Monster of the Day #9

The way you walked was thorny, through no fault of your own.
But as the rain enters the soil, the river enters the sea,
so tears run to a predestined end.
Now find peace for eternity, my son.

  • The only Universal monster played by the same actor in every appearance! Lon Chaney Jr. wasn’t a terribly good Frankenstein’s Monster (I’ve never seen his Dracula but I have a hard time picturing him as a vampire) but he was a great Wolf Man. Chaney’s Talbot is so screwed and he so knows it. Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man adds that extra touch of being screwed – he can’t even end his own reign of terror by killing himself.

  • what a movie! Inventing all the werewolf backstory on its own, too, which I think is highly impressive. Who today doesn’t know that silver kills werewolves?

  • Yeah, it’s weird to think how one guy, in this case Curt Siodmak, invented out of sheer cloth all these ‘rules’ that are now universally known: werewolves changing under the light of the full moon, invulnerability to everything but silver (and presumably natural forces, like fire), etc. You write one movie and wreak massive changes on the culture at large.

  • Rock Baker

    At least Talbot was able to find a cure for his condition (I’m working on the idea here that Abbott and Costello meet Frankenstein stood apart from the earlier films. Or is it considered a real sequel?). Funny that no one in the publicity department caught the bare arm in the picture. I’d have to see them side by side to know for sure, but I think this shot might be for House of Frankenstein.

  • Reed

    I never really got the pentagram thing, though. Is there something overtly satanic about turning into a half-man/half-beast? Wouldn’t the sign of the unibrow make more sense? Come to think of it, that was used in “Company of Wolves”. Regardless, I don’t get the pentagram thing.

  • Rock Baker

    The pentagram, as a symbol of demonic forces, could be seen as a token of how the curse has taken hold of a once-goodly man. Pentagram = evil, pentagram in victim’s hand = evil done to victim.

  • Rock Baker

    As a side-note, in The Beast Must Die (the who-done-it werewolf movie) Peter Cushing gives a scientific reason for the pentagram to be seen in a lycanthrope’s vision. Something about the cornia being misshapen or something like that, been some time since I’ve seen it.

  • Man, for what it was, BMD was dull as dirt.

  • note though that the pentagram thing went away pretty fast in the sequels, because it made no sense. Even in the original, it only shows up a couple of times.

  • pb210

    n the 1933 novel The Werewolf of Paris by Guy Endore, someone did use a silver bullet on Bertrand Caillet, though it did not slay him, only landing in the leg

  • sandra

    But Universal wouldn’t LET him find peace; he kept coming back in lame sequels.