366 Days at the Drive-In: Day 358

The Date: September 22

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.

366 Days at the Drive-In: Day 315

The Date: August 10

The Movie: I Walked with a Zombie (1943)

What Is It?: Val Lewton’s disdain for the supernatural led him to produce a movie called Cat People that probably doesn’t have any cat people and a movie called I Walked with a Zombie that probably doesn’t have any zombies. Rather, the film is a very loose adaptation of Jane Eyre as a romantic familial mystery set on Saint Sebastian, where for a refreshing change, the well-adjusted black majority condescends to the white family falling to pieces on their old sugar plantation. 

Why Today?: On this day in 1902, screenwriter Curt Siodmak is born.

20 Things You May Not Have Known About ‘The Wolf Man’

Today marks 70 years since Larry Talbot first spied the mark of the wolf in the palms of his victims. One of the greatest and most iconic of Universal’s great and iconic monster movies, The Wolf Man is essential viewing for any novice horror hound. Those who wish to further their lycanthropic education may learn a thing or two by boning up on these 20 Things You May Not Have Known About The Wolf Man…

1. Universal’s The Wolf Man is not the first film to bear that title. In 1924, Fox Films presented a silent melodrama starring John Gilbert and Norma Shearer called The Wolf Man. No lycanthropes were present.

2. Screenwriter Robert Florey first conceived of a werewolf movie called The Wolf Man in 1932. The potential Boris Karloff vehicle failed to materialize partly because Universal execs feared the officious Catholic Church would take issue with a scene in which the werewolf transformed in a church confessional.

3. Jack Pierce first designed the well-known Wolf Man makeup for Henry Hull in Werewolf of London. Hull supposedly nixed the makeup because it was so uncomfortable to wear.

4. Bela Lugosi was the first choice to play the lycanthropy-spreading Dr. Yogami in Werewolf of London, a role that ultimately went to Warner Oland. Six years later

Review: 'The Beast with Five Fingers'

Spoilers ahead…



American horror spent the ‘40s running on fumes. In the wake of The Wolf Man and the 1935 departure of monster-champion and production-chief Carl Laemmle, Jr., Universal Pictures put less stock in its horror films, churning out a succession of increasingly half-hearted sequels. The films by the genre’s new golden boy, producer Val Lewton of RKO, were atmospheric and cerebral but shied away from the paranormal. The supernatural spook pictures emerging elsewhere were either tempered with humor (Paramount’s The Uninvited) or sheer lethargy (MGM’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde). All of these problems are grasped in the disembodied paw of Warner Bros.’ The Beast with Five Fingers. Had it been produced in the previous decade, this adaptation of W.F. Harvey’s short story might have been a first-rate chiller. It certainly has a lot going for it: stylish direction from Robert Florey (Murders in the Rue Morgue), a script by Curt Siodmak (The Wolf Man), a lush score by Max Steiner (King Kong), and meaty lead parts for Peter Lorre and J. Carrol Naish (doing an Italian caricature worthy of Chef Boyardee).

The glitch is that The Beast with Five Fingers isn’t quite sure if it’s man or beast. After a long, long lead up to the death of a crusty pianist (Victor Francen), his personal secretary Hilary (Lorre) starts seeing the dead man’s disembodied hand scurrying all over the place and people start getting choked. Although the hour preceding the hand’s appearance receives able support from fine performances by Francen, the ever-clammy Lorre, Robert Alda (Alan’s dad) as a wisenheimer musician, and Naish as a cop, it drags badly. Those who came to the picture for horror will note a decided reluctance to leap into those waters, possibly because the genre was such a pariah at the time. When the hand finally crawls out of a box like Thing, the terrific visual effects (which recall The Invisible Man) render the previous, humdrum 60 minutes irrelevant and the fun begins.



But even now it’s difficult to suss where the filmmakers were aiming. The hand’s exploits are played dead-seriously, yet the sight of it tapping out a Bach partita on a grand piano is pretty silly. The ultimate cop-out arrives when we learn that the five-fingered beasty was nothing more than a psychotic hallucination of Hilary, who’d been committing the killings he attributed to the pianist’s nefarious mitt. As if tasked with helping us decide whether we should laugh, shriek, or shrug, Naish turns to the camera and drops a few creaky one-liners in his “that’s a spicy meat-a-ball!” accent. So it’s a comedy after all? Were the filmmakers shoehorning in jokes at the last minute to deflate the potentially heart attack-inducing horrors we just witnessed? Or were they working overtime to avoid having their picture filed in the career-killing horror drawer? Shrug. One thing is for sure: it’s a good thing the Brits were on the verge of taking horror seriously. Otherwise the genre may not have survived beyond the ‘40s.