Sarah: Hello, hello everybody. Welcome to another wonderful, wonderful week with us. we're So Random and Weird Pod. Thank you for joining us. I'm Sarah. I'm your host for today.
Sheena: And I'm Sheena.
Sarah: It was nice and dreary today. How about you?
Sheena: still eighty degrees here and quite a bit
Sarah: Well.
Sheena: sunny than I like. but supposedly we're supposed to be getting some rain soon and then everybody's like, we're gonna start getting into rain season and I'm like, and that's a bad thing?
Sarah: Well I was gonna say, hopefully that would takes away the heat. you kinda want to get rid of the heat, so if if if the rain does that, you know, yay. It was like drizzling all day here, like all day. So, Yeah, I'm it's been kind of a bleh kinda day, although I have to say I got some cleaning done. So, I mean that's always a good thing. You can't go outside, you can't enjoy the weather, you can't go to a park or anything like that. So, yeah. Gonna have to make do. I like I said, I got my cleaning done. of course there's still so much to do, but I'm happy with what
Sheena: Right.
Sarah: was done. So yeah.
Sheena: Yeah, I I'm just ready for soup. I'm ready to bake.
Sarah: You know what I wanna I wanna do more fall themed food this year, like when I cook.
Sheena: Mm-hmm. I made baked oatmeal. Yeah. And I got
Sarah: Why?
Sheena: like the good, good cinnamon. That's no,
Sarah: Like the steel cut? sorry.
Sheena: no, like I don't remember what it is right now, but it's like really good and it's like seven dollars for like yeah, half a pound. Yeah. And it's
Sarah: For for cinnamon, for the cinnamon? Okay.
Sheena: it's supposed to be like the cinnamon that Cinnabon uses.
Sarah: Well I I can see
Sheena: So it's
Sarah: why that would would have been a little pricey 'cause no.
Sheena: Yeah. But it's good. I love me some baked oatmeal and I this morning I woke up and I went, I'm choosing violence, so I I made baked oatmeal.
Sarah: I yeah, no. I love baked oatmeal. I would much rather have it like I like okay, so my mom kind of raised me like you don't you don't do the instant crap.
Sheena: Mm.
Sarah: she's like steel cut oats are the best. so I get like the Irish steel cut oats in the can. and so it's a little pricier. But it is really good. It is healthier for you having still cut oatmeal from when I took all of my nutrition classes. it is healthier. Not that I don't do like the once in a while, the cheapo like oatmeals and cre oatmeal and cream, you're like the strawberries or the peaches or the blueberries or if I want something quick. But I love baked oatmeal. It is such a comfort food. in my mind you have to have it with
Sheena: Yeah. me
Sarah: fruit too in it, like blueberries or peaches or something in my mind.
Sheena: I usually make it with pecans or walnuts in it.
Sarah: Okay.
Sheena: But the thing is is like so yet again, you know, my
Sarah: Yeah.
Sheena: my autistic traits come out when it comes to texture and I hate soggy porridge. Give me congee any day, I'll eat congee any day, but I hate
Sarah: What is that?
Sheena: it's kind of like it's rice porridge. That's it's a Japanese Asian kind of thing. It's delicious. It's just like overcooked rice. So it's like squidgy.
Sarah: Hmm.
Sheena: It's delicious, but but I hate cooked so and I was raised on the Quaker instant packages. So I
Sarah: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Sheena: I did not put a I just put a little bit of water in there and mixed it up just so it was just wet enough and crunch, crunch, crunch. And and and it
Sarah: Crunchy oatmeal? Crunchy oatmeal. Is that what you're saying? You're
Sheena: Well, baked oatmeal is crunchy.
Sarah: Not how I eat No,
Sheena: Ha ha ha
Sarah: I mean like I I do fatty with it 'cause I I do like like some heavy whipping cream instead of milk. Like I pour a little cream in there instead of milk. when I heat it. after it comes out of the oven. I pour a little cream in there I don't make it mushy. I don't I don't do mushy. like when I eat cereal, I maybe a drop or two of milk goes into my cereal. Okay. My daughter pours like a whole frickin' half gallon into her cereal bowl. I mean, I'm like, I mean it's floating. I mean, you barely see
Sheena: Ha ha
Sarah: the cereal. I'm like, Arya, do you like some cereal with your milk? Cause, you know.
Sheena: Ha ha ha.
Sarah: I can't. I can't dude. I don't want mushy, soggy cereal. To me, that is ugh I just I have to throw it away. I can't. I cannot do it. if I eat like frosted flakes, like my cereal is very, very crunchy and it just has a little like splash of milk. Literally just like a like a very little drop or two. I mean, it's probably maybe a teaspoon of milk.
Sheena: Mm-hmm.
Sarah: that I eat in my cereal bowl. because I just don't want soggy flakes. That's just gross to me. I'm sorry. This is no.
Sheena: I yeah, well I mean I it was instant oatmeal. So yeah, I just I prefer crunch whenever I eat. So
Sarah: I mean, yeah, and I I do too. But I mean I I've never actually had unless it was like undercooked, oatmeal. I I've never had crunchy oatmeal. So
Sheena: Well, I mean baked oatmeal's crunchy on the top.
Sarah: Well, I mean if you don't like put like liquid
Sheena: Like an o
Sarah: in it, I don't I mean I've never really had like crunchy. Maybe it's maybe it's the
Sheena: It's like an oatmeal cookie.
Sarah: Like we go. I'm not a big oatmeal cookie fan. So it's all good though. It's all good.
Sheena: It's just it always comes down to texture.
Sarah: Yeah. it can be a little you know, with texture. I'm I'm not like my kids are more of a texture freak than I am, it's texture all the way from me. So I c I can't judge. I can't judge. So all right, I'm gonna sit up here a little bit 'cause I've been lounging.
Sheena: so Yeah, and i it's time for you to tell me a story.
Sarah: yes. And a story I shall tell. All right. Alright, picture it. Nighttime, beautiful out, stars in the sky, nice full moon, wind whipping through the trees, a twig snaps, the distant mournful howl of a wolf. You wait I know you wait Frozen All of a sudden Probably not gonna happen. Probably not gonna happen, you know. So but
Sheena: A six w four fe no.
Sarah: but you
Sheena: Hmm.
Sarah: know, I I do want to leave you guys with this. Just think about this for a second. For most of human history, most of the humans in the world have lived with somebody somewhere genuinely believing that their neighbor. You know, let's you know the turnip farmer next door was secretly a wolf. Not acted kind of feral, not had anger issues, an actual wolf with fur and teeth, you know, who went after people and ate them. All right. So they didn't just believe it quietly either. They built an entire legal system around it. They tortured people until these people agreed that they were wolves. Sound familiar? Kind of like witch trials kind of thing going on here. Anyway, so they wrote it into court records with the same bureaucratic seriousness that you'd use to log property disputes. So I'm going to, for the next hour, trace the history of the werewolf. Not the CGI kinds, not the guy from the movie you rented back in 2003 with the girl from the other movie, you know, but the actual documented. Deeply strange cultural history of a monster that has been with us since we had campfires to tell stories around and quite frankly, some pretty compelling reasons to be scared of the dark. Okay. So to start off, I'm gonna start in ancient Greece with a king who really should not have served that particular dinner. We're going to spend some quality time in the courtrooms of early modern Europe, which were, and I cannot stress this enough, not kidding around. And then because no history of the werewolf is complete without it, we're going to spend a good chunk of this episode in a Universal Studios back lot in 1941.
Sheena: Yeah.
Sarah: Because that's where a makeup artist, a screenwriter, and Lon Cheney Jr. Sat down and almost by accident invented half of what you think you know about werewolves. I'm excited. Silver bullets, full moons, the idea that this is hereditary, that it's the curse passed down like bad knees. None of that is ancient. Okay. Most of it is younger than sliced bread. So I'm gonna get comfortable. You do too. And maybe don't do this, don't listen to us alone in the woods tonight, so I'm saying.
Sheena: Don't go into the woods tonight. You might what is it?
Sarah: Exactly.
Sheena: You might die of fright? I I just remember don't go into the woods tonight. Something something you die of fright.
Sarah: Yeah, there's like bumping the bump in the night or something. Yeah. this is my deal. I love the wolf man and werewolves and not the cheesy ugly ones that look like a costume. Anyway. So the ancient world. So we're gonna start like I said in Greece. We're gonna start at the beginning, or at least the beginning that we can prove. which in the monster business is always a little further back than you'd like, and never quite as far back as people online will tell you. The werewolf, or more precisely, the idea of a human transforming into a wolf-like predator shows up independently in cultures that had zero contact with each other. Ancient Greece, Norse sagas, American folklore, native traditions across America North America involving skinwalkers, which quite important detour are a distinct and culturally specific concept from Navajo tradition. Not a werewolf and not something I'm going to dramatize here because it's not mine to dramatize. And quite frankly there's real culture harm to flattening it into a spooky podcast content. So different topic, different respect required. But moving on. What's interesting is why the idea Keeps showing up. Anthropologists have a fairly unromantic answer. Wolves were the apex predator. Most humans actually lived alongside. Not tigers, not dragons, wolves. Pack hunters, intelligent, capable of taking down something much bigger than themselves through coordination. If you're an early human trying to explain the scariest, smartest threat in your environment. And you're always trying to explain why people sometimes do horrifying predatory things to other people. the wolf is right there. it's the obvious metaphor. It's also unfortunately kind of insulting to wolves who mostly want to eat rabbits and be left alone, but nobody consulted them. So I don't know. so let's talk about lichen because lichen is where the word comes from, lycanthropy. and also because Lycan's story is a genuinely upsetting little myth, up as a kind of a morality tale. In the version most commonly told, recorded by the Roman poet Ovid in Metamorphoses, Lycan is a king of Arcadia. Zeus, who is at this point in Greek mythology, is basically wandering the earth as a divine mystery shopper, testing whether mortals will treat a stranger with hospitality, and I don't know. shows up at Lycan's court disguised as an ordinary traveler. Okay. And Lycan decides to test him right back to test Zeus. So, you know, which is fine. Bold move, but fine. except Lycan's test involves serving Zeus a meal made partly from a human being. So apparently we're doing, eating people here. So some versions say a hostage. was used. Some say lichen's own son was used. Sounds like a great guy, by the way. you know, that if that is true, and obviously it tells you what kind of guy we're working with here. so Zeus was not fooled. He is in fact extremely displeased. Well I would be too, let me tell you. He flips the table. Literally in some tellings, as a punishment, transforms lichen into a wolf. So Ovid describes him Fleeing into the countryside, his jaws foaming, his old thirst for slaughter, like coming back, and now it's permanent. He's terrified, even of the sheep he used to just steal from. He's he's just he's terrified. He's he's terrifying. So here's what I find chilling about this story. And it has nothing to do with fangs. The punishment isn't really the wolf part. The wolf part is revealing what was already there. Lycan doesn't be didn't become a monster. He already was a monster. Zeus just stopped letting him hide it. So instead of, you know, like a wolf in sheep's clothing kind of thing. that idea, like I said, the the wolf shape is a less of a curse and more of an x-ray, is going to come up again and again for the next 3,000 years. And it's a lot more disturbing than guy grows for once a month, honestly. So the Greeks weren't alone, the Roman writer Petronius, in the Saticon, which is like a wild, gossipy, extremely unserious text, which was like the ancient equivalent of group chat, includes a soldier telling a story about a fire, around a fire about a companion who stripped off his clothes at a crossroads, urinated in a circle around them, an actual detail in the text, and yes, historians. have had to write academic papers using the phrase urinated in a circle. so let's
Sheena: Yeah.
Sarah: just all sit with that for a second there. And he turned into a wolf. Exactly. Urinated wolf in a
Sheena: How big of a circle? And like, is he going around people? Like is this like duck duck goose but he's like peeing?
Sarah: Yeah, P, P, P, P. But you know, maybe it was a circle protection. Maybe they felt, the P was protected. I don't know. So he the crossroads detail matters, you know, by the way, that crossroads. the crossroads show up constantly in werewolf and and witch folklore across cultures. So they're line their liminal spaces. Neither one neither one road nor the other road. And the liminal spaces are where like transformation folklore loves to happen. not fully day, not fully night, not fully man, not fully beast. The folklore is very con consistent about its real estate preferences. So Norse tradition gives us the the wolf skins story. I am not Norse, I have no idea how to pronounce. that name of the wolf skin stories. so if you want to look it up, great. I'm I have no idea. But we're
Sheena: Well you're gonna say what I'm never mind, you're gonna say what I'm going to say.
Sarah: No, go ahead.
Sheena: I was just gonna say there's the whole premise of them what is called like a berserker where
Sarah: Mm-hmm.
Sheena: they become like they have the pelts of the animals you know, whether it's a bear or whatever, and they
Sarah: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yep. Yeah.
Sheena: possibly ingest hallucinogenics or whatever and
Sarah: Yeah, exactly.
Sheena: build themselves up into a frenzy that they think that they are the animal.
Sarah: They are correct. so like I said, so Norse tradition, you know, gives us the wolf skins, the warriors mentioned alongside the berserkers, in the sagas and other like old Norse sources who wore wolf pelts into battle and were said to fight with a kind of animal ferocity, channeling the wolf rather than being cursed into one. I mean, this is generally different flavor of the myth. Transformation is power, not punishment. and it's one that gets almost entirely steamrolled by the version that wins out later, which is the version we're turning into a wolf is a tragedy, a disease, you know, a thing done to you rather than by you. so let's keep let's keep that tension in our back pockets. We're gonna curse, you know, the curse versus power, victim versus predator, because in about 40 minutes, a man named Kurt Sodomak is going to sit down at a typewriter in Los Angeles. And settle that argument, culturally speaking, for the next 80 years. But we're not there yet. Darn. We need to go somewhere much,
Sheena: Mm-hmm.
Sarah: much worse than a Greek myth. We need to go to the witch trials. Yay. I told you it's there somewhere. Sound very familiar. Yep.
Sheena: Doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo.
Sarah: All right. So here is part of the episode where I have to stop being charming for a while and silly. Because what happened in Europe between roughly the 1500s and 1650s wasn't folklore. It was a legal religious apparatus that tortured and executed real, specific, named people for the crime of being werewolves. This is documented. It's in trial records, in confessions, extracted under torture and execution records, written by observers who chillingly often described the proceedings with a kind of bureaucratic satisfaction. I'm not gonna sensationalize this beyond what happened because what happened doesn't need embellishing. It's already the worst version of itself. So we're gonna talk about Peter Stump. S-T-U-M-P-P. In 1589, in the town of Bedberg, near Cologne, Germany, a wealthy farmer named Peter Stump was arrested and accused of being a werewolf, responsible for a string of brutal killings. livestock and according to the confession extracted from him, numerous people, including children, over a period of roughly 25 years. Under torture, and I want to be precise here, because the pamphlets from the period are precise in that horrible clinical way propaganda often is, Stump confessed to owning a magical belt allegedly given to him by the devil. That transformed him into what witnesses described as a wolf with gr eyes great and large, which in the night sparkled like brands of fire, strong claws and a huge body. He confessed to killing and, cannibalizing the victims, including his own son.
Sheena: My what big eyes you have, said
Sarah: Exactly. He was executed in October. Yeah.
Sheena: Wonder if that's where wonder if that's where Grimm got that from, you know?
Sarah: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. He was executed in October fifteen eighty nine in a manner designed as public spectacle, broken on the wheel, flesh torn with hot pincers, decapitated, then burned. His daughter and mistress, also implicated, were executed alongside of him. The town reportedly erected a monument, a wolf figure mounted on a pole, as a warning. Now. Here's the thing historians point out, and it's important that it's the actual scary part of this story. Once you look at it straight on, there is no wolf. Okay. There was no belt. What there almost certainly was was a wealthy farmer who confessed under torture so severe that people will confess to anything, anything at all, to make it stop. Historians studying the Bedberg case note. The trial occurred amid intense regional religious conflict between Catholic and Protestant factions. economic hardship, you know, broader continental panic about witchcraft that swept up tens of thousands of victims across roughly two centuries. So, I mean, the werewolf, in other words, wasn't hiding in the German countryside in 1589. It was hiding in the legal and religious systems that needed a monster to explain famine, disease, and violence. And found it easier to manufacture one out of a human being than to sit with the possibility that the world was just cruel and chaotic on its own. No fur required. No fur. So this is, I think, the single most important thing to understand about werewolf history. Before we get to the fun part, the werewolf trials
Sheena: Mm-hmm.
Sarah: ran in parallel with the with with the witch trials. So, I mean, they use the same, you know, theological logic, a pact with the devil, a transformation granted through demonic power, you know, and killed people through the same machinery. You know, estimates of the total witch trial executions across Europe during this period range widely, depending on region and record survival. But scholars generally place the toll in the tens of thousands. Werewolf trials specifically were less numerous. But followed the identical sc script and concentrated heavily in French, German, and some Baltic regions. So there is a French case as well, the case of Giles Garnier. he was tried and executed near Dole in 1573. it followed nearly the same identical pattern to Stumps. A confession under torture describing an ointment or salve that enabled transformation, accusations of killing children. And a horrific public execution. In this case, he was burned at the stake. So I want to sit in something uncomfortable with you for a second, and then we'll come up for air, I promise. the idea of the werewolf as a scapegoat mechanism, you know, a way for a community under stress to the point that one person, you know, would say the wrongness is contained in him specifically, and now it can be burned out of us, is arguably the most historical significant thing. werewolf myth ever did. It wasn't metaphorical. It had a body count. you know, real people with real names, you know, real families, real real turnip farmers, you know, were killed because a frightened and structurally cruel legal system needed a monster with a face. So yeah. Okay.
Sheena: Well, I mean, to be fair though, a lot of things are really cruel then.
Sarah: Yeah, no. I mean it was it was, you know, religious deep deep religious beliefs and not a logi not a lot of logical thinking, rational thinking. because everything was was steeped in religion. Everything was steeped in the Bible, everything was steeped in the devil.
Sheena: Well that and also brute brutality, just pure brute you.
Sarah: Yeah, it it it also yeah, I mean they didn't see any problems with taking out the root cause and if, you know, someone is possessed by the devil or is in cahoots with the devil, there is no safe way to squash that except for a brutal death. When you're usually burning burning something out of you, burning the body.
Sheena: Drawn and cornered, beheaded.
Sarah: The headed. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. All right. I promise the rest of this episode guess to be a bit more fun in the campy silver bullet howling at a fake moon on a Hollywood back plot sense of fun. But I didn't want to breeze through the past with the trials. because a lot of werewolf content does and I think that's a disservice to the people who actually died. Over this. So also, deep breath, because we are about to leave 16th century Bedberg and France and travel directly into the much safer, much sillier, much more spandex adjacent world of what people think
Sheena: Mm-hmm.
Sarah: they know about werewolves and where all of that actually came from. So spoiler, it's mostly one movie. So one incredibly influential, moderately budgeted. Nineteen forty one monster movie. made by a team of Universal Studio employees who were, and I say this with love, absolutely just making up what they wanted. All right.
Sheena: gee, like history.
Sarah: Yeah. Exactly. Well right, so quick pop quiz, no pressure, because I can't actually hear you. what
Sheena: Well, I'm here.
Sarah: well, yes, but I'm gonna ask this, I guess, theoretical kind of question. Full moon, silver bullets, wolf's bane, hereditary curse, usually passed by bite, a werewolf who has no memory of what he did the night before and wakes up covered in let's be delicate evidence. How old do you think those tropes are? Medieval? Ancient? Older than the pyramids? Probably right. It feels ancient, right? Yeah.
Sheena: nineteen seventies.
Sarah: no, but it it it's feels like something your grandmother or grandfather would have whispered by candlelight. It's not. almost all of that is from one movie. 1941 and we're getting there, I promise. But first I'm gonna walk through these tropes individually because the wait, that's not ancient folklore reveal is genuinely one of my favorite things about doing this research. Of course I knew it, but you know, anyway. silver. Silver as a weapon against supernatural evil does have older folkloric roots. silver appears across various European traditions, like as a pure metal associated with the moon and with warding off malevolent spirits generally, generally, like not werewolves specifically, but silver bullets specifically, as the werewolf's one true weakness. There's one, I mean, there's no consistent trial record, no consistent rule like regional folklore. that nails this down before the 19th and 20th centuries and it really crystallizes unregrettably intended in popular fiction and film. it's less ancient wisdom and more a screenwriter's need to solve a problem for a free art free art act structure. So yeah made fit in movies. The full moon. So this one is generally surprising. because it feels like the most ancient part of the myth. Older confessions and folklores, including some of the trial testimony we just talked about, don't consistently tie transformation to lunar cycles at all. some traditions describe werewolves who could transform at will, using an object like a belt or a salve, like we discussed before. like you know, stump's belt, Garnier's ointment. Others describe a more general unpredictable curse. the specific ironclad rule of transforms involuntarily, exactly, once per month, precisely at the full moon is a narrative convenience that kind of gets cemented again, largely through 20th century film, because the monster attacks on a predictable schedule is enormously useful if you're trying to build suspense across a movie, a monster movie. So Wolf Spain. The plants it's a is a is a plant. it does have a genuinely ancient reputation, kind of as a poison. It's it's real, it's toxic. the Greeks and Romans knew it knew it as dangerous, and it does show up in folklore associated with witchcraft, dark magic bro you know, broadly. it's the specific role as a werewolf repellent or cure. Is again largely a dramatic invention popularized in the night in the 20th century. So the bite as hereditary curse transmission mechanism. a werewolf bites you, now you're a werewolf too. The vampire style contagion model, by the way. this one is almost entirely a modern narrative device. Older folklore is much more varied and much weirder. Transformation via pact with the devil. via a cursed object, via being born on a certain day, via you know, parental curse, via simply being punished by a god for bad behavior, like like like lichen was. So if basically none of this was fixed, consistent folklore before the 20th century, where did it all sudden suddenly click into place? You know, all at once it was like a kind of a tidy rule set we all just kind of absorb through cultural osmosis. The way you know Frankenstein's monster says fire bad, even if you've never read Mary Shelley. it just kind of clicked into place in a research department at Universal Studios in nineteen forty-one because of a German Jewish immigrant screenwriter, legendary makeup artist, and the son of the original Phantom of the
Sheena: Yeah, the only thing that I ever had a problem with is the way that they did the the wolf man. Because it just reminded me of people who have like the hyper keratinesis or whatever it is, you know, where their their face is just completely like everything yeah. Well it's hair. But it's like
Sarah: For hair. Tall hair. Tall hair.
Sheena: but it's just like the way because a lot of it, you know, the hair grows back this way and it it
Sarah: Yeah.
Sheena: just looks round. You know.
Sarah: Mm-hmm.
Sheena: That that's the only thing that I have never liked about the the forties Wolfman is that.
Sarah: That's what I love. That's what I love. I love
Sheena: I want a wolf.
Sarah: no the poof. I call it his poof. He has a poof. In the in the in the original movie he has a poof. and I I love that because it's fantastic. I I absolutely love it. yeah, no, that's that's my wolf man. Yeah.
Sheena: I don't about I want a wolf. Okay. I don't w if there's if they're gonna be a wolf man they're gonna have the ears and they look like a wolf. They're not gonna look like
Sarah: Then why call him a wolf man if they don't look like a man? I mean that can be a werewolf. That can be a w that can be
Sheena: Well the rest of them could be a man. Yeah.
Sarah: I mean don't even say don't we're not even talking she wolves. god no. We're not gonna talk about
Sheena: Ha ha ha.
Sarah: she wolves. my god. I know.
Sheena: I'm not talking about she wolves. I'm talking about you know,
Sarah: wolf man, he's a man who's a wolf. That's werewolves can be those fugly whatever they are, they look like costumes and the howling. The howling are werewolves,
Sheena: yeah.
Sarah: they're ugly, they're horrible. Wasn't even scared by those things anyway. But wolf man, I lock my doors for. Thank you very much. Anyway.
Sheena: Yeah.
Sarah: all right. So this is the big one. So I'm gonna take a sip of my drink here. But by 1941, Universal Studios had already made a fortune off of monsters. Dracula in 31, Frankenstein, same year 1931, The Mummy in 1932, God, classic movies. the studio had essentially invented the modern monster movie as a genre and a business model. and by the real forty by the early forties, they were looking for the next reliable monster to put in a rubber mask and a promotional poster. There had been an earlier werewolf film, 1935, Werewolf in London. starred Harry Hall.
Sheena: Mm-hmm.
Sarah: my son actually thinks he's scarier than Juan Cheney's Wolfman. I I can't even. The man gets dressed as a what as a wolfman who gets dressed. He puts a coat, a frock coat on or something before he goes outside. I'm like, what are you doing? You're an animal. What are you doing? Anyway, I digress. it's it's worth a footnote because it actually got there first with a a few of the tropes, including a version of the transformation via plant idea. but it didn't stick the way what came next did. which, you know, werewolf of London is the answer to a trivia question. The werewolf is the reason the trivia question exists. The wolf man. My wolf man.
Sheena: Ha ha ha.
Sarah: Sorry, I was so cheesy. so The Wolfman was written by Kurt Sodomack. and his story is worth pausing on for a second because I think it explains a lot about what makes the film hit differently than you'd expect from a B-movie monster picture. and Sodomac was a German Jewish writer who fled Nazi regimes in the nineteen thirties. Eventually landing in Hollywood. See he was by multiple later accounts, including his own reflections and interviews, working through real trauma, and real fear, fear about persecution, about a curse being placed on you by forces entirely outside your control, about becoming something monstrous through no choice or fault of your own. in the eyes of people who had already decided what you were. there really was probably something behind the story that he was writing, you know, in his own life, that that fear and that trauma. So I don't wanna overstate this into some kind of tidy one-to-one allegory. Sodomek was first and foremost a working studio writer turning around a commercial script on a deadline. But it's generally hard to read his later comments about the film and not feel something real was bleeding through the werewolf. you know, the suit and fog machine trappings, the, you know, he reportedly said later in life that the curse of the werewolf was in some way about his curse, you know, being marked, hunted, transformed into an enemy by circumstances entirely beyond his control. So all right. so the film stars Lon Cheney Jr., who was the son of Lon Cheney Sr., the legendary silent year and man of a thousand faces. who played like Phantom of the Opera and Hunchback of Notre Dame. Cheney Jr. had spent a career somewhat in his father's enormous shadow. and the Wolfman became, by wide consensus among film historians, the defining role of his career, the one part that was unambiguously, permanently his. no one else ever played the Wolfman. four films. Well, five if you count Advan Costello, but th they say it's not canon. where the Wolfman was in the the movies through Universal, Lon Cheney Jr. played him every single time. they didn't get anyone else to unlike Frankenstein who was played by multiple actors, unlike Dracula who's played by multiple actors, Wolfman was always Lon Cheney Junior's so or Creighton Cheney, that was his real name. Sorry, I'm a geek. I'm a geek. I know. All right. So Lon plays Larry Talbot, a man returning to his ancestral home in Wales. an American who'd been estranged from his aristocratic family. his father is played by Collard Rains, who ironically plays the phantom of the opera later on, which I thought was funny, because I mean here he's Lon's dad and And he plays Phantom in a later movie, After the death of his brother, like I said, Larry comes home and kind of reunites with his estranged father. Talbot's drawn into a budding romance with a local shopkeeper, Gwen Conliffe, who's played by Evelyn Angers. and on a walk through the fog-drenched countryside, one night, tries to save a woman from what he believes is an attacking wolf. He beats the creature to death with a silver-headed cane. A cane purchased in a detail that becomes deeply ironic by the film's end as a gift decorated with a wolf's head and a pentagram. He's bitten in the struggle. The wolf turns out to have actually been a man, a gypsy fortune teller named Bella, played by Bella Legosi, who it's revealed was himself a werewolf.
Sheena: Mm-hmm.
Sarah: So from here, the film builds its dread the way the best of these old universal pictures always did. Through atmosphere, knocked over my thing.
Sheena: Yeah.
Sarah: God bless. I'm getting so into it, I'm knocking over my microphone. anyway, so yeah, so through atmosphere rather than gore, because it's 1940s. You don't show blood, you don't show anything, you know, here comes, you know, bloodied body, you know, who was killed by a werewolf, fog rolling across the moor, that gorgeous doom laden, you know, studio built forest set with all crooked trees and impossible mist and that universal reused across, you know, half a dozen monster movies and always the same. But I loved it. It was so cheesy, so campy. a gypsy woman Maleva, who was played by Maria Ospinskaya. My mom loves that name by the way. who becomes the film's oracle of dread, delivering the poem that would go on to outlive the movie itself, quoted and misquoted in werewolf media for the next eight decades. Even a man who is pure in heart and says his prayers by night may become a wolf when the wolf vein blooms and the autumn moon is bright. That verse, the even a man who is pure in heart poem is as far as film historians and folklorists alike can tell, entirely Sodomac's invention for this screenplay. It sounds like it should be centuries old. it has the cadence of something translated out of a crumbling memoir. It is, in fact, 39 words written by a guy at Warner Brothers, adjacent studio commissary, sometime in 1941. And it has been more culturally influential on the popular understanding of werewolf folklore than probably every genuine European trial record combined. That's not a criticism, by the way. it's one of the most quietly impressive pieces of pop culture world building of the entire 20th century. it's not just folklore, it's a really, really good screenwriter's invention that folklore washed itself into. the culture so thoroughly that most people, my myself very much included until I actually researched this episode, assumed it was ancient. So so Talbot begins transforming. And here's where Jack Pierce comes in, makeup artist. The same universal makeup artist who was responsible for Carly Boris Karloff's you know iconic flat-headed Frankenstein monster design. Pierce's transformation makeup for Cheney was a legendarily brutal process. Layers of yak hair were applied directly to
Sheena: No.
Sarah: Cheney's skin with spirit gum, one section at a time. So with the film shot in incremental stop motion style stages, so the transformation could be shown agonizingly, frame by frame, dissolved by dissolved. So Cheney reportedly sat through hours of this application repealing for a single scene's worth of transformation footage. and later in interviews across his career, he spoke about the physical toll of it with the kind of weary first person authority that none of Universal's other monster actors quite had because none of them had to sit still under all that yak hair and spirit gum for as many hours as he did. And I I think it was a point of contention between him and Jack Pierce. Jack Pierce was very old school. He did not want to make anything fake. He wanted to use real things. He wanted to make it look real. He did not want to use rubber masks or anything like that. He built his mask.
Sheena: even today still when people do special effect makeup, they're in it for hours.
Sarah: Hm, yeah. the sad thing is a Universal eventually let Jack Pierce go. And it came just before Abbott and Costello meet Frankenstein. And you can tell the difference, or at least I can tell the difference, between the beginning, like the nineteen forty one the Wolfman makeup, and the Abbott and Costello makeup, because Jack Pierce was no longer doing makeup. for Universal Studios at the time of Abbott and Costello meet Frankenstein. and it it's painfully obvious that it's it's it it doesn't look as real. It doesn't look it looks more fake, unfortunately. and I mean it's still scary, but yeah. Anyway. So there is something almost sweetly literal about that you know the actor playing the man cursed to slowly, helplessly transform into something monstrous against his will, spent his actual real work day slowly, physically transforming one uncomfortable layer at a time, unable to do much of anything about it either. So I think that's that is definitely ironic. I don't think I'd want it any other way. it was perfect makeup. It was perfect makeup.
Sheena: Mm-hmm.
Sarah: so Talwood spends the rest of the film increasingly convinced he's cursed, increasingly unable to get anyone, including his own rational, scientifically minded father, to believe him, which in i is its own terror in itself. if no one, even his father, believes him, you know, believes what he's saying, believes that he's transforming, that he's, you know, not thinking about this and that but he he can't help it. The film is as much about not being believed as it is about the wolf itself. It builds to a genuinely mournful climax in the fog-bound woods, where Talbot's father, still not truly believing the curse is real, ultimately beats his own transformed son to death with that same silver-headed cane. The cane that killed Bella at the film's opening, now closing the circle and killing Larry Talbot. As Talbot dies, he transforms back into human form in front of his father and Gwen, and the film ends not on a triumphant monster slaying note, but on grief. A father who has just killed a son, who has previously lost his other son his other son, a silver tipped cane sitting in the mist, Maleva's closing lines about the wandering soul finally finding peace. So it's generally one of the more emotional, somber monster movie endings of the entire universal cycle. and I think that some somberness is a huge part of why the Wolfman mythology stuck the way it did. culturally in a way that some of the studio's flashier monsters didn't. Dracula is a predator. Frankenstein's monster is a tragic, wronged creation, but Larry Talbot is structurally a victim who is also the threat. Cursed through no fault of his own, unable to stop himself, killed by the person who loves him most. That's an incredibly potent shape for a monster story. And it's the shape that virtually every werewolf story since has borrowed, whether it knows it or not. And here's the kicker. The thing I love most about the whole saga, almost nothing that everyone knows about werewolves, like full moon, silver bullets, wolf main, the hereditary bite. Curse, the tragic sympathetic monster who didn't ask for this, predates this one film by more than a few years, if that. Wolfman wasn't really adapting werewolf folklore. It was writing werewolf folklore retroactively for all of us. Forever. Kurt Sodomack, a guy who reportedly needed the paycheck, invented a fake 39-word old country poem on a deadline. And eighty-five years later, you could probably recite half of it from memory. without knowing where it came from. That's not folklore surviving through oral tradition across the centuries. That's just really, really good copywriting. I have to say also, Maria Ospenskaya, you know, the prayer that she says over both Vela and Larry Talbot. I mean, that's that's was also written by Kurtzon Mac and and yet it's It's so enchanting the way you walked with Thorny through no fault of your own. You know, but as the rain enters the soil, the the water enters the the river. So tears run to a predestined end. Your suffering is over, my son. it sounds like it's a real, you know, but it was all written by one man. It's just incredible. It's incredible. So The Wolfman was a substantial hit for Universal. And Chani would go on to reprise the role of Larry Talbot, like I said, across multiple sequels and crossover films through the 1940s, including team-ups with the Frankenstein Monster and eventually the studio's whole monster rally era, where basically every universal creature ended up in the same fog-drenched Transylvanian black lot at once. Because if one monster sells tickets, four monsters sell even more tickets, just math. So, But the cultural footprint of the original 1941 film, specifically the rules it invented almost as afterthoughts in service of a tight, moody, 70-minute B picture, is the actual reason that I'm I'm with you right now and talking to you about the wolf man and what kills a werewolf? Silver bullet, right? That's what you'd say. What kills a werewolf? So with total confidence, You know, you'd be citing nineteen forty one Hollywood. Not not, you know, fifteen eighty nine Bedberg, Germany, or whether you knew it or not.
Sheena: Mm-hmm.
Sarah: So yeah, so once Sodomac's rules were out in the world, something interesting happened. They didn't stay in that one movie. They got treated almost immediately as if they'd always been there. you know, it later films borrowed the full moon rule, you know, uncritically. pulp novels borrowed it, comic books borrowed it. By the time tabletop games and later young adult vampire and werewolf franchises were building on their own, werewolf mythologies decades later, the Sodomac rule set wasn't being treated as a clever 1941 screenplay internal logic. It was being treated as bedrock, as the given, the thing you riff off rather than the thing you've invented. Folklorists have a term for this general phenomenon, incidentally, when a piece of modern media invention gets absorbed into popular belief as if it were authentic traditional folklore. It's sometimes called fake lore, or more academically discussed under the broader idea of invented tradition. The full moon werewolf is functionally one of the most successful pieces of fake lore in modern history. It's got better retention rate than most actual folklores. So there's a a slightly funny, slightly sad postscript. bear with me here. I gotta switch again to to Sodomak's story, which is worth sitting with for just a moment by his later accounts. he never really felt like he got properly compensated, credit wise or otherwise, for how enormously influential That one screenplaying turned out to be. So he wrote
Sheena: Mm-hmm.
Sarah: The Werewolf as we know it, essentially by himself on a work for hire basis for a mid-budget monster picture. And then he watched those rules become cultural bedrock, essentially reused for the rest of his life. Excuse me, largely uncredited in the popular imagination. So, I mean, which honestly feels like it could have been its own werewolf movie. the guy who invents the curse and never sees the benefit of what
Sheena: Mm-hmm.
Sarah: he made. so later, I mean Universal Monster Mythology, and eventually a wave of werewolf films from the 1970s and 80s onward, like an American Werewolf London, the howling that we talked about earlier. they pushed the makeup and transformation technology forward dramatically, going for a more visceral, painful on-screen transformation. you know sequences that learned that leaned into like body horror rather than dissolve cuts restraint of the 1941 original. but structurally they almost are still telling Larry Talbot story. Cursed, usually through a bite, a predictable lunar schedule, a weapon with a specific narrative narratively convenient weakness. So and a protagonist who's more sympathetic victim than villain. all right. So Even werewolf stories that try hard to subvert those rules are definitely still in conversation with them. Like you you can't subvert a trope nobody's ever heard of. so where does that leave us? I a myth that starts as an ancient cross-cultural way of processing humanity's most dangerous, cleverest, natural predator. that curdles in early modern Europe into a genuine deadly weapon used to torture and execute real innocent people during a period of religious panic and social upheaval. you know, and that gets finally almost entirely rewritten, reinvented, top to bottom, rules and all, by a refugee screenwriter and a makeup artist working a difficult and glamorous job on a Los Angeles backplot in 1941 for a monster movie that ran about 70 minutes and was at the time just one more product on an assembly line of studio horror pictures. None of these three eras really knew about the other two, culturally speaking, at the time. And yet, here we are, 85 years later. And if you asked a hundred people on the street what a werewolf needs to fear, you would get silver bullet and full moon from the overwhelmingly majority of them.
Sheena: Me.
Sarah: a specific, empathetic and slightly haunted Hollywood invention has completely and totally colonized the folklore it was supposedly just borrowing from. so a few things I want to leave you with. since we've covered a lot of fog drenched ground tonight. one, the werewolf myth across every era we've talked about keeps cycling the same central anxiety over and over in different costumes. The fear that the monstrous thing might not be a stranger. If it might be your neighbor. It might be someone you love. It might be in the very worst version of the story, it might be you. and you might not even know it. and you might not be able to stop it once it starts. Lycan didn't know what he'd become until Zeus told him. Larry Talbot didn't know until it was too late, and for you know, for everyone around him. that's a genuinely old, genuinely human fear, and it's not going anywhere. no matter how many rubber masks and yak care applications we bury under it. Two, be a little careful, I think, with how casually we tr we treat the witch in werewolf trials as History's greatest hits, you know, spooky edition. those are real people. You know, Peter Stump was a real specific person who existed and who was tortured into confessing to being something he almost certainly was not. and who's executed in public a as a civic entertainment. I mean it's worth remembering that the werewolf's scariest chapter isn't the one with fangs in it. So, and then the third thing that seems a little more Fun, I promise. note, I think. Next time somebody at a party confidently explains that obviously you need silver bullets. Everyone knows that. It's like ancient folklore. You know now that it's not really ancient folklore. it was written on a deadline by a guy who'd fled the Nazis and needed a paycheck and featured a poem he made up on the spot that sounded like old and You know, like should be carved into a cave wall or something. I don't know. And start a guy who spent hours in a chair getting yak hair glued to his face so that eighty-five years later you've instinctively know exactly what kills a werewolf. So that's not folklore failing us, by the way. If anything, it's kind of beautiful. It means that myth is still alive. it's still being written, and it just happens to have a production credit now. So thank you very much. I loved researching that. I I wanted to share my Wolfman knowledge with you and I love that I get to talk about Yay. And talk about
Sheena: Mm-hmm.
Sarah: my love of Lon Cheney Junior. So
Sheena: Well, here's two episodes of TV you need to watch. And I've probably
Sarah: Yeah.
Sheena: told you this already, but you need to watch the episode of Doctor Who
Sarah: Mm-hmm.
Sheena: it's set in Victorian England. I can't
Sarah: Okay.
Sheena: remember the episode name off the top of my head. also remember Doctor Who is dealing with aliens.
Sarah: Mm-hmm.
Sheena: So it does deal with werewolves on that one.
Sarah: Love it, love it, love it.
Sheena: The other so you get to see Queen Victoria and a werewolf.
Sarah: Ooh. Now is it like is it the cheesy
Sheena: Yeah, it's
Sarah: werewolf or
Sheena: yeah, kind of.
Sarah: Or is it like actually like it looks like a a okay.
Sheena: But but still it's still a good episode. Especially 'cause Queen Victoria. Anyways. Second
Sarah: Okay.
Sheena: is Supernatural's Monster Movie.
Sarah: Awesome.
Sheena: Which is that one you will enjoy.
Sarah: Okay. Well, like I said, if anyone if anyone's interested, the werewolf the Wolfman movies that starred Lonchini Jr., the Wolfman 1941, the Wolf Frankenstein meets the Wolfman came next. And that's with him and with Lonchini Jr. and and and Bell Legosi, who plays the Frankenstein monster. and then you have House of Frankenstein, which came next, House of Dracula came after that. And then of there's Aben Castellamy Frankenstein. And they say that is pretty much non canon, only because at the end of House of Dracula, Montchaney is cured of his werewolfism. So which so then you think, you know, well, if he was cured in House of Dracula, how is he turning into the wolf man again in Av and Castellamy Frankenstein, which was made later? but it was kind of a fun monster thing, you know. So that's why fans kind of say it's non canon. It's a it's a fun movie.
Sheena: Well, I spun the wheel. You ready? You got paranormal.
Sarah: That's funny. I love it. That's awesome. And you know what? That's okay
Sheena: What?
Sarah: because we're getting more and more into fall. And I'm I'm I love kind of doing more of the spookier stuff. So
Sheena: Yes, it we're just gonna start you know, once we get ready for soup season, it's spooky season. So and it's definitely
Sarah: Yeah, yeah.
Sheena: soup season for me because I want some clam
Sarah: Yeah, like
Sheena: chowder.
Sarah: uh-huh. Yep. Like I said, I yeah, it's getting into it. I mean, you know, it's we're still in August, but my daughter was actually just telling me the other day, she's like, Mom, can we start decorating for Halloween already? And I'm like, Of course. You don't have to ask
Sheena: Mm-hmm.
Sarah: that. Of course, you know, it's it's August, why not? Okay, you know, what's funny is I've actually taken all of the the Halloween movies that I own. because I didn't want to miss any of them. You know, I own a lot. I own a lot more than I do Christmas movies. I don't know what that says about me. I put them in in order by by year that they were made. because I didn't want to miss any of them. And I try to start watching them all. at you know, around this time of the year because first of all, there are so many of them. there's a good number of Halloween movies, from nineteen, you know, nineteen thirty, you know, Dracula to present day. like Hocus Pocus 2, Practical Magic 2, that's coming out. Can't wait for that one. We talked about that. Yeah, I know we talked about that last week. there are so many Halloween movies that I love to watch that I can't fit them all into the month of October. So I have to start earlier. darn. And that just gets me in the mood
Sheena: no.
Sarah: for Halloween. I'm dressing up. Lighting my candles. Yeah, lighting my candles. You
Sheena: We'll just be even more spookier.
Sarah: know, it's funny, on Halloween, I think I think Bailey, my my friend's daughter asked me just recently. She's like, what do you do on Halloween? And I was like, Well, trick-or-treating, magic circles. What do you mean? She's like,
Sheena: Ha ha ha.
Sarah: what? I don't know if she knows I'm a witch. I can't remember. I think I told her, but I don't know. I after trick or treating I come up to my room, I I light my candles, you know, and the four fall down the four corners and I commune with my ancestors. So with my family.
Sheena: I mean I'm not t in my twenties anymore, so I I don't want to go out and get drunk and walk around in
Sarah: Yeah. Mm.
Sheena: in clothes that are not comfortable in cold weather.
Sarah: I ha well I I I have been going out for the kids. Tyrion has has gone out on his own with friends, but I still go with Arya. And I I honestly I haven't dressed up why I dressed up two years ago. and that was actually only because I got a costume for free, very last minute. And I was like, why the hell not? I'm gonna do this. I haven't dressed up in years. and it was fun, but I had this headgear on because I was being abducted by aliens, which you would have loved, by the way, because you love aliens. and so of course in in in E Town here we have a lot of low-hanging trees. Ooh, lightning. my god, I just talked about the wolf man, there's lightning outside. god, I hope the doors are locked. Anyway.
Sheena: Ha ha ha.
Sarah: So I'm just like, you know, I'm getting like hit by tree branches and stuff. I was like, my God, this is an actual this is a horrible costume. And of course, I mean my my kids were
Sheena: Ha ha ha
Sarah: slightly younger. it wasn't like I like running after like three year olds, four year olds, thank God. I I would not have been able to do it. But it was kind of annoying because I was like trying to watch out for them and I was trying to, have my umbrella hat thing get, you know, knocked off and we went with friends of ours, 'cause Lauria was going out with their son the husband was kinda like helping me get get untangled.
Sheena: Ha ha ha
Sarah: So I thought, you know what? I I'll just go with me for right now. Maybe I'll put a witch's hat on because, you know, that's fun, but whatever. I'm I'm not dressing up, at least right now. But
Sheena: Well and maybe we should do some logistical chat after this about what we want to do for Halloween. maybe we'll do a special Halloween episode. you know, or maybe we could do a live stream or
Sarah: I think we I would love to talk about the hi the history of Salin. I'd love to talk about the history 'cause that's that's actually one of the first things I watch is the history of of Salin and Halloween.
Sheena: I call vampires. You got the werewolves. I call vampires.
Sarah: That's fine. That's cool. I got werewolves already, so we we did werewolves. But that's fine. I'm not a big I'm not a big vampire fan. My mom, you know, was terrified of Frankenstein. I'm like, why? You can outrun him in a heartbeat. Why? Why?
Sheena: Ha ha ha.
Sarah: And Dracula is is all about sex. I mean, Dracula is very sensual, very sexual. I mean, that's not really chilling. That's not really chilling for me.
Sheena: Hello, Scorpio.
Sarah: To me it's a man who transforms into a man like creature but is can kill you. He's fast, he can jump, he can hide, he can stalk you. That's scary. That's fucking scary shit. You know.
Sheena: And there's your Gemini.
Sarah: So
Sheena: Yeah.
Sarah: Yeah, I yeah, I to me Wolfman is is the classic universal monsters of the classic monsters. I'm not talking about like zombies zombies freak me out 'cause I I'm like eating people and brains and shit. That's just nasty. You know.
Sheena: Hate zombies.
Sarah: yeah, possessed children freak me out. I mean I I was terrified when I had
Sheena: Yeah.
Sarah: small children 'cause I didn't want them to be like evil, turning of the head, you know, that that you see in horror movies.
Sheena: Yeah.
Sarah: so yeah. I mean once again mommy is
Sheena: Yep, I
Sarah: a really old guy. this shit's not scary except for the wolfman. The wolfman in my esteem is the scariest of the of the universal.
Sheena: Well, you know, though I didn't grow up on the old ones. I grew up on
Sarah: Mm.
Sheena: the eighties. Watching it with my dad.
Sarah: That's because you had young parents. Yeah, you had young parents. I didn't. I had older parents who were raised on those movies.
Sheena: Yeah. So you know, and my dad my dad was a wild child. So, you know, he so I grew up watching
Sarah: Mm-hmm. I'm sure your dad I can see your dad liking the howling. I can see your dad liking the howling. He he would be the kind of guy that would like the howling.
Sheena: You I I d you know, I don't remember, but you know, I did watch Nightmare on Elm Street. I watched Tales of Crypt with my my dad. So so so for
Sarah: That would yeah, that would be your dad. That would be your dad. I can see that.
Sheena: me, you know, it's more of the psychological thrillers that get to me because then
Sarah: Yeah. Yeah.
Sheena: I just sit there and watch the gory stuff and I'm like, I'm bored.
Sarah: Well, interesting interestingly enough, like the wolf man when Kurt Sodomak wrote the screenplay, originally, you weren't supposed to know if Larry Talbot actually physically changes into a wolf. you were supposed to wonder if is he actually a werewolf, like someone who actually transformed Or is it all in his mind? Is it all up
Sheena: Mm-hmm.
Sarah: here? You know? and I think, you know, obviously for for Hollywood, they're like, we gotta we gotta actually change him. We g we gotta see a wolf.
Sheena: Mm-hmm.
Sarah: We we gotta see that. That's what that's what's scary. That's what's gonna bring people into the seats, you know.
Sheena: Mm-hmm.
Sarah: but yeah, you weren't supposed to know and apparently Larry Talbot, from what I also read was not that nice of a guy. in in Kirst Adamak's original scri screenplay. He was not that nice of a guy. He was more of a a douchey asshole. you know, who was a kind of a peeping Tom. and that's how he met Gwen, the the shopkeeper's daughter. which, my mind I'm glad he changed to like this kind of carefree kind of l you know, hapless kind of guy, because it makes you feel more for him, you know. If he would have been a douche, you would have like, God, I hope he I hope he gets killed. Like what the hell? Like who cares about this guy? No one's gonna care about a guy like that. But
Sheena: Mm-hmm.
Sarah: hapless Joe Schmo, everyday kind of guy who, you know, who could just be like you and me. you know, who this this this curse falls upon him, you know, because he saved somebody. He s he was trying to save Gwen's friend Jenny. well, he doesn't save her. She die she ends up dying. But I mean, his reward for saving her is to get bitten himself. And you know and through the the the remaining movies, all he wants to do is die. Because he does not want to go on killing. He does not want to continue to be this monster. that's one of my favorite things, is that he's not a monster Dracula's a monster all the time. Frankenstein's a monster all the time. The mommy's a monster all the time. Lon Trini Jr. is not a monster as Larry Talbot. He is not. He's a human being, someone who, you know, wouldn't hurt a fly. who's kind to people, who's loving, who wants to protect people, who wants to kill you know, end his own life so that he doesn't keep killing. who we see on the outside versus who we really are on the inside He's a genuinely lovable character in when he's a human. And then he turns into this monster. And that's tragic. That's really tragic.
Sheena: Yeah. Yeah, well there's always a story behind them all, so definitely
Sarah: Yeah. could it be also like kind of like going through like puberty type of thing too, like you know, hair growing
Sheena: Mm-hmm.
Sarah: in places that you know, you never had hair before, you know, and like the changing of emotions, the changing of fear. So I mean that puberty was also I guess kind of a
Sheena: The second puberty for women. Perimenopause, growing hair where you don't normally grow hair. Turning
Sarah: Mm, yeah, you know, yeah.
Sheena: into rabid feral beasts.
Sarah: Or if you live in if you live in Lancaster County, you have fur on your faces no matter what age you are after after puberty.
Sheena: So
Sarah: I'm not talking about me, by the way. Not talking about me. I've seen poor poor furry faced women in the around this area. So mm but no.
Sheena: Yeah. Well.
Sarah: yeah. Anyway. So
Sheena: But yeah, so yeah, maybe get us some of your spooky scary stories to us at so random and weirdput at gmail.com and maybe we can do spooky story time of your guys' incidences.
Sarah: Do you have favorite monsters? Yeah. If you have favorite monsters and want to tell us which one's your favorite, or you know,
Sheena: rate and review and leave comments so that way we know what to do. You know, because you did almost get history when I spun it. So I had to spin it again because I'm doing history. You know,
Sarah: Yeah.
Sheena: so let us know if you want us to do whatever it actually lands on the first time, even if it's a double. let us know what we're doing right, what we what you'd like to see, give us some suggestions on what we can do and yeah, so share us with your friends, your coworkers, your worst enemy if you feel like it. And
Sarah: Yeah, we'd we'd love to to have, you know, you share your thoughts and feelings with us. We wanna hear from you. So
Sheena: And so with that, stay curious, stay weird, and don't go into the woods tonight. Da da da da da da da da da. Yep. Bye.
Sarah: Especially during full moon. Especially during full moon. Stay inside. Lock the doors. Bye everybody. Bye. Love you guys.
Sheena: And I'm Sheena.
Sarah: It was nice and dreary today. How about you?
Sheena: still eighty degrees here and quite a bit
Sarah: Well.
Sheena: sunny than I like. but supposedly we're supposed to be getting some rain soon and then everybody's like, we're gonna start getting into rain season and I'm like, and that's a bad thing?
Sarah: Well I was gonna say, hopefully that would takes away the heat. you kinda want to get rid of the heat, so if if if the rain does that, you know, yay. It was like drizzling all day here, like all day. So, Yeah, I'm it's been kind of a bleh kinda day, although I have to say I got some cleaning done. So, I mean that's always a good thing. You can't go outside, you can't enjoy the weather, you can't go to a park or anything like that. So, yeah. Gonna have to make do. I like I said, I got my cleaning done. of course there's still so much to do, but I'm happy with what
Sheena: Right.
Sarah: was done. So yeah.
Sheena: Yeah, I I'm just ready for soup. I'm ready to bake.
Sarah: You know what I wanna I wanna do more fall themed food this year, like when I cook.
Sheena: Mm-hmm. I made baked oatmeal. Yeah. And I got
Sarah: Why?
Sheena: like the good, good cinnamon. That's no,
Sarah: Like the steel cut? sorry.
Sheena: no, like I don't remember what it is right now, but it's like really good and it's like seven dollars for like yeah, half a pound. Yeah. And it's
Sarah: For for cinnamon, for the cinnamon? Okay.
Sheena: it's supposed to be like the cinnamon that Cinnabon uses.
Sarah: Well I I can see
Sheena: So it's
Sarah: why that would would have been a little pricey 'cause no.
Sheena: Yeah. But it's good. I love me some baked oatmeal and I this morning I woke up and I went, I'm choosing violence, so I I made baked oatmeal.
Sarah: I yeah, no. I love baked oatmeal. I would much rather have it like I like okay, so my mom kind of raised me like you don't you don't do the instant crap.
Sheena: Mm.
Sarah: she's like steel cut oats are the best. so I get like the Irish steel cut oats in the can. and so it's a little pricier. But it is really good. It is healthier for you having still cut oatmeal from when I took all of my nutrition classes. it is healthier. Not that I don't do like the once in a while, the cheapo like oatmeals and cre oatmeal and cream, you're like the strawberries or the peaches or the blueberries or if I want something quick. But I love baked oatmeal. It is such a comfort food. in my mind you have to have it with
Sheena: Yeah. me
Sarah: fruit too in it, like blueberries or peaches or something in my mind.
Sheena: I usually make it with pecans or walnuts in it.
Sarah: Okay.
Sheena: But the thing is is like so yet again, you know, my
Sarah: Yeah.
Sheena: my autistic traits come out when it comes to texture and I hate soggy porridge. Give me congee any day, I'll eat congee any day, but I hate
Sarah: What is that?
Sheena: it's kind of like it's rice porridge. That's it's a Japanese Asian kind of thing. It's delicious. It's just like overcooked rice. So it's like squidgy.
Sarah: Hmm.
Sheena: It's delicious, but but I hate cooked so and I was raised on the Quaker instant packages. So I
Sarah: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Sheena: I did not put a I just put a little bit of water in there and mixed it up just so it was just wet enough and crunch, crunch, crunch. And and and it
Sarah: Crunchy oatmeal? Crunchy oatmeal. Is that what you're saying? You're
Sheena: Well, baked oatmeal is crunchy.
Sarah: Not how I eat No,
Sheena: Ha ha ha
Sarah: I mean like I I do fatty with it 'cause I I do like like some heavy whipping cream instead of milk. Like I pour a little cream in there instead of milk. when I heat it. after it comes out of the oven. I pour a little cream in there I don't make it mushy. I don't I don't do mushy. like when I eat cereal, I maybe a drop or two of milk goes into my cereal. Okay. My daughter pours like a whole frickin' half gallon into her cereal bowl. I mean, I'm like, I mean it's floating. I mean, you barely see
Sheena: Ha ha
Sarah: the cereal. I'm like, Arya, do you like some cereal with your milk? Cause, you know.
Sheena: Ha ha ha.
Sarah: I can't. I can't dude. I don't want mushy, soggy cereal. To me, that is ugh I just I have to throw it away. I can't. I cannot do it. if I eat like frosted flakes, like my cereal is very, very crunchy and it just has a little like splash of milk. Literally just like a like a very little drop or two. I mean, it's probably maybe a teaspoon of milk.
Sheena: Mm-hmm.
Sarah: that I eat in my cereal bowl. because I just don't want soggy flakes. That's just gross to me. I'm sorry. This is no.
Sheena: I yeah, well I mean I it was instant oatmeal. So yeah, I just I prefer crunch whenever I eat. So
Sarah: I mean, yeah, and I I do too. But I mean I I've never actually had unless it was like undercooked, oatmeal. I I've never had crunchy oatmeal. So
Sheena: Well, I mean baked oatmeal's crunchy on the top.
Sarah: Well, I mean if you don't like put like liquid
Sheena: Like an o
Sarah: in it, I don't I mean I've never really had like crunchy. Maybe it's maybe it's the
Sheena: It's like an oatmeal cookie.
Sarah: Like we go. I'm not a big oatmeal cookie fan. So it's all good though. It's all good.
Sheena: It's just it always comes down to texture.
Sarah: Yeah. it can be a little you know, with texture. I'm I'm not like my kids are more of a texture freak than I am, it's texture all the way from me. So I c I can't judge. I can't judge. So all right, I'm gonna sit up here a little bit 'cause I've been lounging.
Sheena: so Yeah, and i it's time for you to tell me a story.
Sarah: yes. And a story I shall tell. All right. Alright, picture it. Nighttime, beautiful out, stars in the sky, nice full moon, wind whipping through the trees, a twig snaps, the distant mournful howl of a wolf. You wait I know you wait Frozen All of a sudden Probably not gonna happen. Probably not gonna happen, you know. So but
Sheena: A six w four fe no.
Sarah: but you
Sheena: Hmm.
Sarah: know, I I do want to leave you guys with this. Just think about this for a second. For most of human history, most of the humans in the world have lived with somebody somewhere genuinely believing that their neighbor. You know, let's you know the turnip farmer next door was secretly a wolf. Not acted kind of feral, not had anger issues, an actual wolf with fur and teeth, you know, who went after people and ate them. All right. So they didn't just believe it quietly either. They built an entire legal system around it. They tortured people until these people agreed that they were wolves. Sound familiar? Kind of like witch trials kind of thing going on here. Anyway, so they wrote it into court records with the same bureaucratic seriousness that you'd use to log property disputes. So I'm going to, for the next hour, trace the history of the werewolf. Not the CGI kinds, not the guy from the movie you rented back in 2003 with the girl from the other movie, you know, but the actual documented. Deeply strange cultural history of a monster that has been with us since we had campfires to tell stories around and quite frankly, some pretty compelling reasons to be scared of the dark. Okay. So to start off, I'm gonna start in ancient Greece with a king who really should not have served that particular dinner. We're going to spend some quality time in the courtrooms of early modern Europe, which were, and I cannot stress this enough, not kidding around. And then because no history of the werewolf is complete without it, we're going to spend a good chunk of this episode in a Universal Studios back lot in 1941.
Sheena: Yeah.
Sarah: Because that's where a makeup artist, a screenwriter, and Lon Cheney Jr. Sat down and almost by accident invented half of what you think you know about werewolves. I'm excited. Silver bullets, full moons, the idea that this is hereditary, that it's the curse passed down like bad knees. None of that is ancient. Okay. Most of it is younger than sliced bread. So I'm gonna get comfortable. You do too. And maybe don't do this, don't listen to us alone in the woods tonight, so I'm saying.
Sheena: Don't go into the woods tonight. You might what is it?
Sarah: Exactly.
Sheena: You might die of fright? I I just remember don't go into the woods tonight. Something something you die of fright.
Sarah: Yeah, there's like bumping the bump in the night or something. Yeah. this is my deal. I love the wolf man and werewolves and not the cheesy ugly ones that look like a costume. Anyway. So the ancient world. So we're gonna start like I said in Greece. We're gonna start at the beginning, or at least the beginning that we can prove. which in the monster business is always a little further back than you'd like, and never quite as far back as people online will tell you. The werewolf, or more precisely, the idea of a human transforming into a wolf-like predator shows up independently in cultures that had zero contact with each other. Ancient Greece, Norse sagas, American folklore, native traditions across America North America involving skinwalkers, which quite important detour are a distinct and culturally specific concept from Navajo tradition. Not a werewolf and not something I'm going to dramatize here because it's not mine to dramatize. And quite frankly there's real culture harm to flattening it into a spooky podcast content. So different topic, different respect required. But moving on. What's interesting is why the idea Keeps showing up. Anthropologists have a fairly unromantic answer. Wolves were the apex predator. Most humans actually lived alongside. Not tigers, not dragons, wolves. Pack hunters, intelligent, capable of taking down something much bigger than themselves through coordination. If you're an early human trying to explain the scariest, smartest threat in your environment. And you're always trying to explain why people sometimes do horrifying predatory things to other people. the wolf is right there. it's the obvious metaphor. It's also unfortunately kind of insulting to wolves who mostly want to eat rabbits and be left alone, but nobody consulted them. So I don't know. so let's talk about lichen because lichen is where the word comes from, lycanthropy. and also because Lycan's story is a genuinely upsetting little myth, up as a kind of a morality tale. In the version most commonly told, recorded by the Roman poet Ovid in Metamorphoses, Lycan is a king of Arcadia. Zeus, who is at this point in Greek mythology, is basically wandering the earth as a divine mystery shopper, testing whether mortals will treat a stranger with hospitality, and I don't know. shows up at Lycan's court disguised as an ordinary traveler. Okay. And Lycan decides to test him right back to test Zeus. So, you know, which is fine. Bold move, but fine. except Lycan's test involves serving Zeus a meal made partly from a human being. So apparently we're doing, eating people here. So some versions say a hostage. was used. Some say lichen's own son was used. Sounds like a great guy, by the way. you know, that if that is true, and obviously it tells you what kind of guy we're working with here. so Zeus was not fooled. He is in fact extremely displeased. Well I would be too, let me tell you. He flips the table. Literally in some tellings, as a punishment, transforms lichen into a wolf. So Ovid describes him Fleeing into the countryside, his jaws foaming, his old thirst for slaughter, like coming back, and now it's permanent. He's terrified, even of the sheep he used to just steal from. He's he's just he's terrified. He's he's terrifying. So here's what I find chilling about this story. And it has nothing to do with fangs. The punishment isn't really the wolf part. The wolf part is revealing what was already there. Lycan doesn't be didn't become a monster. He already was a monster. Zeus just stopped letting him hide it. So instead of, you know, like a wolf in sheep's clothing kind of thing. that idea, like I said, the the wolf shape is a less of a curse and more of an x-ray, is going to come up again and again for the next 3,000 years. And it's a lot more disturbing than guy grows for once a month, honestly. So the Greeks weren't alone, the Roman writer Petronius, in the Saticon, which is like a wild, gossipy, extremely unserious text, which was like the ancient equivalent of group chat, includes a soldier telling a story about a fire, around a fire about a companion who stripped off his clothes at a crossroads, urinated in a circle around them, an actual detail in the text, and yes, historians. have had to write academic papers using the phrase urinated in a circle. so let's
Sheena: Yeah.
Sarah: just all sit with that for a second there. And he turned into a wolf. Exactly. Urinated wolf in a
Sheena: How big of a circle? And like, is he going around people? Like is this like duck duck goose but he's like peeing?
Sarah: Yeah, P, P, P, P. But you know, maybe it was a circle protection. Maybe they felt, the P was protected. I don't know. So he the crossroads detail matters, you know, by the way, that crossroads. the crossroads show up constantly in werewolf and and witch folklore across cultures. So they're line their liminal spaces. Neither one neither one road nor the other road. And the liminal spaces are where like transformation folklore loves to happen. not fully day, not fully night, not fully man, not fully beast. The folklore is very con consistent about its real estate preferences. So Norse tradition gives us the the wolf skins story. I am not Norse, I have no idea how to pronounce. that name of the wolf skin stories. so if you want to look it up, great. I'm I have no idea. But we're
Sheena: Well you're gonna say what I'm never mind, you're gonna say what I'm going to say.
Sarah: No, go ahead.
Sheena: I was just gonna say there's the whole premise of them what is called like a berserker where
Sarah: Mm-hmm.
Sheena: they become like they have the pelts of the animals you know, whether it's a bear or whatever, and they
Sarah: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yep. Yeah.
Sheena: possibly ingest hallucinogenics or whatever and
Sarah: Yeah, exactly.
Sheena: build themselves up into a frenzy that they think that they are the animal.
Sarah: They are correct. so like I said, so Norse tradition, you know, gives us the wolf skins, the warriors mentioned alongside the berserkers, in the sagas and other like old Norse sources who wore wolf pelts into battle and were said to fight with a kind of animal ferocity, channeling the wolf rather than being cursed into one. I mean, this is generally different flavor of the myth. Transformation is power, not punishment. and it's one that gets almost entirely steamrolled by the version that wins out later, which is the version we're turning into a wolf is a tragedy, a disease, you know, a thing done to you rather than by you. so let's keep let's keep that tension in our back pockets. We're gonna curse, you know, the curse versus power, victim versus predator, because in about 40 minutes, a man named Kurt Sodomak is going to sit down at a typewriter in Los Angeles. And settle that argument, culturally speaking, for the next 80 years. But we're not there yet. Darn. We need to go somewhere much,
Sheena: Mm-hmm.
Sarah: much worse than a Greek myth. We need to go to the witch trials. Yay. I told you it's there somewhere. Sound very familiar. Yep.
Sheena: Doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo.
Sarah: All right. So here is part of the episode where I have to stop being charming for a while and silly. Because what happened in Europe between roughly the 1500s and 1650s wasn't folklore. It was a legal religious apparatus that tortured and executed real, specific, named people for the crime of being werewolves. This is documented. It's in trial records, in confessions, extracted under torture and execution records, written by observers who chillingly often described the proceedings with a kind of bureaucratic satisfaction. I'm not gonna sensationalize this beyond what happened because what happened doesn't need embellishing. It's already the worst version of itself. So we're gonna talk about Peter Stump. S-T-U-M-P-P. In 1589, in the town of Bedberg, near Cologne, Germany, a wealthy farmer named Peter Stump was arrested and accused of being a werewolf, responsible for a string of brutal killings. livestock and according to the confession extracted from him, numerous people, including children, over a period of roughly 25 years. Under torture, and I want to be precise here, because the pamphlets from the period are precise in that horrible clinical way propaganda often is, Stump confessed to owning a magical belt allegedly given to him by the devil. That transformed him into what witnesses described as a wolf with gr eyes great and large, which in the night sparkled like brands of fire, strong claws and a huge body. He confessed to killing and, cannibalizing the victims, including his own son.
Sheena: My what big eyes you have, said
Sarah: Exactly. He was executed in October. Yeah.
Sheena: Wonder if that's where wonder if that's where Grimm got that from, you know?
Sarah: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. He was executed in October fifteen eighty nine in a manner designed as public spectacle, broken on the wheel, flesh torn with hot pincers, decapitated, then burned. His daughter and mistress, also implicated, were executed alongside of him. The town reportedly erected a monument, a wolf figure mounted on a pole, as a warning. Now. Here's the thing historians point out, and it's important that it's the actual scary part of this story. Once you look at it straight on, there is no wolf. Okay. There was no belt. What there almost certainly was was a wealthy farmer who confessed under torture so severe that people will confess to anything, anything at all, to make it stop. Historians studying the Bedberg case note. The trial occurred amid intense regional religious conflict between Catholic and Protestant factions. economic hardship, you know, broader continental panic about witchcraft that swept up tens of thousands of victims across roughly two centuries. So, I mean, the werewolf, in other words, wasn't hiding in the German countryside in 1589. It was hiding in the legal and religious systems that needed a monster to explain famine, disease, and violence. And found it easier to manufacture one out of a human being than to sit with the possibility that the world was just cruel and chaotic on its own. No fur required. No fur. So this is, I think, the single most important thing to understand about werewolf history. Before we get to the fun part, the werewolf trials
Sheena: Mm-hmm.
Sarah: ran in parallel with the with with the witch trials. So, I mean, they use the same, you know, theological logic, a pact with the devil, a transformation granted through demonic power, you know, and killed people through the same machinery. You know, estimates of the total witch trial executions across Europe during this period range widely, depending on region and record survival. But scholars generally place the toll in the tens of thousands. Werewolf trials specifically were less numerous. But followed the identical sc script and concentrated heavily in French, German, and some Baltic regions. So there is a French case as well, the case of Giles Garnier. he was tried and executed near Dole in 1573. it followed nearly the same identical pattern to Stumps. A confession under torture describing an ointment or salve that enabled transformation, accusations of killing children. And a horrific public execution. In this case, he was burned at the stake. So I want to sit in something uncomfortable with you for a second, and then we'll come up for air, I promise. the idea of the werewolf as a scapegoat mechanism, you know, a way for a community under stress to the point that one person, you know, would say the wrongness is contained in him specifically, and now it can be burned out of us, is arguably the most historical significant thing. werewolf myth ever did. It wasn't metaphorical. It had a body count. you know, real people with real names, you know, real families, real real turnip farmers, you know, were killed because a frightened and structurally cruel legal system needed a monster with a face. So yeah. Okay.
Sheena: Well, I mean, to be fair though, a lot of things are really cruel then.
Sarah: Yeah, no. I mean it was it was, you know, religious deep deep religious beliefs and not a logi not a lot of logical thinking, rational thinking. because everything was was steeped in religion. Everything was steeped in the Bible, everything was steeped in the devil.
Sheena: Well that and also brute brutality, just pure brute you.
Sarah: Yeah, it it it also yeah, I mean they didn't see any problems with taking out the root cause and if, you know, someone is possessed by the devil or is in cahoots with the devil, there is no safe way to squash that except for a brutal death. When you're usually burning burning something out of you, burning the body.
Sheena: Drawn and cornered, beheaded.
Sarah: The headed. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. All right. I promise the rest of this episode guess to be a bit more fun in the campy silver bullet howling at a fake moon on a Hollywood back plot sense of fun. But I didn't want to breeze through the past with the trials. because a lot of werewolf content does and I think that's a disservice to the people who actually died. Over this. So also, deep breath, because we are about to leave 16th century Bedberg and France and travel directly into the much safer, much sillier, much more spandex adjacent world of what people think
Sheena: Mm-hmm.
Sarah: they know about werewolves and where all of that actually came from. So spoiler, it's mostly one movie. So one incredibly influential, moderately budgeted. Nineteen forty one monster movie. made by a team of Universal Studio employees who were, and I say this with love, absolutely just making up what they wanted. All right.
Sheena: gee, like history.
Sarah: Yeah. Exactly. Well right, so quick pop quiz, no pressure, because I can't actually hear you. what
Sheena: Well, I'm here.
Sarah: well, yes, but I'm gonna ask this, I guess, theoretical kind of question. Full moon, silver bullets, wolf's bane, hereditary curse, usually passed by bite, a werewolf who has no memory of what he did the night before and wakes up covered in let's be delicate evidence. How old do you think those tropes are? Medieval? Ancient? Older than the pyramids? Probably right. It feels ancient, right? Yeah.
Sheena: nineteen seventies.
Sarah: no, but it it it's feels like something your grandmother or grandfather would have whispered by candlelight. It's not. almost all of that is from one movie. 1941 and we're getting there, I promise. But first I'm gonna walk through these tropes individually because the wait, that's not ancient folklore reveal is genuinely one of my favorite things about doing this research. Of course I knew it, but you know, anyway. silver. Silver as a weapon against supernatural evil does have older folkloric roots. silver appears across various European traditions, like as a pure metal associated with the moon and with warding off malevolent spirits generally, generally, like not werewolves specifically, but silver bullets specifically, as the werewolf's one true weakness. There's one, I mean, there's no consistent trial record, no consistent rule like regional folklore. that nails this down before the 19th and 20th centuries and it really crystallizes unregrettably intended in popular fiction and film. it's less ancient wisdom and more a screenwriter's need to solve a problem for a free art free art act structure. So yeah made fit in movies. The full moon. So this one is generally surprising. because it feels like the most ancient part of the myth. Older confessions and folklores, including some of the trial testimony we just talked about, don't consistently tie transformation to lunar cycles at all. some traditions describe werewolves who could transform at will, using an object like a belt or a salve, like we discussed before. like you know, stump's belt, Garnier's ointment. Others describe a more general unpredictable curse. the specific ironclad rule of transforms involuntarily, exactly, once per month, precisely at the full moon is a narrative convenience that kind of gets cemented again, largely through 20th century film, because the monster attacks on a predictable schedule is enormously useful if you're trying to build suspense across a movie, a monster movie. So Wolf Spain. The plants it's a is a is a plant. it does have a genuinely ancient reputation, kind of as a poison. It's it's real, it's toxic. the Greeks and Romans knew it knew it as dangerous, and it does show up in folklore associated with witchcraft, dark magic bro you know, broadly. it's the specific role as a werewolf repellent or cure. Is again largely a dramatic invention popularized in the night in the 20th century. So the bite as hereditary curse transmission mechanism. a werewolf bites you, now you're a werewolf too. The vampire style contagion model, by the way. this one is almost entirely a modern narrative device. Older folklore is much more varied and much weirder. Transformation via pact with the devil. via a cursed object, via being born on a certain day, via you know, parental curse, via simply being punished by a god for bad behavior, like like like lichen was. So if basically none of this was fixed, consistent folklore before the 20th century, where did it all sudden suddenly click into place? You know, all at once it was like a kind of a tidy rule set we all just kind of absorb through cultural osmosis. The way you know Frankenstein's monster says fire bad, even if you've never read Mary Shelley. it just kind of clicked into place in a research department at Universal Studios in nineteen forty-one because of a German Jewish immigrant screenwriter, legendary makeup artist, and the son of the original Phantom of the
Sheena: Yeah, the only thing that I ever had a problem with is the way that they did the the wolf man. Because it just reminded me of people who have like the hyper keratinesis or whatever it is, you know, where their their face is just completely like everything yeah. Well it's hair. But it's like
Sarah: For hair. Tall hair. Tall hair.
Sheena: but it's just like the way because a lot of it, you know, the hair grows back this way and it it
Sarah: Yeah.
Sheena: just looks round. You know.
Sarah: Mm-hmm.
Sheena: That that's the only thing that I have never liked about the the forties Wolfman is that.
Sarah: That's what I love. That's what I love. I love
Sheena: I want a wolf.
Sarah: no the poof. I call it his poof. He has a poof. In the in the in the original movie he has a poof. and I I love that because it's fantastic. I I absolutely love it. yeah, no, that's that's my wolf man. Yeah.
Sheena: I don't about I want a wolf. Okay. I don't w if there's if they're gonna be a wolf man they're gonna have the ears and they look like a wolf. They're not gonna look like
Sarah: Then why call him a wolf man if they don't look like a man? I mean that can be a werewolf. That can be a w that can be
Sheena: Well the rest of them could be a man. Yeah.
Sarah: I mean don't even say don't we're not even talking she wolves. god no. We're not gonna talk about
Sheena: Ha ha ha.
Sarah: she wolves. my god. I know.
Sheena: I'm not talking about she wolves. I'm talking about you know,
Sarah: wolf man, he's a man who's a wolf. That's werewolves can be those fugly whatever they are, they look like costumes and the howling. The howling are werewolves,
Sheena: yeah.
Sarah: they're ugly, they're horrible. Wasn't even scared by those things anyway. But wolf man, I lock my doors for. Thank you very much. Anyway.
Sheena: Yeah.
Sarah: all right. So this is the big one. So I'm gonna take a sip of my drink here. But by 1941, Universal Studios had already made a fortune off of monsters. Dracula in 31, Frankenstein, same year 1931, The Mummy in 1932, God, classic movies. the studio had essentially invented the modern monster movie as a genre and a business model. and by the real forty by the early forties, they were looking for the next reliable monster to put in a rubber mask and a promotional poster. There had been an earlier werewolf film, 1935, Werewolf in London. starred Harry Hall.
Sheena: Mm-hmm.
Sarah: my son actually thinks he's scarier than Juan Cheney's Wolfman. I I can't even. The man gets dressed as a what as a wolfman who gets dressed. He puts a coat, a frock coat on or something before he goes outside. I'm like, what are you doing? You're an animal. What are you doing? Anyway, I digress. it's it's worth a footnote because it actually got there first with a a few of the tropes, including a version of the transformation via plant idea. but it didn't stick the way what came next did. which, you know, werewolf of London is the answer to a trivia question. The werewolf is the reason the trivia question exists. The wolf man. My wolf man.
Sheena: Ha ha ha.
Sarah: Sorry, I was so cheesy. so The Wolfman was written by Kurt Sodomack. and his story is worth pausing on for a second because I think it explains a lot about what makes the film hit differently than you'd expect from a B-movie monster picture. and Sodomac was a German Jewish writer who fled Nazi regimes in the nineteen thirties. Eventually landing in Hollywood. See he was by multiple later accounts, including his own reflections and interviews, working through real trauma, and real fear, fear about persecution, about a curse being placed on you by forces entirely outside your control, about becoming something monstrous through no choice or fault of your own. in the eyes of people who had already decided what you were. there really was probably something behind the story that he was writing, you know, in his own life, that that fear and that trauma. So I don't wanna overstate this into some kind of tidy one-to-one allegory. Sodomek was first and foremost a working studio writer turning around a commercial script on a deadline. But it's generally hard to read his later comments about the film and not feel something real was bleeding through the werewolf. you know, the suit and fog machine trappings, the, you know, he reportedly said later in life that the curse of the werewolf was in some way about his curse, you know, being marked, hunted, transformed into an enemy by circumstances entirely beyond his control. So all right. so the film stars Lon Cheney Jr., who was the son of Lon Cheney Sr., the legendary silent year and man of a thousand faces. who played like Phantom of the Opera and Hunchback of Notre Dame. Cheney Jr. had spent a career somewhat in his father's enormous shadow. and the Wolfman became, by wide consensus among film historians, the defining role of his career, the one part that was unambiguously, permanently his. no one else ever played the Wolfman. four films. Well, five if you count Advan Costello, but th they say it's not canon. where the Wolfman was in the the movies through Universal, Lon Cheney Jr. played him every single time. they didn't get anyone else to unlike Frankenstein who was played by multiple actors, unlike Dracula who's played by multiple actors, Wolfman was always Lon Cheney Junior's so or Creighton Cheney, that was his real name. Sorry, I'm a geek. I'm a geek. I know. All right. So Lon plays Larry Talbot, a man returning to his ancestral home in Wales. an American who'd been estranged from his aristocratic family. his father is played by Collard Rains, who ironically plays the phantom of the opera later on, which I thought was funny, because I mean here he's Lon's dad and And he plays Phantom in a later movie, After the death of his brother, like I said, Larry comes home and kind of reunites with his estranged father. Talbot's drawn into a budding romance with a local shopkeeper, Gwen Conliffe, who's played by Evelyn Angers. and on a walk through the fog-drenched countryside, one night, tries to save a woman from what he believes is an attacking wolf. He beats the creature to death with a silver-headed cane. A cane purchased in a detail that becomes deeply ironic by the film's end as a gift decorated with a wolf's head and a pentagram. He's bitten in the struggle. The wolf turns out to have actually been a man, a gypsy fortune teller named Bella, played by Bella Legosi, who it's revealed was himself a werewolf.
Sheena: Mm-hmm.
Sarah: So from here, the film builds its dread the way the best of these old universal pictures always did. Through atmosphere, knocked over my thing.
Sheena: Yeah.
Sarah: God bless. I'm getting so into it, I'm knocking over my microphone. anyway, so yeah, so through atmosphere rather than gore, because it's 1940s. You don't show blood, you don't show anything, you know, here comes, you know, bloodied body, you know, who was killed by a werewolf, fog rolling across the moor, that gorgeous doom laden, you know, studio built forest set with all crooked trees and impossible mist and that universal reused across, you know, half a dozen monster movies and always the same. But I loved it. It was so cheesy, so campy. a gypsy woman Maleva, who was played by Maria Ospinskaya. My mom loves that name by the way. who becomes the film's oracle of dread, delivering the poem that would go on to outlive the movie itself, quoted and misquoted in werewolf media for the next eight decades. Even a man who is pure in heart and says his prayers by night may become a wolf when the wolf vein blooms and the autumn moon is bright. That verse, the even a man who is pure in heart poem is as far as film historians and folklorists alike can tell, entirely Sodomac's invention for this screenplay. It sounds like it should be centuries old. it has the cadence of something translated out of a crumbling memoir. It is, in fact, 39 words written by a guy at Warner Brothers, adjacent studio commissary, sometime in 1941. And it has been more culturally influential on the popular understanding of werewolf folklore than probably every genuine European trial record combined. That's not a criticism, by the way. it's one of the most quietly impressive pieces of pop culture world building of the entire 20th century. it's not just folklore, it's a really, really good screenwriter's invention that folklore washed itself into. the culture so thoroughly that most people, my myself very much included until I actually researched this episode, assumed it was ancient. So so Talbot begins transforming. And here's where Jack Pierce comes in, makeup artist. The same universal makeup artist who was responsible for Carly Boris Karloff's you know iconic flat-headed Frankenstein monster design. Pierce's transformation makeup for Cheney was a legendarily brutal process. Layers of yak hair were applied directly to
Sheena: No.
Sarah: Cheney's skin with spirit gum, one section at a time. So with the film shot in incremental stop motion style stages, so the transformation could be shown agonizingly, frame by frame, dissolved by dissolved. So Cheney reportedly sat through hours of this application repealing for a single scene's worth of transformation footage. and later in interviews across his career, he spoke about the physical toll of it with the kind of weary first person authority that none of Universal's other monster actors quite had because none of them had to sit still under all that yak hair and spirit gum for as many hours as he did. And I I think it was a point of contention between him and Jack Pierce. Jack Pierce was very old school. He did not want to make anything fake. He wanted to use real things. He wanted to make it look real. He did not want to use rubber masks or anything like that. He built his mask.
Sheena: even today still when people do special effect makeup, they're in it for hours.
Sarah: Hm, yeah. the sad thing is a Universal eventually let Jack Pierce go. And it came just before Abbott and Costello meet Frankenstein. And you can tell the difference, or at least I can tell the difference, between the beginning, like the nineteen forty one the Wolfman makeup, and the Abbott and Costello makeup, because Jack Pierce was no longer doing makeup. for Universal Studios at the time of Abbott and Costello meet Frankenstein. and it it's painfully obvious that it's it's it it doesn't look as real. It doesn't look it looks more fake, unfortunately. and I mean it's still scary, but yeah. Anyway. So there is something almost sweetly literal about that you know the actor playing the man cursed to slowly, helplessly transform into something monstrous against his will, spent his actual real work day slowly, physically transforming one uncomfortable layer at a time, unable to do much of anything about it either. So I think that's that is definitely ironic. I don't think I'd want it any other way. it was perfect makeup. It was perfect makeup.
Sheena: Mm-hmm.
Sarah: so Talwood spends the rest of the film increasingly convinced he's cursed, increasingly unable to get anyone, including his own rational, scientifically minded father, to believe him, which in i is its own terror in itself. if no one, even his father, believes him, you know, believes what he's saying, believes that he's transforming, that he's, you know, not thinking about this and that but he he can't help it. The film is as much about not being believed as it is about the wolf itself. It builds to a genuinely mournful climax in the fog-bound woods, where Talbot's father, still not truly believing the curse is real, ultimately beats his own transformed son to death with that same silver-headed cane. The cane that killed Bella at the film's opening, now closing the circle and killing Larry Talbot. As Talbot dies, he transforms back into human form in front of his father and Gwen, and the film ends not on a triumphant monster slaying note, but on grief. A father who has just killed a son, who has previously lost his other son his other son, a silver tipped cane sitting in the mist, Maleva's closing lines about the wandering soul finally finding peace. So it's generally one of the more emotional, somber monster movie endings of the entire universal cycle. and I think that some somberness is a huge part of why the Wolfman mythology stuck the way it did. culturally in a way that some of the studio's flashier monsters didn't. Dracula is a predator. Frankenstein's monster is a tragic, wronged creation, but Larry Talbot is structurally a victim who is also the threat. Cursed through no fault of his own, unable to stop himself, killed by the person who loves him most. That's an incredibly potent shape for a monster story. And it's the shape that virtually every werewolf story since has borrowed, whether it knows it or not. And here's the kicker. The thing I love most about the whole saga, almost nothing that everyone knows about werewolves, like full moon, silver bullets, wolf main, the hereditary bite. Curse, the tragic sympathetic monster who didn't ask for this, predates this one film by more than a few years, if that. Wolfman wasn't really adapting werewolf folklore. It was writing werewolf folklore retroactively for all of us. Forever. Kurt Sodomack, a guy who reportedly needed the paycheck, invented a fake 39-word old country poem on a deadline. And eighty-five years later, you could probably recite half of it from memory. without knowing where it came from. That's not folklore surviving through oral tradition across the centuries. That's just really, really good copywriting. I have to say also, Maria Ospenskaya, you know, the prayer that she says over both Vela and Larry Talbot. I mean, that's that's was also written by Kurtzon Mac and and yet it's It's so enchanting the way you walked with Thorny through no fault of your own. You know, but as the rain enters the soil, the the water enters the the river. So tears run to a predestined end. Your suffering is over, my son. it sounds like it's a real, you know, but it was all written by one man. It's just incredible. It's incredible. So The Wolfman was a substantial hit for Universal. And Chani would go on to reprise the role of Larry Talbot, like I said, across multiple sequels and crossover films through the 1940s, including team-ups with the Frankenstein Monster and eventually the studio's whole monster rally era, where basically every universal creature ended up in the same fog-drenched Transylvanian black lot at once. Because if one monster sells tickets, four monsters sell even more tickets, just math. So, But the cultural footprint of the original 1941 film, specifically the rules it invented almost as afterthoughts in service of a tight, moody, 70-minute B picture, is the actual reason that I'm I'm with you right now and talking to you about the wolf man and what kills a werewolf? Silver bullet, right? That's what you'd say. What kills a werewolf? So with total confidence, You know, you'd be citing nineteen forty one Hollywood. Not not, you know, fifteen eighty nine Bedberg, Germany, or whether you knew it or not.
Sheena: Mm-hmm.
Sarah: So yeah, so once Sodomac's rules were out in the world, something interesting happened. They didn't stay in that one movie. They got treated almost immediately as if they'd always been there. you know, it later films borrowed the full moon rule, you know, uncritically. pulp novels borrowed it, comic books borrowed it. By the time tabletop games and later young adult vampire and werewolf franchises were building on their own, werewolf mythologies decades later, the Sodomac rule set wasn't being treated as a clever 1941 screenplay internal logic. It was being treated as bedrock, as the given, the thing you riff off rather than the thing you've invented. Folklorists have a term for this general phenomenon, incidentally, when a piece of modern media invention gets absorbed into popular belief as if it were authentic traditional folklore. It's sometimes called fake lore, or more academically discussed under the broader idea of invented tradition. The full moon werewolf is functionally one of the most successful pieces of fake lore in modern history. It's got better retention rate than most actual folklores. So there's a a slightly funny, slightly sad postscript. bear with me here. I gotta switch again to to Sodomak's story, which is worth sitting with for just a moment by his later accounts. he never really felt like he got properly compensated, credit wise or otherwise, for how enormously influential That one screenplaying turned out to be. So he wrote
Sheena: Mm-hmm.
Sarah: The Werewolf as we know it, essentially by himself on a work for hire basis for a mid-budget monster picture. And then he watched those rules become cultural bedrock, essentially reused for the rest of his life. Excuse me, largely uncredited in the popular imagination. So, I mean, which honestly feels like it could have been its own werewolf movie. the guy who invents the curse and never sees the benefit of what
Sheena: Mm-hmm.
Sarah: he made. so later, I mean Universal Monster Mythology, and eventually a wave of werewolf films from the 1970s and 80s onward, like an American Werewolf London, the howling that we talked about earlier. they pushed the makeup and transformation technology forward dramatically, going for a more visceral, painful on-screen transformation. you know sequences that learned that leaned into like body horror rather than dissolve cuts restraint of the 1941 original. but structurally they almost are still telling Larry Talbot story. Cursed, usually through a bite, a predictable lunar schedule, a weapon with a specific narrative narratively convenient weakness. So and a protagonist who's more sympathetic victim than villain. all right. So Even werewolf stories that try hard to subvert those rules are definitely still in conversation with them. Like you you can't subvert a trope nobody's ever heard of. so where does that leave us? I a myth that starts as an ancient cross-cultural way of processing humanity's most dangerous, cleverest, natural predator. that curdles in early modern Europe into a genuine deadly weapon used to torture and execute real innocent people during a period of religious panic and social upheaval. you know, and that gets finally almost entirely rewritten, reinvented, top to bottom, rules and all, by a refugee screenwriter and a makeup artist working a difficult and glamorous job on a Los Angeles backplot in 1941 for a monster movie that ran about 70 minutes and was at the time just one more product on an assembly line of studio horror pictures. None of these three eras really knew about the other two, culturally speaking, at the time. And yet, here we are, 85 years later. And if you asked a hundred people on the street what a werewolf needs to fear, you would get silver bullet and full moon from the overwhelmingly majority of them.
Sheena: Me.
Sarah: a specific, empathetic and slightly haunted Hollywood invention has completely and totally colonized the folklore it was supposedly just borrowing from. so a few things I want to leave you with. since we've covered a lot of fog drenched ground tonight. one, the werewolf myth across every era we've talked about keeps cycling the same central anxiety over and over in different costumes. The fear that the monstrous thing might not be a stranger. If it might be your neighbor. It might be someone you love. It might be in the very worst version of the story, it might be you. and you might not even know it. and you might not be able to stop it once it starts. Lycan didn't know what he'd become until Zeus told him. Larry Talbot didn't know until it was too late, and for you know, for everyone around him. that's a genuinely old, genuinely human fear, and it's not going anywhere. no matter how many rubber masks and yak care applications we bury under it. Two, be a little careful, I think, with how casually we tr we treat the witch in werewolf trials as History's greatest hits, you know, spooky edition. those are real people. You know, Peter Stump was a real specific person who existed and who was tortured into confessing to being something he almost certainly was not. and who's executed in public a as a civic entertainment. I mean it's worth remembering that the werewolf's scariest chapter isn't the one with fangs in it. So, and then the third thing that seems a little more Fun, I promise. note, I think. Next time somebody at a party confidently explains that obviously you need silver bullets. Everyone knows that. It's like ancient folklore. You know now that it's not really ancient folklore. it was written on a deadline by a guy who'd fled the Nazis and needed a paycheck and featured a poem he made up on the spot that sounded like old and You know, like should be carved into a cave wall or something. I don't know. And start a guy who spent hours in a chair getting yak hair glued to his face so that eighty-five years later you've instinctively know exactly what kills a werewolf. So that's not folklore failing us, by the way. If anything, it's kind of beautiful. It means that myth is still alive. it's still being written, and it just happens to have a production credit now. So thank you very much. I loved researching that. I I wanted to share my Wolfman knowledge with you and I love that I get to talk about Yay. And talk about
Sheena: Mm-hmm.
Sarah: my love of Lon Cheney Junior. So
Sheena: Well, here's two episodes of TV you need to watch. And I've probably
Sarah: Yeah.
Sheena: told you this already, but you need to watch the episode of Doctor Who
Sarah: Mm-hmm.
Sheena: it's set in Victorian England. I can't
Sarah: Okay.
Sheena: remember the episode name off the top of my head. also remember Doctor Who is dealing with aliens.
Sarah: Mm-hmm.
Sheena: So it does deal with werewolves on that one.
Sarah: Love it, love it, love it.
Sheena: The other so you get to see Queen Victoria and a werewolf.
Sarah: Ooh. Now is it like is it the cheesy
Sheena: Yeah, it's
Sarah: werewolf or
Sheena: yeah, kind of.
Sarah: Or is it like actually like it looks like a a okay.
Sheena: But but still it's still a good episode. Especially 'cause Queen Victoria. Anyways. Second
Sarah: Okay.
Sheena: is Supernatural's Monster Movie.
Sarah: Awesome.
Sheena: Which is that one you will enjoy.
Sarah: Okay. Well, like I said, if anyone if anyone's interested, the werewolf the Wolfman movies that starred Lonchini Jr., the Wolfman 1941, the Wolf Frankenstein meets the Wolfman came next. And that's with him and with Lonchini Jr. and and and Bell Legosi, who plays the Frankenstein monster. and then you have House of Frankenstein, which came next, House of Dracula came after that. And then of there's Aben Castellamy Frankenstein. And they say that is pretty much non canon, only because at the end of House of Dracula, Montchaney is cured of his werewolfism. So which so then you think, you know, well, if he was cured in House of Dracula, how is he turning into the wolf man again in Av and Castellamy Frankenstein, which was made later? but it was kind of a fun monster thing, you know. So that's why fans kind of say it's non canon. It's a it's a fun movie.
Sheena: Well, I spun the wheel. You ready? You got paranormal.
Sarah: That's funny. I love it. That's awesome. And you know what? That's okay
Sheena: What?
Sarah: because we're getting more and more into fall. And I'm I'm I love kind of doing more of the spookier stuff. So
Sheena: Yes, it we're just gonna start you know, once we get ready for soup season, it's spooky season. So and it's definitely
Sarah: Yeah, yeah.
Sheena: soup season for me because I want some clam
Sarah: Yeah, like
Sheena: chowder.
Sarah: uh-huh. Yep. Like I said, I yeah, it's getting into it. I mean, you know, it's we're still in August, but my daughter was actually just telling me the other day, she's like, Mom, can we start decorating for Halloween already? And I'm like, Of course. You don't have to ask
Sheena: Mm-hmm.
Sarah: that. Of course, you know, it's it's August, why not? Okay, you know, what's funny is I've actually taken all of the the Halloween movies that I own. because I didn't want to miss any of them. You know, I own a lot. I own a lot more than I do Christmas movies. I don't know what that says about me. I put them in in order by by year that they were made. because I didn't want to miss any of them. And I try to start watching them all. at you know, around this time of the year because first of all, there are so many of them. there's a good number of Halloween movies, from nineteen, you know, nineteen thirty, you know, Dracula to present day. like Hocus Pocus 2, Practical Magic 2, that's coming out. Can't wait for that one. We talked about that. Yeah, I know we talked about that last week. there are so many Halloween movies that I love to watch that I can't fit them all into the month of October. So I have to start earlier. darn. And that just gets me in the mood
Sheena: no.
Sarah: for Halloween. I'm dressing up. Lighting my candles. Yeah, lighting my candles. You
Sheena: We'll just be even more spookier.
Sarah: know, it's funny, on Halloween, I think I think Bailey, my my friend's daughter asked me just recently. She's like, what do you do on Halloween? And I was like, Well, trick-or-treating, magic circles. What do you mean? She's like,
Sheena: Ha ha ha.
Sarah: what? I don't know if she knows I'm a witch. I can't remember. I think I told her, but I don't know. I after trick or treating I come up to my room, I I light my candles, you know, and the four fall down the four corners and I commune with my ancestors. So with my family.
Sheena: I mean I'm not t in my twenties anymore, so I I don't want to go out and get drunk and walk around in
Sarah: Yeah. Mm.
Sheena: in clothes that are not comfortable in cold weather.
Sarah: I ha well I I I have been going out for the kids. Tyrion has has gone out on his own with friends, but I still go with Arya. And I I honestly I haven't dressed up why I dressed up two years ago. and that was actually only because I got a costume for free, very last minute. And I was like, why the hell not? I'm gonna do this. I haven't dressed up in years. and it was fun, but I had this headgear on because I was being abducted by aliens, which you would have loved, by the way, because you love aliens. and so of course in in in E Town here we have a lot of low-hanging trees. Ooh, lightning. my god, I just talked about the wolf man, there's lightning outside. god, I hope the doors are locked. Anyway.
Sheena: Ha ha ha.
Sarah: So I'm just like, you know, I'm getting like hit by tree branches and stuff. I was like, my God, this is an actual this is a horrible costume. And of course, I mean my my kids were
Sheena: Ha ha ha
Sarah: slightly younger. it wasn't like I like running after like three year olds, four year olds, thank God. I I would not have been able to do it. But it was kind of annoying because I was like trying to watch out for them and I was trying to, have my umbrella hat thing get, you know, knocked off and we went with friends of ours, 'cause Lauria was going out with their son the husband was kinda like helping me get get untangled.
Sheena: Ha ha ha
Sarah: So I thought, you know what? I I'll just go with me for right now. Maybe I'll put a witch's hat on because, you know, that's fun, but whatever. I'm I'm not dressing up, at least right now. But
Sheena: Well and maybe we should do some logistical chat after this about what we want to do for Halloween. maybe we'll do a special Halloween episode. you know, or maybe we could do a live stream or
Sarah: I think we I would love to talk about the hi the history of Salin. I'd love to talk about the history 'cause that's that's actually one of the first things I watch is the history of of Salin and Halloween.
Sheena: I call vampires. You got the werewolves. I call vampires.
Sarah: That's fine. That's cool. I got werewolves already, so we we did werewolves. But that's fine. I'm not a big I'm not a big vampire fan. My mom, you know, was terrified of Frankenstein. I'm like, why? You can outrun him in a heartbeat. Why? Why?
Sheena: Ha ha ha.
Sarah: And Dracula is is all about sex. I mean, Dracula is very sensual, very sexual. I mean, that's not really chilling. That's not really chilling for me.
Sheena: Hello, Scorpio.
Sarah: To me it's a man who transforms into a man like creature but is can kill you. He's fast, he can jump, he can hide, he can stalk you. That's scary. That's fucking scary shit. You know.
Sheena: And there's your Gemini.
Sarah: So
Sheena: Yeah.
Sarah: Yeah, I yeah, I to me Wolfman is is the classic universal monsters of the classic monsters. I'm not talking about like zombies zombies freak me out 'cause I I'm like eating people and brains and shit. That's just nasty. You know.
Sheena: Hate zombies.
Sarah: yeah, possessed children freak me out. I mean I I was terrified when I had
Sheena: Yeah.
Sarah: small children 'cause I didn't want them to be like evil, turning of the head, you know, that that you see in horror movies.
Sheena: Yeah.
Sarah: so yeah. I mean once again mommy is
Sheena: Yep, I
Sarah: a really old guy. this shit's not scary except for the wolfman. The wolfman in my esteem is the scariest of the of the universal.
Sheena: Well, you know, though I didn't grow up on the old ones. I grew up on
Sarah: Mm.
Sheena: the eighties. Watching it with my dad.
Sarah: That's because you had young parents. Yeah, you had young parents. I didn't. I had older parents who were raised on those movies.
Sheena: Yeah. So you know, and my dad my dad was a wild child. So, you know, he so I grew up watching
Sarah: Mm-hmm. I'm sure your dad I can see your dad liking the howling. I can see your dad liking the howling. He he would be the kind of guy that would like the howling.
Sheena: You I I d you know, I don't remember, but you know, I did watch Nightmare on Elm Street. I watched Tales of Crypt with my my dad. So so so for
Sarah: That would yeah, that would be your dad. That would be your dad. I can see that.
Sheena: me, you know, it's more of the psychological thrillers that get to me because then
Sarah: Yeah. Yeah.
Sheena: I just sit there and watch the gory stuff and I'm like, I'm bored.
Sarah: Well, interesting interestingly enough, like the wolf man when Kurt Sodomak wrote the screenplay, originally, you weren't supposed to know if Larry Talbot actually physically changes into a wolf. you were supposed to wonder if is he actually a werewolf, like someone who actually transformed Or is it all in his mind? Is it all up
Sheena: Mm-hmm.
Sarah: here? You know? and I think, you know, obviously for for Hollywood, they're like, we gotta we gotta actually change him. We g we gotta see a wolf.
Sheena: Mm-hmm.
Sarah: We we gotta see that. That's what that's what's scary. That's what's gonna bring people into the seats, you know.
Sheena: Mm-hmm.
Sarah: but yeah, you weren't supposed to know and apparently Larry Talbot, from what I also read was not that nice of a guy. in in Kirst Adamak's original scri screenplay. He was not that nice of a guy. He was more of a a douchey asshole. you know, who was a kind of a peeping Tom. and that's how he met Gwen, the the shopkeeper's daughter. which, my mind I'm glad he changed to like this kind of carefree kind of l you know, hapless kind of guy, because it makes you feel more for him, you know. If he would have been a douche, you would have like, God, I hope he I hope he gets killed. Like what the hell? Like who cares about this guy? No one's gonna care about a guy like that. But
Sheena: Mm-hmm.
Sarah: hapless Joe Schmo, everyday kind of guy who, you know, who could just be like you and me. you know, who this this this curse falls upon him, you know, because he saved somebody. He s he was trying to save Gwen's friend Jenny. well, he doesn't save her. She die she ends up dying. But I mean, his reward for saving her is to get bitten himself. And you know and through the the the remaining movies, all he wants to do is die. Because he does not want to go on killing. He does not want to continue to be this monster. that's one of my favorite things, is that he's not a monster Dracula's a monster all the time. Frankenstein's a monster all the time. The mommy's a monster all the time. Lon Trini Jr. is not a monster as Larry Talbot. He is not. He's a human being, someone who, you know, wouldn't hurt a fly. who's kind to people, who's loving, who wants to protect people, who wants to kill you know, end his own life so that he doesn't keep killing. who we see on the outside versus who we really are on the inside He's a genuinely lovable character in when he's a human. And then he turns into this monster. And that's tragic. That's really tragic.
Sheena: Yeah. Yeah, well there's always a story behind them all, so definitely
Sarah: Yeah. could it be also like kind of like going through like puberty type of thing too, like you know, hair growing
Sheena: Mm-hmm.
Sarah: in places that you know, you never had hair before, you know, and like the changing of emotions, the changing of fear. So I mean that puberty was also I guess kind of a
Sheena: The second puberty for women. Perimenopause, growing hair where you don't normally grow hair. Turning
Sarah: Mm, yeah, you know, yeah.
Sheena: into rabid feral beasts.
Sarah: Or if you live in if you live in Lancaster County, you have fur on your faces no matter what age you are after after puberty.
Sheena: So
Sarah: I'm not talking about me, by the way. Not talking about me. I've seen poor poor furry faced women in the around this area. So mm but no.
Sheena: Yeah. Well.
Sarah: yeah. Anyway. So
Sheena: But yeah, so yeah, maybe get us some of your spooky scary stories to us at so random and weirdput at gmail.com and maybe we can do spooky story time of your guys' incidences.
Sarah: Do you have favorite monsters? Yeah. If you have favorite monsters and want to tell us which one's your favorite, or you know,
Sheena: rate and review and leave comments so that way we know what to do. You know, because you did almost get history when I spun it. So I had to spin it again because I'm doing history. You know,
Sarah: Yeah.
Sheena: so let us know if you want us to do whatever it actually lands on the first time, even if it's a double. let us know what we're doing right, what we what you'd like to see, give us some suggestions on what we can do and yeah, so share us with your friends, your coworkers, your worst enemy if you feel like it. And
Sarah: Yeah, we'd we'd love to to have, you know, you share your thoughts and feelings with us. We wanna hear from you. So
Sheena: And so with that, stay curious, stay weird, and don't go into the woods tonight. Da da da da da da da da da. Yep. Bye.
Sarah: Especially during full moon. Especially during full moon. Stay inside. Lock the doors. Bye everybody. Bye. Love you guys.
