I think I’ve told you already that werewolves scare the crap outta me. There’s something about the transformation and the uncanniness of the monster in most forms that really freak me out. I guess that’s why I like werewolf movies so much, too. I’ve seen so many horror movies that I’ve become harder and harder to scare. Werewolves can still raise the hair on my arms, so to speak.
I don't think I knew this. Know I'm wondering if you've seen Dog Soldiers, from the director of The Descent?
The Curse of the Werewolf is such a structurally strange movie.
And welcome to Hammer. There are things they do wrong and things they get right and because they're so consistent it soon becomes easy to brush aside the unusual structure and abrupt endings.
The werewolf doesn’t show up on screen until an hour into this 90 minute movie. It is really very strange, but it got me thinking about the symbolic role werewolves play in the pantheon of horror monsters. Where vampires are the seducers, werewolves are the violent assaulters.
Vampires are the lovers teenage boys want to be and werewolves are the freaks we fear puberty will make us.
Very interesting to read your viewing experience through the prism of current events.
I watched Dog Soldiers back in my undergrad, which started over 10 years ago now, so it's been a while. I liked it, but didn't love it at the time. Something to do with the hyper-masculinity on display, especially because I was coming off of The Descent. I think it would be interesting to watch again now with this context in mind.
I noticed but didn't write about the abrupt ending, too. This time it's two characters hugging each other shot from above. It's thematically interesting given who the characters are and all the stuff I wrote about in the review, but it's also so brief that it doesn't make much of an impact. I liked the chase that precedes it, though.
I think the puberty aspect is really interesting. It's obviously the main thing in stuff like An American Werewolf in London and even Teen Wolf, and even here it's the subtext since the first time we see the character that will eventually become the wolf he's a preteen boy and just starting to get hair on his hands and arm. The fear he has of what he could do with that power is intense but also not really focused on because the story moves at such a quick pace. I'm not sure there's been an absolutely perfect movie that has dealt with this topic yet. AAIL comes pretty close, but I'd have to think more about what the ghost/friend character has to do with it.
Vampyr
Carl Theodore Dreyer's 1932 vampire film is only the third of its kind, though saying this is like anything else is a bit of a stretch. It's closer to Nosferatu than Dracula (31), sure, but this film is so ephemeral as to almost not exist. If you read the supplementary materials and watch the visual essay included in the Criterion edition, you'll discover that there were 3 versions of the film (in French, English, and German), one of which was lost forever (English) while the others are edited together for the restoration, and that the literary "source" of the film, le Fanu's "Carmilla" is only vaguely referenced in the larger plot of the film. This haziness in the film's origins extends to its visuals and story. If you told me I made up a creepy old man that appears at the Inn at the beginning of the movie I'd probably believe you, since he doesn't show up again and doesn't seem to have any importance for either the story or the thematic elements.
The movie looks like it might disappear at any moment, too, following the creepy old man as he exits the picture. It's always foggy any time the characters venture outside, and indoors the geography of the old mansion where much of the film takes place seems both out of whack and disconnected. Dreyer's camera is almost constantly moving and it is exhilarating, especially during the film's opening and closing 15 minutes. You never know what it'll show you, and soon even benign shadows take on a malevolent malleability. For one of the few times while watching a horror film, I was actually afraid that what I was seeing might be revealed to be some dangerous other thing.
The first 15 minutes of this movie are a straight masterpiece of surreal horror filmmaking. From the eerie guy with a sickle to the strange inhabitants of the riverside inn to the walk through a nightmarish factory that seems to be the vampire's lair, the film drips with menace and style. It's also clever as hell. With just lighting and editing, Dreyer creates some fantastic images that equally delight and terrify. My favorite in the early goings is the shadow that prances along the river, but only in the water's reflection. This is the introduction of the sourceless shadow trick that Dreyer gets the most out of in the first part of the film and I loved every iteration. In the back section, he relies on a different technique to get a totally different rise out of the audience: an extended POV shot of a presumably dead man getting screwed into his coffin (with a convenient glass window for his face!) and then carried to a graveyard. It's a deeply unsettling setup and while it lasts maybe a bit too long, I can't impugn something so remarkable and new (I had seen a version of this shot before, kinda, in Borzage's A Farewell To Arms, one of the few great moments of that film). The vampire's henchman also gets a glorious sendoff that will stick with me for some time.
The beginning and end of this movie are so spectacular that it is a pretty big disappointment when the middle is so unremarkable. Perhaps it's because the middle contains the most of the typical vampyric stuff that, I understand, wasn't so typical at the time. It's one of those things where something new becomes so important to a genre or style of movie that it loses some of its impact on later viewers. But there's also a noticeable drop-off in cleverness that sets in during the middle 40 minutes or so. The only thing that really stands out from this is the beguiling and seductive look that lights up the young female vampire's face when she tries to lure her even younger sister in for a bite. The movie is sexy, to a degree, and it is also remarkable for having no male vampires on screen. For one of the few times, especially in early horror, it's all about the women. Coming off of the wonderful character study that is The Passion of Joan of Arc, Dreyer uses his formidable talents with framing and lighting the young woman's face for maximum impact, and her performance matches his framing, even if it doesn't make up as much of the film as it does in his previous attempt. It's too bad everything around it feels perfunctory.
Vampyr is a movie that will not soon leave my mind. There's a power to the opening and close of the film that will cement some of those images in my mind for a long while. There's a whiff of missed opportunity here, given both the story and filmmaking boredom that sets in during the middle, but half of that can be explained away with the passage of time. Had I seen this movie when it first came out, or before I had seen dozens of other vampire movies, it probably would have impressed me more, at least I would lose that sense of over-familiarity. I think it still has plenty of merit, and is definitely necessary viewing for any fans of the gothic or film history or just great looking movies.
B+