Just about everyone is
familiar with the legend of the werewolf…traditionally, there were several ways
a person could become a werewolf...a person could be transformed by eating the
meat of a wolf that had been mixed with that of a human and that the ensuing
condition was irreversible…centuries later other stories circulated that were
said to create werewolves or perhaps more rationally explained as a condition
of clinical lycanthropy as the medical people call it…these including having a
cursed placed upon you, or by being conceived under a new moon, or by having
eaten certain herbs, or by sleeping under the full moon on a Friday (presumably
outside or this would make us all werewolves), or by drinking water that has
been touched by a wolf…this was taken quite seriously in medieval Europe…traditionally,
there are three methods one can use to cure a werewolf… medicinally (usually
via the use of wolfs bane)…surgically or by exorcism…many of the cures
advocated by the medieval medical practitioners proved to be fatal to the
patients… Lon Chaney Jr. played
the title role in 1941’s ‘The Wolf Man’… He was the son of course of movie
legend Lon Chaney…the movie was a great factor in the rise in popularity of the
wolf man story…Bela Lugosi of ‘Dracula’ fame had a part as a gypsy fortune
teller who was also a werewolf…the idea of a wolf man has a widespread belief
in European folklore…Bavaria, Romania, Hungary and Austria were the hotbeds of
this tale…speaking of Lon Chaney Jr., he was the only actor ever to play ‘The
Big Four’ horror characters from Universal…The Wolf Man, and in later
incarnations, Frankenstein’s monster, Count Dracula, and the Mummy…he also
appeared in ‘The Inner Sanctum’ movie series which was very good.
