The beast without: The cinematic werewolf as a (counter)cultural metaphor

Abstract

While in-depth cultural histories have been devoted to such horror monsters as the vampire, the zombie and Frankenstein’s monster, the cinematic werewolf has long been considered little more than a Freudian allegory for the dark side of man. Accepted thinking on horror cinema would have it that countercultural ‘New Horror’ films such as Night of the Living Dead (Romero, 1968), The Last House on the Left (Craven, 1972) and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (Hooper, 1974) marked a turning point, proving beyond doubt that the horror film could be a site for social, cultural and political debate. Yet, while a few examples have been given scholarly attention outside of psychoanalytic discourse, the werewolf film is still considered to have little cultural resonance and continues to be framed in the context of ‘the beast within’. This article argues that, while this term has been historically important in establishing the werewolf as a topic for scholarly study, its continued dominance prevents us from engaging with the werewolf as a complex and mutating cultural metaphor. By providing cultural readings of Werewolves on Wheels (Levesque, 1971), The Boy Who Cried Werewolf (Juran, 1973) and The Werewolf of Washington (Ginsberg, 1973) – three films that share their thematic preoccupations with the New Horror movement – it illustrates that the werewolf is just as versatile as our other popular monsters and should be considered not just in the context of the psychoanalytic ‘beast within’ but the cultural ‘beast without’.