Hero Complex has a great piece by Susan King up about the origins of The Wolf Man, the 1941 horror flick about to be released as a remake starring Benicio Del Toro and Emily Blunt. Among other things, the lycanthropic classic apparently has Jewish origins:
Screenwriter Curt Siodmak was a German Jew of Polish descent who fled Europe for Hollywood in the 1930s to escape persecution from the Nazis. So there's little wonder that his 1941 Universal horror classic The Wolf Man parallels the experiences of Jews in Europe before and during World War II.As I've written before, this is one remake I'm fully in support of, if only for putting the fear back into fantasy. And I'm intrigued by Latoya Peterson's fascinating essay on the lack of female werewolves on Jezebel. I'm not entirely sure I agree with the thesis that we don't have female werewolves because audiences are uncomfortable with the transfiguration of a female-coded body into one with male-coded traits like hair and muscles, though it's an intriguing argument. Instead, I think werewolves are associated with male sexuality run amok, literally devouring their female victims. And so the lack of female werewolves is less a matter of bodily discomfort than sexual ignorance--audiences have a hard time buying that such sexual rapacity lurks in the heart of any woman, at least any woman they're supposed to feel sympathy for. Either way, I can virtually guarantee you I'll be spending Valentine's Day with The Wolfman. Whatever the sexual or ethnic politics involved, it's hard to argue with a good scare.
"The Wolf Man" revolves around an everyman, Lawrence Talbot (Lon Chaney Jr.), who arrives at his father's mansion in England after years of living in America. One evening, he's bitten by a werewolf in the forest and finds himself turning into a vicious beast whenever the moon is full.
Filled with self-loathing for what happened to him, Talbot fears not only what he might do to his friends and family but also being hunted down and killed....
Even the pentagram in Talbot's hand signifying a werewolf is a "very obvious substitute for the Star of David, and if you had that symbol you were going to be cursed," Nasr says. "That is not how Siodmak felt as a Jew but how he felt others perceived him. Larry Talbot was an interesting substitute for what was going on with the Jewish people in the early 1940s."