Editor’s note: All throughout October, the vibes get spookier and the nights get longer. It’s the perfect time of year to watch horror movies, whether you’re a year-round horror fan or you just like to watch horror flicks to get into the Halloween spirit. This year at Horror Obsessive, for our 31 Horror Classics Revisited series, we’re giving you one recommendation for a classic horror film each day throughout the month of October. What do you think—is this film a horror classic? What other horror films do you consider to be classics, and what films do you make sure you watch each October? Let us know in the comments below!
When it comes to classic horror movies, you don’t get much more influential than The Wolf Man. While this wasn’t the first werewolf film ever made (it wasn’t even Universal’s first!), it’s hands down the most important. It cemented and popularized just about all of the typical werewolf tropes we take for granted today, like the idea that you have to use silver to kill the creatures, so without it, the subgenre almost certainly would’ve developed along very different lines.
That alone is more than enough to make The Wolf Man one of the best horror movies ever made, but it’s just the beginning of the film’s greatness. In fact, the way I see it, this movie’s near incalculable influence isn’t even the best thing about it. For my money, its biggest strength is actually its message. The Wolf Man is essentially just one big metaphor for a key element of the human condition, so unless you’ve entirely lost touch with your humanity, you’d be hard-pressed not to be moved by its central themes. It’s quite possibly the most universally relatable horror film ever made, so without further ado, let’s take a deep dive into this absolute classic and see how it beautifully conveys an important message about what it means to be human.
“Even a Man Who Is Pure in Heart…”
Early on in The Wolf Man, before Larry Talbot, the titular lycanthrope, gets bitten and becomes a werewolf, there’s a scene where his love interest Gwen tells him about the creatures for the first time, and she recites a brief poem about them: “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.”
At this point in the movie, it’s easy to dismiss these words as just a bit of fictionalized local color, but they’re actually really important. They subtly foreshadow the film’s main message, and in case you don’t get it this first time, they pop up again and again throughout the story to hammer the point home.
So what does this poem mean? In a nutshell, it tells us that werewolves are metaphors for our natural human weaknesses and imperfections. Just like a person who is “pure in heart” can still become a werewolf in this mythology, so too do good people in the real world still struggle with all sorts of vices and toxic traits.
Sure, there are plenty of good people out there, people who we could describe as “pure in heart,” but nobody is perfect. Even the best of us do bad things sometimes, and no matter how much we try, we’re never going to overcome that natural human weakness. We can fight against it, and we can improve ourselves a little bit every day, but we’re never going to root out our vices entirely.
Our “Dual Personality”
And if there’s any doubt about that, the very next scene in The Wolf Man makes it clear as day. After Larry goes back home, he tells his father about what Gwen said, and the man explains to Larry that the werewolf legend is “an ancient explanation of the dual personality in each of us.”
He doesn’t say what this “dual personality” is, but if you can read between the lines, his meaning is pretty clear. Right after he says that he recites the poem about “a man who is pure in heart,” so he’s basically telling us that those words are all about the “dual personality” he just referenced.
Now, if the poem contrasts people who are “pure in heart” with werewolves, it stands to reason that the two “personalities” Larry’s father is talking about are purity of heart (aka virtue or moral goodness) and its opposite, which would be vice. What’s more, later on in the film, he even straight up says that lycanthropy represents “the good and evil in every man’s soul,” so once again, we see that The Wolf Man is basically just one big metaphor for our natural human struggle with evil. No matter how good we are, we all have that “dual personality” inside of us. We all do things we know we shouldn’t, so no matter how much we try to do the right thing, we’re never going to succeed all the time.
Larry Talbot’s Struggle
And once Larry gets bitten by a werewolf and becomes one himself, The Wolf Man demonstrates that universal truth in a really poignant way. When the moon is full, Larry turns into a human-wolf hybrid and kills people, and it causes him untold anguish.
It’s tough to put it into words, but if you’ve ever seen The Wolf Man, you know that Lon Chaney, Jr.’s performance as Larry Talbot is fantastic. Granted, it can be a bit wooden in the early parts of the film, but once the horror gets going, everything from Chaney’s facial expressions to the tone of his voice lets you know without a doubt that Larry is a man in tremendous pain.
He doesn’t want to murder people in his wolf form, but he has no choice. No matter how much he tries to stop himself, he simply can’t, and that awful inevitability weighs on him just as heavily as you’d expect. It’s absolutely heartbreaking to watch, and it perfectly conveys the tragic nature of the human condition. Just like Larry Talbot, we too know we should be better, but no matter how hard we try, we just can’t get rid of the “curse” of our weakness and vice.
A Glimmer of Hope
All that being said, The Wolf Man isn’t entirely pessimistic. While it focuses primarily on our inability to completely root out the “evil” in our souls, it does contain a glimmer of hope as well. There’s a scene towards the end of the film where the Wolf Man gets stuck in a bear trap, and he can’t get himself out of it. He tries and tries, but after a little while, he just keels over and passes out. Soon afterward, an old Romani woman named Maleva finds the creature, and she has pity on him.
She says, “The way you walk is thorny, through no fault of your own, but as the rain enters the soil, the river enters the sea, so tears run to a predestined end. Find peace for a moment, my son.” Immediately after this, the monster turns back into Larry Talbot, and he does experience peace, albeit only “for a moment,” as Maleva said.
On the surface, this scene might appear like little more than an unnecessary break in the action, but if we really dive into it, we’ll see that it actually caps off the message of The Wolf Man in a very touching way. For starters, Maleva’s compassion is a great example for us to follow. She recognizes that Larry’s path “is thorny, through no fault of [his] own,” so she doesn’t condemn him for being a murderous monster. Instead, she does what she can to help relieve him of his burden, and that’s exactly how we should approach the “dual personality in each of us” as well.
Sure, our natural human weakness doesn’t mean we can just gloss over the bad things people do, but it does mean that most of us aren’t genuinely bad people. It means we’re struggling to be good, so we should treat one another with compassion and love. We should help each other fight against our vices and become the best people we can be, just like Maleva helped Larry fight against his curse.
On top of that, this scene in The Wolf Man also tells us that our weaknesses aren’t quite as unconquerable as we might think at first. Granted, we’re never going to entirely win the war against them, but we can win individual battles. Even if we struggle with a particular vice, that doesn’t mean we’re doomed to give in to it every chance we get.
Rather, just like Larry was able to fight his curse and revert back to his human form for a little bit, so too can we fight against our baser natures and choose the higher road sometimes. In fact, by repeatedly choosing to do good, we can even root out individual vices from our lives, even if we can’t root out vice and weakness in general.
So despite what we might think at first, The Wolf Man is actually a pretty hopeful movie. Sure, it’s about our unwinnable struggle against the “curse” of our natural human weakness, and it ends rather pessimistically (Larry Talbot dies), but it doesn’t stop there. It also gives us a glimmer of hope and shows us that we’re not entirely helpless in this fight. There are things we can do to help form ourselves and others into the best people we can be, and at the end of the day, that’s pretty much what the human experience is all about.