Werewolves

Calling All Filmmakers! Are You a Horror Hound?

HORRORHOUND WEEKEND is a traveling convention, although you probably knew that already. It gets lots of press coverage. It’s a Rondo Award winner! (See this week’s post over at darkness.com for details on the Rondos, if you don’t recognize THAT name, either. You probably do. Heck, go on over to our sister site, anyway.) Anyway,…

Thrown to the Wolves. (Um, make that “Dog.”)

Seems like a lot of these type stories are cropping up as of late. Killer dog stories, people being mauled by dogs, murderers feeding victims to dogs, etc. Here’s another one for the record books. Newlywed Svetlana Batukova, a 46-year-old Russian woman, murdered her husband, 66-year-old German Horst Hans Hinkles (seriously?) and fed his remains…

Survival Tips for Dealing with Psychopaths

Psychopaths, aka Sociopaths—the latest thinking is that both a biological predisposition as well as certain environmental factors are necessary to create such an individual, and thus the two terms are being used more and more interchangeably—are, for the most part, and despite what the movies and the entertainment industry would have us all believe, NOT…

First Nations Suicide Curse?

First off, please don’t mistake my featuring this topic on an entertainment website, which this one obviously is, as any indication that I am dismissive of the seriousness the subject warrants. I am in no way disparaging the real life tragedy that is unfolding, and has been unfolding for many years now, amongst the indigenous…

Happy birthday, Roger!

Roger Corman is a legend. There is no denying that fact. The man has been around so long and done so much, produced so much work and had his hand in so much that is modern Hollywood that even the snooty “Academy” had to acknowledge it, awarding him an honorary Oscar in 2009. Several of…

The Devil is in the Details—No, make that the Sirloin

The word for today is “simulacrum,” or, in the plural form, “simulacra.” It is Latin in origin, and according to Webster’s dictionary, it is defined as “(1.) a slight, unreal, or superficial likeness or semblance. (2.) an effigy, image, or representation.” In all the cases in which I have encountered the term, it is used…

Giving in to Temptation

I have to, y’all. I just have to. I came across this headline and knew this story was going up here at our website. I can’t NOT report on it. I’ve seen the story, you see, read it, and the only way to purge it from my psyche, to provide myself a catharsis, is to…

Real-Life Frankenstein Monster vs. Real-Life Werewolf? It could happen.

Which of the “classic” monsters is most likely to exist in our mundane “real” world? If you accept that the furry, fanged werewolf of the movies and of folklore is a metaphor for the bestial side of human behavior, a sort of supernatural stand-in, then the werewolf exists ALREADY, and always has. What, then, is…

Review: THE WOLFMAN VS. DRACULA

If you’re thinking, “Wait, what?! I haven’t seen that one? How’d I miss it?!”, you didn’t. It is a movie that was never made. What I am reviewing is the script, written by Bernard Schubert, which WAS completed. The movie was supposed to come out in 1944 and to be a sequel to either FRANKENSTEIN…

Equal Time

Pitbulls are not werewolves. The only thing they could possibly be seen as having in common with werewolves is their ferocity. The only times I have written about pitbulls or other dogs is when a human being had been attacked by them—and the attacking dogs in question have all been either part- or full-blooded pitbulls….

Man’s Best Frenemy

Was there ever a time when wolves preyed on our primitive human ancestors? Certainly. (That was a long time ago, though. Today, humans prey on wolves.) More than from predation, however, wolves would have proven a threat to early humans due to the competition they provided, as wolves and humans fed on the same animals….

The Debated Pedigree of the Easter Bunny

First answer (to the first question you’re probably asking yourselves—wasn’t Easter LAST weekend?): Easter SUNDAY was last weekend. But if you belong to one of the high liturgical churches, you already know that Easter is a SEASON and it lasts for 50 days, terminating in the Day of Pentecost. Ergo, any Easter-related post is still…

Advice for a Werewolf Writer

That’s a writer who wants to write about werewolves, not a writer who IS a werewolf, just to clarify. I received an email this past week from an aspiring author named Taylor, requesting some help. This brings back memories for me. I worked for a time as a submissions agent for a literary agency, and…

Werewolf Sightings—Real Ones!

Let’s have a look at this compilation, available at the link below, shall we, and see if these are sightings with which we are familiar? Do these reports, all supposedly true, cover all the known territory, the terra cognita, of real-world werewolf lore? The arrest of Peter Stubbe, the Gilles Garnier case, the Beast of…

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What does a Monster look like?

There’s a scene in the early 90s psychological thriller THE GOOD SON, an alternate take on THE BAD SEED starring Macaulay Culkin as a middle school sociopath that’s actually pretty good, where the protagonist, played by a young Elijah Wood, is trying to tell this woman, a therapist, about Culkin’s character and how dangerous he…

Surplus Killing

There’s a new term for you. “Surplus killing.” I’d never heard it used before. Reports are that a pack of wolves killed a total of 19 elk recently outside Bondurant, Wyoming. 17 of those were calves, and 2 adults were females. The carcasses were not eaten, which makes this a most unusual case indeed. Wolves…

People all over the world, come on! Join in! Start a love train!

Our ancestors got their freak on. No doubt about it. They did it frequently, and they loved ‘em some variety. Were cavemen and women monogamous? Who knows? But our species was not designed, not genetically programmed, for monogamy. The latter is not unknown in the animal world, but it is rare. Commonly, an animal’s instincts…

Go to Hell!

Literally. Well, no, not LITERALLY literally. But there is a place you can visit that is modeled after Hell, which is as close as any of us would want to get to the real thing, right? Not that the REAL Hell is a place. Rather it’s more a state of being. If it exists. But…

Woman Puts Child In Oven

We tend to look at the state of things in our present day and bemoan the erosion of decency and sanity. We pine for the good old days before everything went to hell in a handbasket. We desire to return to a gilded age of innocence and morality that never existed. Things were simply better,…

The Man in the Cage

Let me ask you, how could THE CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON be seen as racist? Likewise, who wouldn’t recognize the description of a part animal, part human creature as a device of popular fiction, of cryptozoology, or of folklore? Don’t you automatically think of a werewolf, or one of the filmed versions of H.G….

Easter, Bunny! Kill! Kill!

I didn’t expect, at all, to find anything to comment on, for this or any of our sister sites, to commemorate the current holiday season. How could I connect anything related to Easter with werewolves, or with vampires, comic books, Horror or zombies? The latter would be a possibility, except I’ve reported in the past…

Moved by the Spirit, Mauled by the Lion

It is recorded in both the Gospels of St. Matthew and St. Luke that Jesus Christ responds to temptation by quoting from a passage in the Old Testament book of Deuteronomy: “Thou shalt not put the Lord thy God to the test” (alternately, “Thou shall not tempt the Lord thy God”). This edict, which seems…

“Well, Clarice, have the lambs stopped screaming?”

I reckon you can tell I’m a big fan of THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS, as I’ve covered it a few times on this site, and movie buffs should recognize the quote that serves as title for this article as one of the lines of dialogue from that film. I just used it because I…

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Wolverine is a vampire? And a terrible driver, too?

Here’s the exact quote from the linked-to article below: “The driver was described as looking like a wolverine with a short, stocky build. The same witness said the driver appeared to have ‘vampire teeth.’” This description is in reference to the one provided to police officers in New Haven, Connecticut, by a witness to a…

The Do-It-(to)Yourself Werewolf Kit

I guess I sometimes take it for granted. Things that, to me, are common knowledge, I just assume that other werewolf enthusiasts know all about them, as well. Why write about the case of Peter Stubbe, I might ask myself, when every werewolf fan knows all about that? It has been covered ad nauseam in…