Fred F. Sears

(On Cable TV, June 2021) On the one hand, there have been countless werewolf movies over the decades since cinema’s invention, and The Werewolf is another one of them. On the other hand, it’s a familiar take executed according to mid-1950s conventions, meaning a bit of noir style, a story taking place in small-town America, and obsessions about “irradiated wolf serum” allowing subjects to survive the inevitable nuclear apocalypse. In other words, it has the advantage of its dated nature, and no film since then would be able to re-create what it manages to put on-screen. It does help that, in the hands of director Fred F. Sears, the film is a snappy watch at 80 minutes, and that the story generally holds up despite the nature of werewolves not being much of a mystery to us viewers. Then again, 1950s audiences weren’t complete innocents either — werewolves and wolfmen having been part of the cinematic vernacular for more than a decade at that point. What’s more important is that The Werewolf works relatively well by itself and even better as a period piece — I don’t mind the time-capsule effect of comparing werewolf films across the decades.