The Movie: The Wolf Man (1941)
What Is It?:
Writer Curt Siodmak, director George Waggner, and makeup wizard Jack Pierce
reinvent the werewolf. Much of what we now associate with lycanthropes—their
aversion to silver, their association with the pentagram, their kinship with
gypsies—leaped from Siodmak’s imagination. He also composed an ace nursery rhyme
repeated infinitely throughout The Wolf
Man and its sequels (“Even a man who is pure at heart and says his prayers
by night / may become a wolf when the wolfbane blooms and the autumn moon is
bright”). The film’s other great innovation is the introduction of Lon Chaney,
Jr., as the next successor in his father’s monster-movie-star legacy.
Why Today?: Today
is the first day of autumn.
