They Were All Teenage Werewolves!

In Wes Craven's recent box office flop Cursed (2005), there is a section when a high school nerd newly infected with lycanthropy starts unleashing his new-found strength on those who have bullied him in the past. The idea is that this isn't so suspicious since he's at the stage when his body is developing and he's likely to start working out to increase his physical potential. The movie as a whole was pretty insubstantial, but in that sequence Craven was paying homage to a sub-genre of the werewolf movie that has a long and interesting heritage -- the teenage werewolf movie.

The first use of lycanthropy as a metaphor for adolescence wasn't particularly smart, but it was hugely successful. AIP's I Was A Teenage Werewolf (1957) found success in the wake of "Rebel Without a Cause" (1955). Thanks to James Dean, youths everywhere now knew that they were angry and frustrated, but they weren't entirely sure why. Michael Landon's character of Tony Rivers was another manifestation of that anger. Looking and acting like James Dean, he took his cruel vengeance on anyone and everyone who got in his way. The other film in which the teenage werewolf appeared, How To Make A Monster, was a more self-indulgent movie about the decline of interest in the horror genre, but a year later the teenage werewolf was also resurrected by Donald F Glut in a series of short films.

Things quietened down on the lycanthropic front throughout the sixties and seventies until it became popular once again in the eighties, and along came the next and arguably the best teen werewolf movie, Neil Jordan's The Company of Wolves (1984). This UK production flung wide open the book of werewolf mythology and for the first time crafted it together into a story about female adolescence. Trapped in a surreal dream, a young girl coming of age learns that all men are truly 'wolves' underneath. Lycanthropic connections are made with puberty, sex, death, lust, murder, and pretty much anything else they could squeeze in, making it probably the definitive film of this type.

Since the werewolf genre was now once again big business at the box office, it was only a matter of time before a studio re-visited that old hit, "I Was A Teenage Werewolf". Subtlely they shortened the title and stuck new 'next big thing' Michael J Fox in the lead role, and there we have Teen Wolf (1985). This movie is light-hearted and not nearly as angry as its predecessor, and here the frustration generally comes from the pressures of high school than from the adult world. In the end, the rather preachy message is that growing up can allow you to do amazing things and set the world at your feet, but you should never forget who you really are. The less said about its meaningless sequel Teen Wolf Too (1987) the better.

Throughout the nineties, things were fairly quiet on the teenage werewolf front. There were some stabs at it, such as in Wilderness (1996), which was another lycanthropic metaphor for female adolescence but not nearly as good as "Company of Wolves". The rest of the action during this period was all on television, with a teenage werewolf subplot on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, involving an introverted young fellow named Oz whose bestial urges become unleashed at the full moon. Also, a TV reworking of "Teen Wolf" came along in the form of the goofy comedy series Big Wolf on Campus, and again the next decade the Wolf Lake TV show took a more serious look at the subject, but was cancelled before it could fully be explored.

As the new millenium arrived, Canadian filmmakers fused together elements of "Teen Wolf" and "Company of Wolves" in the dark cult horror movie Ginger Snaps (2000), which explicitly points out the similarities between a teenage girl going through puberty and a teenage girl becoming a werewolf. Growing hair, odd mood swings, strange impulses, bleeding, growing a tail ... okay, maybe not growing a tail. It's sequels, Ginger Snaps : Unleashed and Ginger Snaps Back : The Beginning, were more concerned with expanding the issues of insanity, fate and drug use rather than the adolescence thing. The next year there was also another unique take on the same subject in Wolf Girl (2001), concerning a teenage girl with the real-life condition of hypertrichosis which is similar to lycanthropy, and how she deals with being different.

Now with the sudden resurgence of interest in the genre, there appear to be several new upcoming takes on this old subject ... Jim Isaac's "Skinwalkers" centres on a thirteen year old lycanthrope, "Blood and Chocolate" is yet another teenage female lycanthropy movie, and "In the Blood" is about an adolescent boy with inherited lycanthropy. It seems that this odd little sub-sub-genre is certainly still alive and kicking ...