Werewolf movies: the first Best Makeup Oscar went to a werewolf

A werewolf film is a movie about a person who turns into a wolf or a wolf-like beast. The word is Old English, from wer, meaning man, and wulf, wolf, and belief in werewolves was widespread in the Middle Ages. On screen the change is the main event, and it pushed makeup forward: when the Academy first gave a competitive Oscar for Best Makeup, in March 1982, it went to Rick Baker, the makeup effects artist, for An American Werewolf in London (1981). Before that, makeup had only been honoured with occasional special awards. Baker won the category seven times in all.

Hollywood wrote most of the rules. Universal's Werewolf of London (1935) is described as the first feature-length werewolf film, with makeup by Jack Pierce, the artist behind Boris Karloff's Frankenstein monster. In 1941 Universal made The Wolf Man with Lon Chaney Jr., who went on to play the role in four sequels. Its rhyme about a man who is pure in heart becoming a wolf when the wolfsbane blooms sounds like ancient folklore. It was written for the film by its screenwriter, Curt Siodmak.

Relay carries 60 films tagged werewolf or lycanthrope. The films below are in release order, and each uses the wolf to stand for something else: a war, a scandal, a teenage body, a sin.

What makes a werewolf film

• A person inside the animal. The victim is usually also the monster, and often knows it.
• The transformation. Hair, teeth and bone, on screen. It is where the budget, or the lack of one, shows.
• Rules borrowed from Hollywood. Silver, wolfsbane and the moon come mostly from Universal's films, not from old legend.

9 werewolf movies to watch

The Mad Monster (1942)

Producers Releasing Corporation, a cheap Hollywood studio run by the brothers Sigmund Neufeld and Sam Newfield, made this within months of The Wolf Man, and critics place it first among the werewolf films other studios rushed out after Universal's hit. Newfield directed.

George Zucco, a British-born actor who had played Professor Moriarty and became the studio's resident mad scientist, plays Dr. Lorenzo Cameron. He turns his simple handyman Petro into a wolf man, planning an army of them as shock troops for the Second World War, and keeps him in line with a bullwhip. Petro is Glenn Strange, who later played Frankenstein's monster for Universal.

Horror

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Moon of the Wolf (1972)

ABC broadcast this TV movie on September 26, 1972. David Janssen, best known as Dr. Richard Kimble in the TV series The Fugitive, plays the sheriff of a Louisiana bayou town where a girl is found dead and everyone blames wild dogs. Daniel Petrie, the director of A Raisin in the Sun, directed.

The source is a 1967 novel by Les Whitten, a Watergate-era investigative reporter for the Washington columnist Jack Anderson, who also wrote horror novels. The curse turns out to belong to the town's richest family. FilmInk calls it a highly effective slice of small screen horror, built on humid Southern atmosphere.

Horror

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The Werewolf of Washington (1973)

Milton Moses Ginsberg, the director of the cult film Coming Apart, wrote, directed and edited this satire of Richard Nixon's White House. Dean Stockwell, later of Paris, Texas and Dune, plays a presidential aide bitten in Hungary, who kills at the full moon and begs people to lock him up. The president is a paranoid who repeats Nixon's catchphrases.

According to the trade paper Box Office, shooting began before the Watergate scandal broke and the script was revised afterward. It opened at a New York theatre that normally showed X-rated films, with a benefit screening for the American Civil Liberties Union, and Variety reported that ABC and Metromedia refused to air its commercials parodying Nixon's speeches.

Comedy

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Blood (1973)

Andy Milligan was an off-off-Broadway stage director who moved into very low-budget horror. He wrote, directed, built the sets and sewed the costumes for nearly all his films, and he shot this one in his own house on Staten Island, New York.

The descendant of a werewolf moves into a 19th-century house with his vampire bride, Dracula's daughter, and there are blood-drinking plants in the basement. Stephen King, the horror novelist, once called another Milligan film the work of "morons with cameras". Schlockmania calls Blood the most fun of his Staten Island gothics, and in 2025 a documentary about his life premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival.

Horror

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Werewolf (1996)

Tony Zarindast directed, produced and co-wrote this direct-to-video film, in which archaeologists in the Arizona desert dig up a werewolf skeleton and their foreman starts infecting people. The Fort Worth Star-Telegram gave it one star and called it silly, uneven and badly acted.

That is how it found its audience. Mystery Science Theater 3000, the TV comedy in which a man and two robot puppets mock bad films, aired it as episode 904 on April 18, 1998. Writer Bill Corbett noted the werewolf looked different in nearly every scene, and Paste writer Jim Vorel ranked it 4th of 191 episodes. More films loved for their flaws are in so bad it's good movies.

Horror

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I Was A Teenage Wereskunk (2017)

The title borrows from I Was a Teenage Werewolf, the 1957 film that gave Michael Landon his first starring role and was made in a little over a week. Critics have traced a long run of "I Was a Teenage..." imitations to it.

Neal McLaughlin wrote and directed this comedy homage to 1950s drive-in monster movies. Curtis, a 1950s high school boy, is sprayed by a skunk while peeping at a woman and turns into the Wereskunk whenever he is aroused. The film has its own songs, title song included, and Melanie Minichino plays two roles.

Horror

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Are We Monsters (2021)

Seb Cox, a director with a background in visual effects and animation, made this as his debut feature, and it premiered at FrightFest, London's horror festival, in August 2021. Maya, played by Charlotte Olivia, is a young werewolf who teams up with a folklore enthusiast to understand both sides of herself, while two young hunters set out to destroy her.

Cox built the film's lore on the idea that werewolves are formed from the evil of man, and designed a different werewolf for each of the seven deadly sins. The one on screen is Wrath, played by Kyle Menzies, who usually works as a monster actor at a scare attraction.

Fantasy

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American Werewolves (2022)

Seth Breedlove directed this documentary for Small Town Monsters, an independent company that has also filmed the Mothman and the Bray Road Beast stories. It is built on about a dozen people describing their own encounters with the "dogman", a creature they describe as half man and half dog.

The witnesses tell it, not experts. The accounts include a woman who vanished while jogging on a country road in rural Ohio and a hiker found mutilated in Alaska. It shows the werewolf as living folklore rather than a Hollywood monster, the same way Bigfoot documentaries treat the ape in the woods.

Documentary

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It Be an Evil Moon (2023)

Ben Etchells wrote and directed this as his first feature, set in his native Scotland. Freddy Campbell, a disgraced scientist played by Ian Ray-White, brews a hair-growth formula from pickled wolfsbane, the plant from Siodmak's rhyme, and goes from meek to murderous.

In Film Threat's telling, he also cooks drugs for two vicious brothers and looks after a demanding 80-year-old mother, whom the serum turns into a feral wolf woman. Reviewers single out its practical effects, the kind Baker made famous, especially Freddy's transformation. Film Threat gave it 8 out of 10.

Comedy

Where to go next

Every film above is on Relay. For the other great night monster, and the studio behind the first film here, try these.

• Vampire movies
• Producers Releasing Corporation