Werewolf of London (1935): Before The Wolf Man, There Was Another Universal Werewolf

Before Lon Chaney Jr. started howling at the moon, Universal Pictures had already unleashed a werewolf on movie audiences.

Werewolf of London (1935) stars Henry Hull as Dr. Wilfred Glendon, a botanist who travels to Tibet searching for a mysterious flower and gets bitten by a creature that turns out to be a werewolf. You can probably guess where this is going.

What makes Werewolf of London fascinating today isn't simply whether it still scares us. It's seeing how many pieces of the werewolf movie formula were already being assembled six years before The Wolf Man became the genre-defining classic.

Transformation. Tragedy. A man losing control of himself. The monster lurking underneath an otherwise respectable human being.

It's all here.

That's why we're beginning our 30 Nights of Werewolves with one of Hollywood's earliest major attempts at putting the creature on screen.

And we're just getting started.

Want more werewolves? Listen to and watch Johnny Spoiler's werewolf movie reviews, reactions and deep dives on the Binge-Watchers Podcast website.

🐺 Tonight's movie: Werewolf of London (1935)
🌕 Tomorrow: The Wolf Man (1941)