The Wolf Man

One of Universal's classic monster films and cinema's main source for the werewolf legend. Larry Talbot returns after years to the family house in Wales. One night, trying to save a woman, he is bitten by a wolf. The wound closes quickly, but at the full moon something else happens. What lasts about the film is its screenplay. Curt Siodmak invented many of the werewolf's rules here: the connection to the full moon, silver, the mark on the palm, and the verse repeated through the film. These are assumed to come from folklore but were largely written for this picture. Siodmak was a Jewish writer who had fled Germany, and the idea of a man turning into something against his will, being marked and hunted, is read alongside that experience. The makeup is by Jack Pierce; the werewolf appearance was shot in stages through successive close-ups. Lon Chaney Jr. plays Talbot, Claude Rains his father, and Bela Lugosi appears briefly as a Romani character. One of the foundational films for anyone curious about classic horror and the history of the genre. To a viewer measuring by today, the transformation scenes are brief and the horror rests largely on atmosphere.