Old Times in Werewolf of London
Rent from DeepDyve- Old Times in Werewolf of London
“Nightmares of the Past”
—Entry, Universal Pictures employee contest to name Werewolf of London (1935)
Other variations occur which relate to questions of time. The trait of inversion may either date back to the very beginning, as far back as the subject’s memory reaches, or it may not have become noticeable till some particular time before or after puberty.
—Sigmund Freud, “Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality”
Introduction
films about men who turn into ravening wolves are ripe for an approach to the horror genre, pioneered by Robin Wood, that sees the films staging a return of the repressed, eruptions (in the case of werewolf films) of primal carnality that must be contained and eradicated before the societal status quo can be restored and reaffirmed (Wood 7–22). Werewolf films can be construed as dramas about men regressing, but also as ones about young men moving forward. Walter Evans sees films about individuals caught up by powerful urges they can neither understand nor control, and wracked by bodily transformations that include hair growing in unexpected places, telling stories about the traumas and discoveries of adolescence (54–55). This second interpretive template can be fitted to many entries in the subgenre, perhaps none more snugly than I Was a Teenage Werewolf (1957). Evans focuses on The Wolf Man (1941), with its affable and pitiable protagonist, Larry Talbot (Lon Chaney Jr.), writing that “the monsters are generally sympathetic, in large part because . . . they themselves suffer the change as unwilling victims” (55). Another unwilling victim of his own sexual awakening, I argue in this article, is the central character in Werewolf of London (1935). Universal’s first attempt at a werewolf film has not been construed as a “coming of age” story for, perhaps, a couple of reasons: its protagonist has been widely regarded as unsympathetic, and the confusions and terrors of adolescence implicitly dramatized by the film are those, specifically, of a gay man.1 This dawning is all the more convulsive because it is a second adolescence, and so this film depicts, simultaneously, a moving forward and a going back, with the latter sense calling to mind the genre’s relationship to the repressed and its return.
That the film has a gay subtext seems to me, although very few have written about it, obvious.2 Perhaps this overtness is one reason it is hard to find an extended queer reading of this film; it may seem that there is little work of interpretation to do when so much lies on the surface. An online reviewer of Werewolf of London (hereafter WWL) calls this subtext “almost impossible to ignore” (Erickson). One starts to get a sense of the film’s obsessive thematic preoccupations from even a thumbnail sketch [End Page 3] of the story, which opens with botanist Wilfred Glendon (Henry Hull) hiking in Tibet in search of a rare flower, the Mariphasa lupino lumino, and finding it just before he is attacked and bitten by a werewolf. Glendon returns home to England and meets another botanist, Doctor Yogami (Warner Oland), who, Glendon learns, is the one who bit him in wolf form back in Tibet. Yogami warns Glendon that both of them are now infected, and he implores Glendon to share his specimen of the rare plant, the flower of which contains the only known antidote to werewolfism. Glendon refuses, transforms, kills, and ultimately is shot dead. Along the way, he and Yogami, bound by their terrible secret, vie and tussle for possession of a flower that Harry Benshoff has called “the key signifier of the homoerotic male couple’s lycanthropy in Werewolf of London” (47).
Beyond its bare narrative outlines, the film supplies ample encouragement for viewers to construe the two men’s secret to be that they are only superficially werewolves and actually lovers. There is Glendon’s relationship with his wife, Lisa (Valerie Hobson), which from the outset seems troubled and distant, nothing like the intense chemistry he and Yogami share from their first scene of dialogue together (Photo 1). One could also point to the suggestive staging of Glendon’s attack on Paul (Lester Matthews...
