Hello, faithful readers. This is our third Werewolf Wednesday and I wanted to celebrate it with a film that a lot of people have never seen: Curse of the Werewolf.
This film is from Hammer Horror in England and kudos to it for going back to the origins of werewolf lore. It wasn’t the bite of the werewolf that carried a virus, but it was generally someone who was cursed, or who would perform dark magic and could take the shape of the wolf and other animals. If you actually look into history, they executed people for being a werewolf (no silver bullets on that one). But I digress back to the movie. It goes with a more classic origin. Our werewolf in this film is the result of a rape and according to myth – the bastard son of a rapist would become a werewolf. Accordingly our werewolf does begin to exhibit the symptoms of lycanthropy as he approaches his late teens (18, I believe) at which point he begins to rampage about under the full moon.
This is one of the more sympathetic characters in werewolf cinema because he actually tells his love’s father where to obtain a silver bullet and that he must be killed with it. The makeup effects on the film are a little dated, but Oliver Reed puts in a good performance as our tormented protagonist. This is the only werewolf film that Hammer Productions ever made, which is sad because it is such a good film.
The image below is a link to a Hammer films mutli-pack featuring Brides of Dracula starring Peter Cushing as Van Helsing and several other British horror classics. The official synopsis is below.
Synopsis: This re-imagining of the classic horror story is set in 18th century Spain and follows an orphan child who terrifies those around him when he becomes a werewolf after a hunting expedition.
