Night of the Werewolf

Waldemar Daninsky. The name is a trochaic delight, a complete poem—I could walk around all day saying those words, which roll off the tongue like “Candyman.” Waldemar Daninsky, the lycanthropic Polish nobleman, was the creation of Spanish screenwriter Paul Naschy (also credited as Jacinto Molina, his real name), who portrayed him in 12 films, each narratively discontinuous and repeating the same formula whereby a quiet, penitent wolf man wants only to fall in love with a woman who will put him out of his misery. He chooses the blandest, least developed female character in the ensemble, canoodles with her a while, and in one last act of bravery, saves her from a less conflicted member of the bestiary: a vampire, a zombie, an extraterrestrial, and, most entertainingly, a yeti. Then his lover kills him with whatever silver is close at hand. By the time Naschy made Night of the Werewolf (1981), a late entry in the cycle and the first that he directed himself, the blend had aged into a fine bloody Rioja, not complex but deeply satisfying. He grabs everything from the pantry—Universal creature transformation, Hammer Gothic, and Eurohorror eroticism, producing something that is gory but sincere, a kind of Spanish folk art, delivered without irony and with a child’s delight in monsters.

When a Spanish artist says something was “surrealist,” I believe him. That was the word Naschy used in his memoirs to describe the monster fight at the end of Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1943), the unlikely film that inspired him to make movies. In that scene, Frankenstein’s monster (Bela Lugosi) and the wolf man Larry Talbot (Lon Chaney Jr) wrestle with each other in the laboratory beneath a Gothic castle. The apocalyptic finale in which monsters are pitted against each other and then drowned in a dam explosion must have made a big impression on young Jacinto Molina, who grew up in Spain and began working in the 1960s under the strict authoritarian regime of General Franco. A politically repressed nation is bound to have vivid nightmares (see Pan’s Labyrinth), and Molina as Naschy expressed his in an energetic explosion of surreal, doomed fairy tales in which the medieval past never left and a Gothic church full of vampires and their zombie slaves was only a short car ride away. He originally intended his stories to be set in Spain, so we can lay some of the blame for the weird mix of geography and time periods at the feet of the Catholic censors who examined every domestic script before production. They weren’t having any Spanish werewolves, and sex and gore were fine as long as they were made for export. Hence the shifting production locations, different domestic and international cuts, and the bewildering number of alternate titles attached to Paul Naschy films.