Fathers and Wolves

This week, I watched The Wolf Man and Other Mommy, and I got menaced by actors and carnies in Griffith Park.

Minor spoilers for The Wolf Man below ...

From the Grave.

Three ideas from horror cinema's past.

◆ The Wolf Man, dir. George Waggner, 1941.

Jr. For horror or classic film fans, it’s hard to watch The Wolf Man without wrestling with the performance and biography of its lead. The Wolf Man is a werewolf story about identity and transformation, and its lead is the son of one of the greatest horror performers who ever lived; born Creighton Chaney, without his father’s first name, he only started acting at 25 after his father’s death (late for a Hollywood kid) and was credited on-screen by Universal simply as “Lon Chaney” without the “Jr.” His performance in The Wolf Man isn’t bad, but it doesn’t feel quite right either, which can’t be disentangled from the fact that he’s acting in the shadow of a giant. Bela Lugosi, on the other hand, who has one real scene in The Wolf Man, channels a Universal Horror charisma that Jr. simply can’t match. The Wolf Man is a movie about a son returning home and grappling with his father’s expectations, a resonant signature role for Jr. In the movie, the son endures transformation and a cruel fate, and Jr.’s course through Hollywood must have been transformative for him (he had a life in business before starting acting)—though his fate was not a cruel one. He starred as the Wolf Man in the sequels, portrayed Frankenstein’s Monster, Count Dracula, and the Mummy, and worked productively across film and TV from the 40s through the 70s. Jr. doesn’t live up to his father’s legacy on-screen or in film history, but he does a lot with it, and makes a mark for himself and for his own unique qualities—very different from his father’s. 

Forest. The forest where the Wolf Man roams feels like the platonic ideal of the classic, black-and-white horror forest. It’s a sound stage forest, so entirely unnatural, but this is for the best. It’s absurdly fog-shrouded, and the trees make gorgeous, stark shapes in the studio lights. This is the kind of environment that will haunt your dreams—its artificiality giving the place an abstract quality. The forest is a horror canvas—a fantasy space where anything might happen, where any creature might be moving in the fog.