#wolfman 1941

Also, a bonus leshy oc, bc i was thinking of a leshy saving leonard while leonard was in wolfman form and injured.

🎬 The Wolfman 1941

The eventual wolfman is named Larry, and he's American even though his dad is an English lord who lives in a castle, Sir John Talbot.

Larry is a peeping tom; the very first thing he does when he gets to his dad's estate is spy on a woman through her window with a telescope. Her name is Gwen, and she lives above her father's antique shop, so Larry goes in and asks to buy the earrings she has sitting on her dresser upstairs. She's surprised he knows about them, and he claims to be psychic. He invites her to go on a date with him that night, but she says no. He asks her again ten times and she keeps saying no.

He buys an antique cane for a scandalous £3 upcharge, "$15 for an old stick? What are you trying to pull?" To be fair, $15 in 1941 is worth over $300 today. I guess when your daddy is a local lord and owns all the serfs in town, you can afford to drop $300 on a stick with a SILVER WOLFHEAD HANDLE AND PENTAGRAM.

Gwen tells him apropos of nothing that "the werewolf is marked by a pentagram! It is the symbol of evil, and he sees it in the palm of his next victim's hand!" Remember this exposition; it's a mystery mousekatool we can use later!

Larry picks up Gwen for their "date" even though she said no and is in fact engaged to his dad's gamekeeper. She invites along her friend Jenny, and they go to have their fortunes told by some traveling ethnic slurs.

Their fortune teller is Bela Lugosi, playing a character also named Bela. He has a pentagram burned into his forehead and sees a pentagram on Jenny's palm.

Don't get too attached to Jenny.

Jenny is mauled to death by a wolf, Larry beats it to death with his cane and somehow gets bitten on the sternum. How a wolf bites the flat center of your chest, the world may never know (the movie never actually shows the wound, nor any of the copious blood the characters keep mentioning)

Larry's wound is magically gone the next day, and the cops find Bela Lugosi with his head bashed in next to Jenny's mangled corpse. Larry is in trouble, but don't worry, his daddy own the cops too and tells them to buzz off.

Bela's mother tells Larry that he is cursed to become a werewolf unless he wears a magic pendant over his heart. He immediately takes it off and gives it to Gwen who offers him a penny for it; "that's not enough," so he kisses her and she runs away because all the ethnic slurs who came for Bela's funeral start packing up shop and leaving town. They heard there's a werewolf on the loose!

Side note: this is pre-decimal currency, back when there were 240 pence in a pound. If 3 pounds is 15 dollars, that means one penny is 2.08333 cents, about 40 cents today. You'd pay more than that for a glow-in-the-dark spider ring or a sticky hand from one of those capsule machines at the grocery store.

Larry finally turns into The Wolfman™! Bela turned into an actual wolf, but Larry turns into a wolf-man hybrid for some reason. He transforms after stripping down to his wife beater to look at his disappearing wound which has suddenly reappeared in the shape of a pentagram (the movie zooms in so close you can't see his chest, just a star on a skin-textured bsckground; man boobs must have been too sexy for the Hays Code). I guess the studio didn't want their monster to run around in an undershirt, because the wolfman wears a black longsleeve, and Larry wakes up wearing it the next morning after killing a gravedigger. Maybe the costume department didn't have enough fake fur to cover his arms. Who knows?

Larry all but confesses to the murder to the cops, his father, and the town doctor, but they write him off and tell him he's just stressed out after mistaking Bela for the wolf that killed Jenny and stoving his brains in. Larry asks the doctor about the werewolf curse, and is told that it's all psychosomatic. "People just IMAGINE they turn into wolves, they don't REALLY transform, it's a kind of schizophrenia."

He visits Gwen at the antique shop and tells her that he's running away. "I'm a loner, Dotty. A rebel. You don't want to get mixed up with a guy like me." She wants to run away with him, abandoning her fiance for some guy she met yesterday, but he sees the pentagram on her palm and runs back home in fear.

Gwen's gamekeeper fiance assembles a posse to trap and kill the werewolf. He is adamant that it is indeed a werewolf even though the tracks are regular wolfprints and the doctor told everyone that werewolves are just mentally ill humans. He should have no reason to suspect it's a werewolf, but I guess he can sense Larry was macking on his honey and now he's out for blood.

Larry confesses again to his father that he's a werewolf after being cast out of church (EVERYONE gave him the stink eye until he left), and he decides to turn himself in to the posse. His dad won't let him, and he won't let the posse come inside to get him either, so he ties him to a chair upstairs until his madness breaks.

"Won't you stay with me until I'm better, papa?"

"Hell no, this is your fight, not mine. Besides, there's an angry mob outside looking for you, and now I've got to throw them off your scent. Godspeed, my boy."

Around this time, I figured the movie wad about half over, and that the next 45 minutes or hour would be spent with Larry struggling with the curse night after night, narrowly escaping the posse, teaming up with Bela's mom, looking for a cure to his curse etc.

NOPE.

He escapes from the chair offscreen and tries to kill Gwen, so his dad beats him to death with the cane. He turns back into a human, everyone cries, the end.

Live-action Wolfman/Werewolf’s 

The Wolfman (1941)

An American Werewolf in London (1981)

Monster Squad (1987)

Ginger Snaps (2000)

Van Helsing (2004)

Underworld: Rise of the Lycans (2009)

The Wolfman (2010)