Uncle John's Great Big Bathroom Reader (69 page)

THE MAKEUP

Jack Pierce was still the makeup artist at Universal, and he welcomed the chance to use his original design: a hairy face complete with fangs and a wolfish nose, plus hairy hands and feet. The makeup took a total of four hours to apply, most of which was spent applying tufts of fur—authentic yak hair imported from Asia—one by one, and then singeing them to create a wild look.

Chaney’s wolfman didn’t talk—all it did was grunt, growl, and howl—and that was no accident: when Chaney was fully made up, he couldn’t talk and could only eat through a straw. As he recounted years later, the only thing worse than wearing the makeup was taking it off:

What gets me is when it’s after work and I’m all hot and itchy and tired, and I’ve got to sit in that chair for forty-five minutes more while Pierce just about kills me ripping off the stuff he put on in the morning! Sometimes we take an hour and leave some of the skin on my face!

THANKS, DAD

Most actors would probably have refused to wear such difficult makeup, but Chaney (whose real first name was Creighton) had no choice: he was desperate to make it in the film business.

While he was alive, Lon Chaney, Sr. had fought Creighton’s attempts to become an actor. He even forced his son out of Hollywood High and into a plumbing school when he asked to take acting lessons. As Chaney, Sr.’s career soared to its heights in the late 1920s, Chaney, Jr. was working as a boilermaker.

The elder Chaney died of throat cancer in 1930; Creighton Chaney signed with RKO studios two years later. After moving from bit part to bit part for more than two years, he reluctantly changed his name to Lon Chaney, Jr. to cash in on his father’s fame. “They had to starve me to make me take his name,” he groused years later.

Finally, in 1939—only days after his car and furniture were re-posessed by a furniture company—Chaney scored a hit in a stage version of
Of Mice and Men.
That led to a starring role in the movie version, and in 1940, a contract with Universal.

ALL THIS AND WORLD WAR II

The studio had modest hopes for
The Wolf Man.
They scheduled its release for December 11, 1941, right before Christmas. But on December 7, Japan bombed Pearl Harbor and the United States entered World War II. Universal was sure the movie would become a box office disaster. After all, who was going to take time out for the movies when they were going to war?

Good vs. Evil

To their surprise, it was a hit. The film played to packed movie houses all over the country, and was the studio’s biggest moneymaker of the season. It established the Wolf Man as an important movie monster, along with Dracula and Frankenstein. It almost singlehandedly made werewolves a part of the popular culture, and it
turned Lon Chaney Jr. into one of the best known actors in the country.

World War II probably had more to do with making
The Wolf Man
a hit than any other factor. What Universal had failed to realize was that the war fueled a need for the kind of escape that horror films provided. Inside a darkened theater, moviegoers could forget their troubles, at least for a while, as they watched ordinary mortals triumph over seemingly insurmountable evil. As David Skal writes in
The Monster Show:
A
Cultural History of Horror
,

Talbot’s four-film quest to put to rest his wolf-self is, in a strange way, an unconscious parable of the war effort. The Wolf Man’s crusade for eternal peace and his frustrated attempts to control irrational, violent, European forces....The Wolf Man’s saga was the most consistent and sustained monster myth of the war, beginning with the first year of America’s direct involvement in the war, and finishing up just in time for Hiroshima.

WOLF MAN FACTS

• The hardest scene to shoot was the final “metamorphosis” scene, in which Chaney turns from a werewolf to a human as he dies. Chaney describes the process:

The way we did the transformation was that I came in at
2:00 a.m.
When I hit the position, they would take little nails and drive them through the skin at the edge of my fingers, on both hands, so that I wouldn’t move them anymore.

While I was in this position, they would take the camera and weigh it down with one ton, so that it wouldn’t move when people walked. They had targets for my eyes.

Then, they would shoot five or ten frames of film in the camera. They’d take the film out and send it to the lab. While it was there, the make-up man would come and take the whole thing off my face and put on a new one. I’m still immobile. When the film came back from the lab, they’d put it back in the camera and then they’d check me.

They’d say, “Your eyes have moved a little bit, move them to the right....” Then they’d roll it again and shoot another 10 frames. Well, we did 21 changes of make-up and it took twenty two hours. I won’t discuss about the bathroom...

• For the rest of the cast and crew, the worst part of filming
The Wolf Man
was breathing the special effects fog that was used in the outdoor scenes. “The kind of fog they used in those days was nothing like the kind we have today,” cameraman Phil Lathrop remembers. “It was greasy stuff made with mineral oil. We worked in it for weeks and the entire cast and crew had sore eyes and intestinal trouble the entire time. Besides that, we were all shivering with cold because it was necessary to keep the temperature below 50 degrees when using the fog.” Female lead Evelyn Ankers fainted on the set after inhaling too much fog during a chase sequence.

•
The Wolf Man
made a lot of money for Universal, but not much of it filtered down to the writers and actors who actually brought it to life. “My salary was $400 a week,” scriptwriter Curt Siodmak recalls. “When the picture made its first million, the producer got a $10,000 bonus, the director got a diamond ring for his wife, and I got fired, since I wanted $25 more for my next job.”

LON CHANEY’S WOLFMAN SEQUELS

Chaney made four wolfman movies for Universal during the war years...more than Universal made of Dracula or Frankenstein. The others were:

•
Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman
(1943). Chaney travels to Castle Frankenstein to see if he can find a cure for his wolfman condition in Dr. Frankenstein’s notes. All he finds is the Frankenstein monster, played by Bela Lugosi, who had turned down the original
Frankenstein
in 1931 because there wasn’t any dialogue.

Movie Note:
Lugosi played a particularly stiff Frankenstein, not just because he was growing old, but also because in the original version of the film, Frankenstein is left blind and mute after a botched brain transplant. In the version released to theaters, all references to blindness, muteness and the brain transplant were removed, so he just looks old.

•
House of Frankenstein
(1944)
. Mad scientist Dr. Gustav Niemann (Boris Karloff) escapes from an insane asylum with the help of his hunchback assistant Daniel (J. Carrol Naish) and flees to Castle Frankenstein. There he teams up with Dracula (John Carradine), Frankenstein (Glenn Strange), and the Wolfman
(Chaney) to terrorize the countryside until they are finally killed by villagers.

•
House of Dracula
(1945)
. Dr. Franz Edelman (Onslow Stevens) finds a way to cure Dracula (John Carradine) of his vampirism, but Dracula refuses to submit. Instead, he bites Dr. Edelman and turns him into a vampire; then Edelman raises Frankenstein from the dead, just as the Wolfman arrives on the scene.

Movie Note:
Originally titled
The Wolfman vs. Dracula
, the movie had to be renamed because the Wolfman and Dracula do not actually meet in the film.

•
Abbot and Costello Meet Frankenstein
(1948)
. Bud Abbott and Lou Costello team up with the Wolfman to prevent Dracula (Lugosi) and a mad female scientist (Lenore Aubert) from transplanting Costello’s brain into the Frankenstein monster. Critics say the film is symbolic of the decline of Universal’s horror classics in the late 1940s—fans say it is one of the best films Abbot and Costello ever made.

THE END

Chaney would reprise the wolfman role in movies and in television for the rest of his life, including appearances on
The Pat Boone Show
, and
Route 66.
He also played the Frankenstein monster in
The Ghost of Frankenstein
(1942), Count Dracula in Son
of Dracula
(1943), and the Mummy in three Mummy movies.

A heavy drinker, by the 1960s he was reduced to appearing in low-budget schlock like
Face of the Screaming Werewolf
(1965);
Hillbillies in a Haunted House
(1967); and
Dracula vs. Frankenstein
(1970). He died of a heart attack in 1973. But the wolfman lives on.

The Legend Lives On.
Like all classic Hollywood monsters, the werewolf was spun off into dozens of movies, many of them lowbudget, some just plain unusual. Take these, for example:

•
I Was A Teenage Werewolf
(1957)

The original “teenage” horror film,
I Was a Teenage Werewolf
, was filmed in seven days at a cost of $125,000...and made $2,000,000. It launched an entire genre of low-budget, B-movie films, including
I Was a Teenage Frankenstein, I Was a Teenage Zombie
, and
I Was a Teenage TV Terrorist.

The movie stars a young Michael Landon (of
Bonanza
and
Little House on the Prairie
fame) in his first feature film role. He plays an emotionally disturbed teenager seeking treatment for his problems. A mad scientist hypnotizes him and he “regresses” so far back in time that he becomes a prehistoric werewolf. Landon’s girlfriend is not amused, and neither are the police. They gun him down at the end of the film.

•
The Mad Monster
(1942)

Dr. Cameron, a mad scientist, injects a handyman with the blood of a wolf, “turning him into the prototype for an army of wolfmen to battle the Nazis.” In the end, however, Dr. Cameron succumbs to pettiness and uses the werewolf “to kill the men he believes responsible for destroying his reputation.” The film, banned in the UK until 1952, was finally released with an X rating and a medical disclaimer touting the safety of blood transfusions.

•
Werewolf In A Girl’s Dormitory
(1961)

When a series of ghastly murders take place at a correctional school for wayward girls, investigators discover that Mr. Swift, the school’s superintendent, is a werewolf.

•
Werewolves On Wheels (1971)

“With surfing music blaring on the soundtrack, motorcycle gang members curse, attend impromptu orgies, drink barrels of beer and rough up some monks. In retaliation, cyclists are cursed with lycanthropy [they’re turned into werewolves]. What follows is some very unintentional comedy and some very unnecessary nudity.”

—The Creature Feature’s Movie Guide

•
Leena Meets Frankenstein
(1993)

“A hardcore remake of
Abbot and Costello Meet Frankenstein
(1948), which changes from black and white to color for the sex scenes. When their car breaks down, two street-wise babes are stranded at a tin e-share condo with the classic monsters—the
Wolfman, Dracula, his vampire wives, and the Frankenstein monster.”

—The Illustrated Werewolf Movie Guide

•
The Rats Are Coming! The Werewolves Are Here!
(1972)

“When a newly married man discovers that his inlaws are incestuous werewolves, he and his wife set out to break the family curse. The characters include a 108-year-old family patriarch and the wife’s brother Malcolm, who is kept in shackles in a locked room, where he commits unspeakable crimes against chickens and mice. “To pad its short running time, producer Andy Milligan filmed a subplot of man-eating rats in Milligan’s hometown of Staten Island. Ads offered: ‘Win a live rat for your mother-in-law.’”

—Cult Flicks and Trash Pics

•
Night Stalkers
(1995)

A private detective stumbles onto a society of werewolves while investigating the murder of someone who was skinned alive. Probably the world’s first all-deaf werewolf film, directed by a deaf director and “shot on video in London and Liverpool with an all-deaf cast for an incredible $600, utilizing sign language, subtitles, and voice-over for the hearing impaired.”

—The Illustrated Werewolf Movie Guide

•
Werewolf Of Woodstock
(1975)

A few days after the Woodstock festival, a beer-drinking, hippie-hating farmer (Tige Andrews from TV’s
The Mod Squad)
who lives next to the farm, is struck by lightning and turns into a beer-drinking, hippie-hating werewolf who preys on slow-to-leave concert-goers.
The Creature Features Movie Guide
describes it as “undoubtedly one of the dumbest lycanthropy [werewolf] movies ever produced.”