The Curse of the Werewolf (1961) Review

Tagline: “He fought the hideous curse of his evil birth, but his ravished victims were proof that the cravings of his beast-blood demanded he kill... Kill... KILL!”

The Curse of the Werewolf (1961) Review

 

Here’s a movie that will put hair on your chest—literally, the werewolf in Hammer Studios’ sole horror film to feature the killer canine has one of hairiest chests of any werewolf I’ve seen so far! What’s different about this guy is how he ends up as a werewolf and how he doesn’t automatically turn into one under a full moon; it’s a little more complex than that, but I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s go back to the beginning.

It starts in Spain a century ago and is narrated by a guy named Alfredo Corledo, though he doesn’t come into the story as a character until later. A beggar, new to town, is looking for money, and stumbles his way into a royal wedding between a hot bride and a disdainful nobleman. The nobleman publicly ridicules the beggar, who doesn’t really seem to understand that he’s the focal point of the nobleman’s cruelty, and ends up imprisoned. It skips ahead and the nobleman becomes a disgusting recluse, his wife having left him (obviously), and he gets the jailer’s mute daughter thrown into the same cell as the beggar for refusing his advances. If you felt any sympathy for the beggar before, it flies out the window at this point, because he rapes the poor imprisoned girl before finally dying.

The mute girl goes right back to the nobleman the second she’s let out and stabs him to death in a satisfyingly bloody assault, then escapes into the woods, which is where Alfredo finds her. She’s pregnant, and gives birth on Christmas Day, but dies, and when the newborn, whom Alfredo and his housekeeper name Leon, gets baptized, some spookiness is in the air. It seems the circumstances of his conception and birth have made him a werewolf, and Alfredo figures it out pretty early on, when Leon is still just a young boy and kills some goats. He puts bars on Leon’s bedroom window and consults a priest, who tells him the only remedy for Leon’s affliction is the love he will never get from his mother or father, so Alfredo and his housekeeper raise him as their own son, which is actually a sweet sentiment, especially considering how dark his origin story is.

The Curse of the Werewolf draws out Leon’s origins for quite some time, then it jumps ahead to when he is a young man, going off to work at a vineyard. He becomes friends with a coworker who is way more aloof than he is and just wants to party and hook up with women, but Leon is in love with the boss’ daughter, who is supposed to marry some other dude. As you can guess, this leads to Leon’s more beastly side coming back out, and he kills a couple people before returning to Alfredo’s house, where they finally fill him in on his true nature. But, his lover doesn’t know the truth, and when Leon ends up jailed under suspicion of murder, she doesn’t back up Alfredo’s explanation, which is actually a pretty clever twist of the storytelling knife. Leon’s wolf form is only visually hinted at for most of the runtime, and we don’t get to see him in full until the last twenty minutes, but he causes some suitably exciting mayhem before his inevitable demise, and looks pretty ferocious while causing it.

Like the other Hammer horror films of the era, The Curse of the Werewolf looks great in colour, with grand sets and bright red blood. The sets were actually built for a different film that never went into production, so the setting was changed from Paris in the script to Madrid to save some money, but I actually kind of like that it has some Spanish flavour to it. The werewolf effects are great for the era, and the design of the full werewolf is a nice blend between the classic Wolf Man look and some timber wolf features. Both actors who play Leon (young version and adult version) are good, but I think the child actor Justin Walters actually stands out more, delivering some challenging dialogue in the scene when he tells Alfredo about his full moon nightmares, and little British kids are always creepy, aren’t they? Oliver Reed has some great physicality and looks buff and brooding, but doesn’t stand out quite as much when he isn’t toothy and hairy.

The Curse of the Werewolf is the most serious werewolf film from the 1960s that I’ve come across, and just like the other reintroductions of classic Universal monsters from Hammer, worth checking out. It’s a little slow in the first half and more disturbing with the implications of its content rather than the visual storytelling, but the beast delivers and the spin that’s put on the lore is a little less cliché than you might expect, while still having all the expected hallmarks, like a scary full-moon transformation and the use of silver bullets to defeat the bloodthirsty creature.