent of Hitler, had to leave." "He spent several years literally on the run." "This gave him an appreciation of the fact that the world is a very unsettling place, a place where a very stable existence can suddenly turn into total chaos, which is exactly what happened to him." "I'm sick of the whole thing." "I'm getting outta here" "Whoever is bitten by a werewolf and lives becomes a werewolf himself." "This was my wolf-man fate." "Wolf-man fate..." "You might go out of your house and somebody hits you with a car." "If you go out one minute later, nothing happens to you." "Qué será, será." "We don't know what is going to happen to us." "I think this very much influenced his work then when he came to the United States and began working in Hollywood, and specifically for Universal, and specialised then in science fiction and horror films." "And when he was given the assignment to write The Wolf Man," "I think he really felt that this was his material." "When the moon comes up, Larry Talbot - the name I gave the wolf man - knows he has to become a murderer." "In the Greek tragedies the gods tell a man his fate." "So it is constructed, by chance - I didn't know it - like a Greek tragedy." "His autobiography is... the German title is called "Under Wolf People"." "And that refers to the Germans - not all Germans, but the Germans who then became Nazis, who turned from very likable people into monsters." "In Siodmak's original script, the transformations were kept ambiguous and it was never clear whether Larry Talbot really turned into a wolf or just imagined he did." "Now, you asked me if I believe a man can become a wolf." "If you mean "Can he take on the physical traits of an animal?", no, it's fantastic." "However, I do believe that most anything can happen to a man in his own mind." "Fortunately for monster fans, the studio ultimately decided to give the public what it wanted." "It's a horror film, so he doesn't wanna beat you over the head with the message." "Indeed, the film takes place in, really, a never-never land." "There's English gentry and there's Maria Ouspenskaya, who is a Gypsy straight out of Romania somewhere, and people drive around in cars that are modern, and then there's covered wagons..." "It is very much a mixture, so that it is a never-never land." "Actually, in my original script, Larry Talbot was an American mechanic who went to Scotland to install a telescope." "And they made him the son of a lord." "I couldn't even imagine any worse casting than casting Lon Chaney Junior as the son of an English lord, with his accent." "But they did it, and what can I do?" "All of these films were shot on the Universal back lot in the European village, which one day would have to double as a Spanish town, the next day as a German and the next day as an English village," "and they'd change it a bit here and there." "So this amorphous quality definitely has to do with the fact that it is the Universal back lot." "But I think beyond that, the horror films were supposed to be very unspecific in terms of the time in which they played." "It helped to reinforce the fact that this world of horror is not of this world." "It is recognisable as a real place, and yet things happen there that are very unreal." "And that's part of the pleasure in watching these films." "The Wolf Man's impact was greatly enhanced by topnotch music, the combined effort of Frank Skinner, Hans Salter and Charles Previn." "Film-music historian John Morgan and conductor William Stromberg recently undertook an ambitious reconstruction of the original score." "One thing that makes the music to these horror films stand out compared to a lot of today's that you would put in the same kind of budget, the B-horror film, is it's real music." "They had real composers that may have not worked on A-budgets, but they were A-composers working on B-music budgets." "And because you have a small orchestra doesn't mean that you stop thinking or creating or finding ways of making wonderful music." "Today's music - you find a lot of it is just a long drone, or they have clichés that they rip off from Psycho, or the same things over and over again." "They don't get into characters, they don't get into drama or atmosphere." "It's just a wallpaper put on with a trowel." "But this music for films like The Wolf Man and all the Universal..." "Bride of Frankenstein, of Franz Waxman..." "it's real music." "When I'm preparing these scores for our new recordings, my kids now just love it." "They can sing all the main themes from all these classic films." " Tell them how old they are." " They're just two and four." "And they can sing the intervals to The Wolf Man." "You could be out there and they'd go "Da da daa... wolf man!"" " Don't they?" " That's right." "The Wolf Man theme itself, the famous three-note motif, is outlining the tritone." "And in medieval music it was always the forbidden interval, and it has a connotation of the devil's interval, and composers throughout time would use it to represent something evil." "Bela's funeral is a great example of music written for the film, a very long sequence originally." "Portions of the sequence were cut out." "Apparently there was a very eerie sequence with Bela actually watching the funeral procession." "So the cue is this eight-minute wonderful, atmospheric piece of music like a dirge." "The music is basically a cantus firmus, a pedal tone, going through the whole cue, where he plays with the motifs on top of this pedal point." "Realising it had killed off a potentially lucrative new monster," "Universal once more called on screenwriter Curt Siodmak to come to the rescue." "Fortunately, being dead in a Universal horror movie did not necessarily create story problems." "Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man was the studio's first pairing of two classic monster characters in the same film." "The opening scene, in which grave robbers inadvertently raise Larry Talbot from the dead, remains one of the most atmospheric moments in any Universal horror film." "It looks like he's asleep." "He's alive." "Help/ Help" "Not at all happy about being restored to life," "Larry spends most of the film desperately seeking assisted suicide." "He wants to die." "But he cannot die, he knows he cannot die, so he's looking for the man who knows the secret of life and death." "Well, now I want to die too." "Won't you show me the way?" "I can't." "Even Maria Ouspenskaya admits that Gypsy magic has its limitations, and recommends that Larry consult a scientific specialist." "We might be able to cure you." "I only wanna die." "That's why I'm here." "If I ever find peace, I'll find it here." "Now you understand." "Why don't you help me?" "Energy which cannot be destroyed can be transmitted." "Well, if that's the case, then the energies from my body can be drained off also." "But the plan to siphon off the wolf man's life energy undergoes a last-minute change, and both monsters are restored to their full power for a titanic wrestling match." "In the next film, House of Frankenstein, a frozen wolf man and Frankenstein monster are thawed out by mad scientist Boris Karloff, who recommends a novel cure for Larry's curse:" "A brain transplant." "I want to die." "Only death can bring me release." "You don't have to die, my boy." "You're wrong." "I can help you." "Don't kill me." "Don't kill me." "Don't..." "Kill my trusted old assistant?" "Why, no." "I'm going to repay you for betraying me." "I'm going to give that brain of yours a new home." "In the skull of the Frankenstein monster." "As for you, Strauss, I'm going to give you the brain of the wolf man." "While waiting for his new body, Larry is smitten with a beautiful young Gypsy, who discovers his secret and takes his cure into her own hands." "Larry's death seemed pretty final, so when he turned up again in Universal's follow-up monsterfest, House of Dracula, no attempt was made to explain his curious resilience." "But some other things were explained." "Dracula, we learned, suffered from a rare blood disease." "And the wolf man's problem wasn't so much the full moon as pressure on the brain." "This condition, coupled with your belief that the moon can bring about a change, accomplishes exactly that." "During the period when your reasoning processes give way to self-hypnosis, the glands which govern your metabolism get out of control." "When this happens, the glands generate an abnormal supply of certain hormones, in your case, those which bring about the physical transformation." "And this time a surgical procedure - much less invasive than the one Boris Karloff had in mind - actually did the trick, and Larry Talbot was finally relieved of his curse." "Of course, a recovered werewolf isn't worth very much to a film studio, so when the time came for Abbott and Costello to meet the monsters," "Larry's prior rehabilitation went discreetly unmentioned." "In half an hour the moon'll rise and I'll turn into a wolf." " You and 20 million other guys." " Listen/ I might tear you limb from limb." " Is that serious?" " He'll murder you." "That's serious." "This time the wolf man was something of a Good Samaritan." "Having put up with several nutty brain doctors in the past, he draws the line at the most dubious practitioner of them all, Count Dracula." "Played by Bela Lugosi in his last role for a major studio," "Dracula ends up assisting in Larry Talbot's long-sought suicide - though he's not exactly a willing participant." "In the half-century since the wolf man's last screen appearance, he has inspired countless imitations." "More recent films have benefited from larger budgets, wide-screen colour, and highly advanced make-up and special effects." "But no matter how accomplished these films are, there is still only one Larry Talbot." "The way you walked was thorny, through no fault of your own." "But as the rain enters the soil, the river enters the sea, so tears run to a predestinate end." "Your suffering is over." "Now you will find peace for eternity." "The Wolf Man saga was the final addition to Universal's golden age of classic horror, a tradition still revered and celebrated by generations of film fans and film professionals." "Especially people of my generation that grew up with those films on TV, there's a special place in their heart for them." "They may not be the best films in the world, but they're pretty damn good." "And they definitely have inspired a lot of filmmakers and a lot of make-up effects people, and just a lot of strange people around the world." "As the wolf man, Larry Talbot only wanted to die, but somehow the public just wouldn't allow it." "He came back again and again, in movie after movie, was resurrected on television, in monster magazines, in model kits, on video cassette and laser disc, and now on DVD." "It just goes to prove you can't keep a good monster down." "But why would you ever want to?" "I'm John Landis."