Universal's
h
orror classic "The
Wolf Man" started out as a project for Boris Karloff, but it took Lon Chaney
Jr. to make it a howling success. He played the role of the tragic
lycanthrope in five pictures. It was his "baby."
Before The Wolf Man, Chaney spent a lot of years trying
to work in the shadow of a very famous man---his dad. He hit pay dirt in
'38 with Lewis Milestone's "Of Mice and Men" and again the following year
with "One Million B.C." But steady work came in horror pictures. Out
from under his famous dad's shadow, he soon found himself working in Boris
Karloff's shadow in "The Ghost of Frankenstein," in Bela Lugosi's shadow
in "The Son of Dracula," and in Tom Tyler's shadow in "The Mummy's Ghost,"
"The Mummy"s Tomb," and "The Mummy's Curse." At the time, it seemed to Chaney
that Universal was limiting him to filling other stars' shoes.
In '65, while at work on a
western, "Apache Uprising," for Paramount and producer A.C. Lyles, Chaney
recalled: "It bothered me because I was already limited to playing heavies.
When you've got a face like mine, you don't get many calls to play a romantic
lead. You go where you can get work."
Along with accolades for his role as The Wolf Man came
letters of protest from Europeans who took their legends of werewolves seriously.
"They didn't like me playing around with their legends," Chaney recalled.
"One fellow wrote me about a farmer who transformed into a wolf and attacked
his wife. He was found later unconscious with her blood all over him. Another
fellow wrote me about a wolf man who attacked and ate horses. Can you
imagine?"
Even those who are pure in heart
and say their prayers, at night
may change into a werewolf
when wolfbane blooms
and the moon is full and bright.
"The circumstance on which my story
rests was suggested in casual conversation," 19-year-old Mary Shelley writes in
the preface of her novel and then tells us a nightmarish story about a grave
robbing scientist intent on "creating" a son.
Winds howl in the Bavarian mountains around an old abandoned watchtower where Victor Frankenstein has shut himself off from the world. Roads to it almost seem designed to keep visitors away. And then there's Fritz, a half-crazy hunchback he keeps around to scare the living daylights out of anyone who does show up at his door.
A human brain Fritz has stolen waits to live again in a body Frankenstein has created. Once the brain is in place, a platform will raise the body up through the roof of the watchtower where lightning from a brewing storm will strike it and give it life.
Frankenstein isn't completely mad, just missing enough marbles to attract the easily frightened to Shelley's novel.
Colin Clive played him in the 1931 movie adaptation. Bela Lugosi was slated to play the "monster," but balked at wearing pounds of makeup and the heavy asphalt boots required to create "the monster gait."
Boris Karloff said he would. Gentle William Henry Pratt from London, England, who struggled for ten years with touring companies before being hired as an extra at Universal.