‘Wolfman’: a new moon rising on werewolves?

February 9, 2010 at 12:00a.m.

By FRANK LOVECE

Vampires and zombies have staked their own popular patches of film and TV, if the “Twilight” movies, HBO’s “True Blood,” the CW’s “Vampire Diaries” and a brain-full of living-dead movies are any indication. Will “The Wolfman,” opening Friday, now give werewolves their day in the sun, so to speak?

It depends. Like zombies and vampires, the werewolf may need to be, well, regroomed: The “Twilight” vamps are daywalkers who glisten in sunlight, and zombies, who almost invariably shambled through the years, sprint like they’re in sneaker commercials in the likes of “28 Days Later” (2002) and the remade “Dawn of the Dead” (2004). Werewolf movies have become so laden with mythology, you wonder if “The Wolfman” can offer anything new under the moon.

“It’s an action-packed movie, and the wolves are ferocious and have great speed,” allows co-star Anthony Hopkins, speaking by phone from California. That’s not an inconsiderable difference from the quick but hardly superhuman lope of most movie werewolves. More subtly, says director Joe Johnston, the title character played by Benicio Del Toro is a “wolfman” — one word — as opposed to Lon Chaney Jr.’s character in the 1941 Universal Pictures classic “The Wolf Man,” of which this is a remake.

“I don’t know that it consciously signals anything,” Johnston reflects. “I don’t think anybody said, ‘Hey, let’s make it one word.’ But it did become integral to the character. It identifies him as an entity that’s not a wolf and not a man. I think that sets it apart from the original, and it gives him his own species. He’s a wolfman.”

Should the movie pull it off, that’s an intriguing distinction. From the start, with the 1913 silent short “The Werewolf” — which filmed a genuine wolf as the creature — werewolf movies have largely been split into two packs, that of the “Wolf MAN” and that of the “WOLF Man.”

With the former, the man is the true identity — a tragic monster who knows not what the beast does and is eaten away by guilt. With the latter, the true identity is the wolf with a human mind, and the only things eaten away at are you and me. Free-spirited predators who live to hunt, these werewolves don’t identify as human. When they take on human appearance, they’re wolves in sheep’s clothing.

The tragic monster was the standard for years, with Universal’s “Werewolf of London” (1935) and “The Wolf Man” each giving us an innocent man afflicted through the bite of a supernatural creature.

“A person, usually a man, becoming an out-of-control, animalistic killer is more relatable than somebody becoming a vampire or creating a Frankenstein monster,” suggests Michael Weldon, author of “The Psychotronic Video Guide” (St. Martin’s, 1996) and a longtime authority on genre movies.

Brad Steiger, author of “The Werewolf Book: The Encyclopedia of Shape-Shifting Beings” (Visible Ink, 1999), says it was Chaney’s indelible acting that made “The Wolf Man” the model for years to come. “The pain we saw in his face, that of a good man who’s under this curse and trying to fight it, became representative of all of us,” Steiger says. “We have to continually keep the wolf in us in check.”

That remained so decades later, he says, when “An American Werewolf in London” was one of three 1981 werewolf films. “We saw our dancing Dr Pepper guy (David Naughton, of that era’s familiar soda commercial) stretch into this wolf, and he was so human that we could relate to the agony of what it might be like to transform.”

In the interim, we’d related to greater or lesser extents to teenage werewolves (1957’s “I Was a Teenage Werewolf” with a young Michael Landon), biker werewolves (1971’s “Werewolves on Wheels”), a divorced-dad werewolf (1973’s “The Boy Who Cried Werewolf”) and European werewolves, notably Hammer Film’s “The Curse of the Werewolf” (1961) starring Oliver Reed, which upped the blood and sex quotient.

Yet, after the vogue that gave us “The Howling” and “Wolfen” (both 1981), “Stephen King’s Silver Bullet” (1985) and the Michael J. Fox comedy “Teen Wolf” (1986), we stopped relating.