Sunday, February 19, 2012
Homework Movie - The Wolf Man (1940)
The Wolf Man starring Lon Chaney, Jr. is one of the Universal Pictures legendary monster movies from the 1940's. As a morality tale of promiscuity, this movie begins with a young man returning home to live and then he takes notice of a woman that is already betrothed to another. After finding this out, Larry still continues to pursue her even after being attacked by a wolf, stirring up panic in the gypsy camp that foretold of danger.
I enjoy the classic horror films when they began to use special FX makeup because they were so primitive and yet they still horrified people of the day because it was something they had never seen before, and only read about. Noticing the different camera setups for the transformation is something that nowadays we see because we are so tech savvy that it's obvious. Although there are only a handful of scenes with the monster makeup, they really used them the their advantage and were careful to only have one or maybe two others in the scene with the Wolf Man.
Of the early morality tales, The Wolf Man was the least upfront about the sexuality that is the nature of the beast. With Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Spencer Tracey was overly devious when it came to women. In the movie Cat People, Irene Reed was afraid of stories from her home culture about turning into a cat person once intimate with a man. These were warnings to young people to keep from being promiscuous out of marriage.
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