Good point. And here I am, the great defender of Elizabeth Bathory from the scurrilous charges of vampirism when all she was really guilty of, according to contemporary account, was sadistic torture.
I do presume Grenier, at least, to be a legit practitioner, since his punishment was confinement to a monastery–hardly what you’d expect if the people were looking for a scapegoat. YMMV.
Dog Soldiers have very creepy (and very big) bi-pedal werewolves. One of the best WW movies out there IMHO.
I think that’s partly an effect of your modern viewpoint, which has been shaped by a major re-evaluation of man’s relationship to nature. To us, wolves are majestic, endangered animals that pose no particular threat to humans. Back in the Middle Ages, wolves were seen as hell-spawned monsters who actively and malevolently preyed on humans. To people of the time, the idea of a wolf that was as smart as a human would have been particularly chilling.
And yet, various woodcuts from that era depict bipedal werewolves from time to time. Maybe it depended on the local lore as to how they were depicted.
Well, if you’re assuming that humans turn into wolves and back, then there has to be some intermediate form, even if it’s only transitional.
I guess that’s true. Whenever I read Laura Ingalls Wilder’s books (Little House in the Big Woods, Little House on the Prairie, etc.), they describe the mountain lions (or panthers) and wolves and bears as being so horribly scary. Not that I’d want to encounter a bear or wolf on a dark night, but I guess I also think of it in terms of all the horrible things we’ve done to them and how in the long run, they’re much less of a threat to us than they are to us. I suppose back then, they really were a lot more threatening.
awesome flick, that one. just re-watched it the other day ago.
the earliest film i’ve been able to recall from my film student days is ‘werewolf of london,’ 1935 with henry hull and warner oland. for a low-budget production, its suitably creepy. now i’m wondering if there were any **silent **ww films… 
No, “Werewolf of London” basically invented the wolf-man concept, which was refined and put into final form by the 1941 “Wolf Man”. Much of the “ancient lore” was invented out of the whole cloth by Curt Siodmak, the lead writer of the latter movie. Silver bullets? Siodmak. Pentagrams? Siodmak. Wolfbane? Siodmak. Only comes out in the full moon? Siodmak.
As did Wolfen (also 1981. It was a big year for werewolves).
But yeah, my recollection is that 1981 is when movies got away from the Wolf Man version of werewolves.
I must be mis-remembering. I thought the Indians changed into wolves. No?
As I remember, the Indian dude communicated with the wolves. Maybe he worshipped them, too. It’s been twenty years.
That’s not quite accurate. As examples, old woodcuts did feature wolf-man depictions (as previously mentioned by Cuckoorex and which can be confirmed quite easily by consulting just about any work on the history of werewolf folklore), and the concept that silver, and even silver bullets specifically, had special power over humans who changed shape into animals predates 1941.
Siodmak put various pieces together in a new way and invented up some of the details, but the film historians and authors who give him the credit for the whole shebang didn’t do a thorough job of checking into the earlier references.
I didn’t mean to suggest that the bipedal wolves were a modern invention, I was just giving a possible explanation for why the “smart wolf” would have been a more frightening concept in pre-modern times.