Autumn is a truly wonderful time of year for monster fans. So many places become the perfect settings for werewolf stories, but October has horror movie marathons and Halloween episodes of tv shows and haunted houses and corn mazes and a gorgeous, glorious full moon. (Did you see it? It was fantastic.) I’m glad I live somewhere that celebrates Halloween.
Werewolves.com has a series of posts about werewolf movies of various decades.
A Decade’s Worth of Werewolf Movies: 1980s (I hate that they use the unnecessary apostrophe in 1980s.)
I’ve seen most, but not all, of the movies from the 1980s. My favorites are The Howling and Silver Bullet, though I have a fond spot for Ladyhawke and I’m actually a pretty big fan of the sequels to The Howling.
I think my love for Silver Bullet exists because Stephen King’s Cycle of the Werewolf is one of my favorite werewolf stories. I love the way it focuses on the different moons and the different holidays in each month, I love that the main character is in a wheelchair, I love the way the terror creeps through the town, I love the way I get chills when reading it, the way it makes me shiver even when much more violent, bloody, descriptive, etc., werewolf stories leave me untouched.
One they missed, Scooby Doo and the Reluctant Werewolf!
A Decade’s Worth of Werewolf Movies: 1990s
Apparently I missed most of the werewolf movies in the 1990s, which makes me sad, but also gives me new things to watch, so that’s exciting. I think there’s actually a Howling sequel I haven’t seen, even, and now I really want to go rent it.
I’ll talk about my least favorite here, and that’s Wolf. I didn’t watch it in the 90s, and I think people telling me over and over to watch it as soon as they learned I liked werewolves built it up too much. I found it frequently lost my attention.
The 90s really had a dearth of werewolf movies, didn’t they?
A Decade’s Worth of Werewolf Movies: 2000s
Oddly, this lists Ginger Snaps Back: The Beginning but only references the other two movies, while it lists the Underworld movies as a set of three. Huh. Ginger Snaps and Cursed are two of my favorites from this list (Ginger Snaps because it’s actually a pretty good movie, Cursed because it has an excellent soundtrack and it very much looked like The Lost Boys for werewolves), but mostly I am shocked and horrified that I missed this:
Never Cry Werewolf: This film was shown on the Sci-Fi channel on May 11, 2008. It is a remake of the 1980s vampire film Fright Night, replacing the vampires with werewolves. About 16-year-old Loren being the only one suspicious of her new (and sexy) neighbor, Jared. She believes Jared is a werewolf and responsible for the town’s recent deaths.
I know why I missed it (I was traveling in May), but I am not sure why I hadn’t even heard of it. A remake of Fright Night with werewolves? Seriously? I must get my hands on this! (I’m a big fan of cheesy Sci-Fi channel movies.)
The more I look at this list, I realize most of my favorite werewolf movies are from the 2000s. Dog Soldiers! Blood Moon, which more heartbreaking than scary! Brotherhood of the Wolf!
And some they’ve missed (not that these are all my favorites, but they are werewolf movies):
Skinwalkers, werewolves with guns! Werewolf: The Devil’s Hound, which is horrible! The Feeding, which I want to see! Blood of the Werewolf, which looks awful.
Actually, WerewolfMovies.net has lists of movies all the way back to the 1940s. I’m finding it useful.