Man’s best monster

A history of werewolves

By Soncirey Mitchell
Reader Staff

Werewolves have been a vehicle for cultural fears since time immemorial, and, unlike most monsters, they have no single origin. Almost every culture in the world has a werewolf myth — or myths of some other were-beast — from Asia to North America, which has made for a varied and enduring monster used throughout history to embody fears of violence, sexual violation, and the fragile line between civilization and barbarism.

Humanity has been fascinated with human-animal hybrids for thousands of years, with the oldest zoomorphic art, the Löwenmensch (or lion-man) statue, dating back to 33,000-38,000 B.C.E. The first written example of a werewolf-like being comes from The Epic of Gilgamesh, written around 2100–1200 B.C.E., in which the goddess Inanna turns her former lover into a wolf, though he maintains his human mind, “so his own shepherds now chase him and his own dogs snap at his shins.” 

Historic stories of werewolves were varied — sometimes sympathetic, as in Marie de France’s Bisclavret, and other times prescriptive, as in the myth of Zeus and Lycaon — however, they began to have a tangible impact on people’s lives during Europe’s Middle Ages.

According to Dr. Emily Zarka, host of PBS’s Monstrum, the rise of sheep farming in Europe in the Middle Ages exacerbated tensions between people and wolves, as the canines became a greater threat to people’s prosperity than ever before. In Of Wolves and Men, essayist and nature writer Barry Holstun Lopez wrote, “The medieval mind, more than any other mind in history, was obsessed with images of wolves … Peasants called famine ‘the wolf.’ Avaricious landlords were ‘wolves.’ Anything that threatened a peasant’s precarious existence was ‘the wolf.’”

This characterization fed into, and was fed by, Christian theology, which often used the image of the wolf to describe everything from false prophets to the antichrist to “heretics,” emphasizing their supposedly bloodthirsty nature. Lopez called this demonization of wolves “almost completely a projection of human anxiety,” with the wolf being, “not so much an animal we have always known as an animal we have consistently imagined.”

Regardless, as the idea of the wolf became more monstrous, accusations of lycanthropy began to grow. From the 14th to 18th centuries, many men (and some women) were tried and executed alongside supposed witches for the crime of being werewolves, which was closely linked to sorcery, as is outlined in the Malleus Maleficarum. During that time, France alone reported more than 30,000 cases of lycanthropy, according to Zarka.

These accusations generally didn’t center on the animal transformation as the key issue, but rather the charges of rape, murder and cannibalism that these men were said to have carried out while in wolf form. The most famous werewolf trial took place in Germany, where farmer Peter Stumpp was found guilty of lycanthropy, witchcraft, cannibalism, incest and murder. Only two surviving records of the trial survive, one of which author and clergyman Montague Summers documented word-for-word in his folklore study, The Werewolf.

The text described Stumpp as a “hellhound” in league with the devil, who used a magic girdle to transform into a wolf “strong and mighty, with eyes great and large, which in the night sparkled like unto brands of fire; a mouth great and wide, with most sharp and cruel teeth; a huge body; and mighty paws.”

Stumpp was convicted of murdering 13 children — including his own son, whose brain he’s said to have eaten — and two pregnant women, “tearing the children out of their wombs … and after ate their hearts panting hot and raw.” 

The document alleged that he carried out these gruesome murders over a period of 25 years, during which time he also had incestuous relationships with his sister and daughter.

Stumpp was executed on Oct. 31, 1589, when his body was “laid on a wheel, and with red hot burning pincers in 10 several places to have the flesh pulled off from the bones.” After that, executioners broke his arms and legs, decapitated him and burned him at the stake with his sister and daughter. After his death, the town of Bedburg displayed the wheel used to torture him alongside the image of a wolf and Stumpp’s severed head as a warning to other werewolves.

Whether you believe in a world where werewolves exist or you think Stumpp was a human serial killer, the accusations of lycanthropy clearly connect the monster to ideas of sexual violation and deviancy. Werewolf accusations often had a sexual component, and even the graphic descriptions of the deaths of children and pregnant women relate the werewolf’s violence to procreation and the family.

(That association continues to the present day. In 1995, the media dubbed Jack Owen Spillman, a particularly gruesome serial killer and rapist from Spokane, “The Werewolf Butcher.”)

Belief in werewolves slowly waned, unlike the public fascination with the furry monster, and eventually, werewolves became staples of Gothic and horror publications like penny dreadfuls. These morbid and salacious stories played up the violence and sexual deviancy of the werewolf myth, during which time it became associated with the lower classes, according to Zarka.

Medical advancements paved the way for Lon Chaney Jr.’s classic werewolf, which took the threat of sexual violence — and just plain violence — and internalized it, making it a Jekyll-and-Hyde-esque battle of two personalities within one body. The 1941 classic The Wolf Man, starring Chaney as a straight-laced, well-bred man-turned-werewolf, includes the poetic line, “Even a man who is pure in heart / And says his prayers by night / May become a wolf when the wolfbane blooms.”

Cultural historians believe that this reimagining helped audiences better understand the growing violence in 20th century Europe. Seeing that a man of good social standing was still capable of violence, even against the woman he loves, was a way for viewers to reconcile the image of polite society with the horrors of the world wars.

The Wolf Man began the American werewolf craze, depicting what horror historian David J. Skal called a “geographically indeterminate ‘Europe’” that blurs elements of “America, England and the continent as the Great War had done literally, and the new war was in the process of doing all over again.”

Whereas previous media, like the lost 1913 film The Werewolf, had depicted werewolves as a cultural other — a threat stemming from the Indigenous people of North America or East Asia — The Wolf Man set Chaney’s misadventures in a fictional version of 1940s Europe, which did not include WWII yet was heavily influenced by it. The Wolf Man and its sequels came out between America’s entrance into the war and the bombing of Hiroshima. At the same time, Adolf Hitler — previously admired by many Americans — was broadcasting his fascination with wolves and werewolves to the world, using the pseudonym “Herr Wolf” and naming his headquarters in France and Ukraine Wolfsschlucht (Wolf’s Gulch) and Werwolf, respectively.

“Images of devolved animal-men, often possessed of the wolfish traits so prized by the Nazis, were striking facets of horror pictures during the war years,” wrote Skal in The Monster Show.

Though Nazis and werewolves wouldn’t be explicitly linked on screen until 1981’s An American Werewolf in London, the monster remained an outlet for Americans to process the previously unheard of death, destruction and loss of culture caused by WWII and Time’s 1938 “Man of the Year.”

The werewolf’s popularity has yet to fade, molding itself to embody whatever new cultural anxieties arise, whether about youth culture (I Was a Teenage Werewolf), menstruation (Ginger Snaps) or motherhood (Nightbitch). The duality of the werewolf, with its diverse cultural origins and mythologies, makes it perhaps history’s most popular and relatable monster, serving as a manifestation of society’s fears for more than 4,000 (or maybe 40,000) years.