He got another chance to do it even later, in Curucu, Beast of the Amazon, which he both wrote and directed.
I don’t know why this was such a big deal for him. He had better luck with other ideas – An artificial island in the Atlantic that allowed transatlantic plane voyages before commercial airlines could travel that far, The disembodied brain in an aquarium that takes over people’s minds, battles between Universal monsters, Space stations orbiting the Earth (really an extrapolation of his Atlantic artificial island idea, hen you think about it). Why keep coming back to people who think they’re monsters but aren’t?
This one’s a bit of a reach, but the ancient Germanic people had warrior cults where men would wear the skins and heads of animals into battle; these warriors had a reputation for fierceness and savagery. The most famous of these cults was, of course, the Berserkers, who wore bearskins, but there were also the Ulfheðnar, who would go into battle wearing wolf pelts. Images like this and the stories behind them could be one possible source of the “wolfman” archetypes:
As I write in my essay, I suspect the direct inspiration for the “look” of the werewolf/wolfman were the hirsute folks that showed up in circus sideshows, like Fedor Jeftichew (AKA JoJo, the Dog-faced Boy).
The reason that we had man/wolf hybrids instead of using actual transformations into wolves is
a.) It’s hard to get a convincing wolf puppet or stop-motion figure
b.) It’s hard to train a wolf or dog to do the things they’d have to do for the film; they’re notoriously bad actors
c.) You really want to have a humanoid face with mouth and especially the eyes so that they can convey emotion.
So you make up a guy with lots of hair and use that as a stand-in for your wolf.
Notice that, in virtually all the movies the wolfman appears in, people speak and react as if he’s an actual wolf, not a man-wolf hybrid. They say they “saw a giant wolf”, not “a hairy man” or “a cross between a wolf and a man”. The movies maintain the illusion that the Wolfman has transformed into an actual wolf through the dialogue, even while showing you a man-wolf hybrid.
Of course, since the invention of CGI you can get much closer to showing something close to a wolf, but doing what you want it to, and showing emotions – see Van Helsing or An American Werewolf in Paris. (Even before CGI they tried to get something like this in the movies The Howling and An American Werewolf in London), using mechanical effects, puppetry, and stop-motion animation. But it didn’t really work that well.)
I’m currently writing one. At my current rate of progress, expect to see it in print when I’m about 104 years old.
Seriously, I’ve always been struck by the fact that Dracula and Frankenstein are both considered classics, and there is no corresponding novel for any werewolf or Wolfman character.
When I was a kid those were the Big 3 of monster fame. At least of humanoid monsters - Godzilla or The Blob were in another category. As for other humanoids, pffft ! The Mummy? The Creature from the Black Lagoon? Small potatoes. Frankenstein, Dracula and the Wolfman were the ones that haunted the shadows when the house was quiet and became awesome costumes when Halloween rolled around.
I’ve always felt a third classic novel was called for. From the answers above, I’m coming to think I’m not alone in seeing that lack.
The two things in the sentence I quoted are completely different and unrelated. (I haven’t seen that gorilla film, but) There are probably lots of reasons why it’s not a good movie, and not showing the monster can be made to work very well. Cheap thrills vs. ratcheting tension for the audience, doesn’t seem like much of a contest to me.
