![]() Just after he grabs her, Talbot is attacked by his own father, Sir John (played by Claude Rains). Toward the end of The Wolf Man, Gwen rushes through a murky forest to escape Talbot’s lupine form. It also turned into a real safety hazard. ANOTHER PROBLEM? A DANGEROUS FOG MACHINE.īillowing, man-made fog greatly enhanced the movie’s climax. “He had to hold me, or I would have ended up in the rafters!” Ankers later said. Once she turned around, he would seize her shoulders and growl. On many occasions, the six-foot, 220-pound Chaney snuck up behind her in full werewolf makeup. To get even, he subjected Ankers to numerous pranks-none of which she found all that funny. Trouble started brewing when the actress was given Chaney’s dressing room. Although their characters had great chemistry, Chaney and Ankers didn’t always get along behind the scenes. In The Wolf Man, she plays Gwen Conliffe, a storeowner’s daughter who falls for Talbot. Nicknamed “ Queen of the B’s,” Evelyn Ankers appeared in numerous horror films, usually as some love interest or damsel in distress. THERE WAS SOME TENSION BETWEEN THE TWO LEADS. ![]() I made it up.” Authentic or not, the poem was repeated verbatim in 2004’s Van Helsing. In 1989, he told journalist Tom Weaver “nowadays, film historians think it’s from German folklore. But the poem was really authored by Siodmak himself. “Even a man who is pure at heart and says his prayers by night may become a wolf when the wolfsbane blooms and the autumn moon is bright.” Over the course of the film, this spooky verse is recited on several occasions-usually by a character who claims that it’s some sort of ancient rhyme. THAT SUPPOSEDLY ANCIENT POEM WAS MADE UP BY SIODMAK. Universal cast Lugosi as a mustachioed Gypsy fortuneteller named “Bela.” This character is later revealed to be a werewolf who gets the plot rolling by biting our friend, Mr. Nevertheless, the former Count Dracula didn’t get left out. Lugosi lost the role to Lon Chaney Jr, whose performance in The Wolf Man propelled him into stardom. BELA LUGOSI WANTED TO PLAY THE MAIN CHARACTER. As movie historian Constantine Nasr once observed, Siodmak saw this picture as “the story of an outsider whose destiny was cursed by forces he could not control.” 3. “I was forced into a fate I didn’t want.” The parallels are noticeable. During a 1999 interview with the Writer’s Guild of America, Siodmak shed some light on the film’s dark subtexts. In The Wolf Man, there’s a degree to which art subtly imitates reality. Finally, in 1937, Siodmak left Europe altogether. ![]() The spread of Nazism drove him to France and then to the UK. Siodmak also made a name for himself within the German film industry-until Hitler’s Third Reich came to power. By the late 1920s, he’d found work as a journalist and emerged as one of Berlin’s most prominent authors. ![]() Bowing to his father’s wishes, the young man went on to earn degrees in engineering and mathematics, but writing always remained his true passion. Even as a boy, Siodmak’s literary talents were readily apparent: At age nine, his first short story was published in a children’s magazine. A Jewish man of Polish descent, the writer was born in Dresden, Germany on August 10, 1902. Lawrence Talbot’s struggle in The Wolf Man was influenced by Siodmak’s own experiences. REAL-LIFE ATROCITIES HELPED CURT SIODMAK EMPATHIZE WITH THE MONSTER. Originally, the movie was titled Destiny, but this was changed to The Wolf Man by the time it premiered. In just seven weeks’ time, Siodmak put together a thrilling story about an American named Lawrence Talbot who travels to his family’s ancestral home in Wales, where he’s bitten by a werewolf. Novelist and screenwriter Curt Siodmak was tapped to pen a new script. Still, six years later, Universal was ready to give the lycanthrope genre one more try. Unlike many of the studio's previous horror flicks, this lupine picture tanked at the box office. That year, they released Werewolf of London, starring Broadway crowd-pleaser Henry Hull. Riding high on the success of Bela Lugosi’s Dracula (1931), Boris Karloff’s Frankenstein (1931), and Claude Rains’s The Invisible Man (1933), Universal Studios gave audiences a fresh look at another famous monster in 1935. Here are some hair-raising facts about the transformative masterpiece. One of Universal’s classic monster films, The Wolf Man paved the way for an entire genre, ushering in such lupine favorites as 1981's duo of The Howling and John Landis’s An American Werewolf in London. It wasn’t the first werewolf movie ever made, but it was the first to become a blockbuster.
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