The Mark of the Wolf

On the 90th anniversary of its release, EDWARD PARNELL celebrates the first Hollywood feature film to deal with lycanthropy: 1935’s Werewolf of London.

Hollywood’s first effort at tackling the folklore of lycanthropy came in a short 1913 silent flick, The Werewolf, about a Navajo woman who turns into a vengeful wolf; it’s impossible today to judge how effectively it captured the switch from woman to beast as the print was destroyed in a 1924 fire, though contemporary accounts state that the defining scene consisted of a straightforward dissolve between the two shots. Although not werewolves per se, supernaturally-infused wolves – well, their sounds, at least, as we never see the animals that make them – feature memorably inTod Browning’s 1931 adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, a film I watched as soon as I could tape it off late-night television; it was to be a few more years, just into my teens, that I…

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