“‘They know it could happen to anyone!’: The Promise of Nuclear Holocaust and Vaccination Fallout in The Werewolf (1956)”

Zack Kruse and Justin Wigard

By the mid 1950s, director-producer Sam Katzman was settling in at Columbia Pictures; the one-time Poverty Row filmmaker had nearly thirty years in Hollywood and had established a reputation for himself by producing serials and genre pictures with meager budgets that had disproportionately high rates of return. Katzman’s approach to filmmaking boiled down to this: if the film was profitable, then it was good. At Columbia, Katzman relied on gimmicks that appealed to a teenage audience: fast cars, teenage criminals, rockabilly music, science fiction, and horrific creatures, all with an atom-age spin. For instance, 1955’s Creature with the Atom Brain (dir. Curt Siodmak) featured a Nazi scientist who had once dreamed of using atomic radiation to create a race of zombie slaves for menial labor but is forced by a mobster to instead resurrect corpses for use as remote-controlled killers. Creature with the Atom Brain led to a series of science fiction and horror movies at Columbia, and in 1956, Katzman paired with director Fred F. Sears for The Werewolf. Notable as the first of only three werewolf films created in the 1950s, The Werewolf centers on the disruptive appearance of Duncan Marsh (Steven Ritch) – the titular creature of the film –  a mutant stranger to a small town in California. The Werewolf continues Katzman’s trend of science fiction and horror blending, as two doctors inject Marsh with a serum designed to protect against nuclear fallout which, instead, causes Marsh to undergo a werewolf-like transformation.

In this article, we examine the film’s pervasive strains of paranoia: fear of the outsider, of the unknown serum afflicting Marsh, of government interference. We attend particularly to Katzman’s turn towards horror films interlaced with scientific anxieties over covert government experimentation, all filtered through the wolfman mutation. Set against the backdrop of 1950s Cold War sentiments, The Werewolf can be appreciated superficially as a B-movie that is both representative of its moment and, as Katzman put it, a style of filmmaking that was “in the five and dime business and not in the Tiffany business.” Film critic Mark Venner writes that films like The Werewolf fall into a subgenre known as cinematic paranoia, reflective of post-WWII nuclear anxieties amidst their B-Movie sensibilities,^[1] yet it is our contention that many of these same cinematic paranoia B-Movies, like The Werewolf, are also shockingly, disturbingly prescient. Revisited over seventy-five years after its release, we argue that The Werewolf’s grim fatalism about the inevitability of nuclear holocaust, the inability of science and government to curb its aftermath, and its presentation of rural distrust over federal vaccination procedures make the film eerily timely in the post-Trump and COVID era of American life. As a part of this brief examination, we also make a case for the importance of recovering lost and overlooked low-budget films of this period for their value in providing important social critique to mass and teen audiences.

Briefly, The Werewolf begins with an amnesiac stumbling into the small, rural town of Mountaincrest late one night. After spending his last dollars on drinks, he leaves and is mugged by a local townie; offscreen action depicts the stranger – later revealed to be Duncan Marsh –  animalistically mauling the would-be mugger before running out of town hunched, his head on swivel in a manner reminiscent of Lon Chaney, Jr.’s performance in The Wolf Man (dir. Curt Siodmak, 1941). The film then follows two parties attempting to find and stop Marsh: local townsfolk led by Sheriff Jack Haines (Don Megowan) and government scientists Drs. Emery Forrest (S. John Launer) and Morgan Chambers (George Lynn). Haines and his cadre are intent on protecting the town from Marsh’s animalistic outbursts, first by trapping Marsh through humane measures, later by any means necessary. Having caused Marsh’s lycanthropy with an experimental serum after Marsh accidentally crashed his car into a tree, Drs. Chambers and Forrest set out to end Marsh’s life before he reveals their involvement in his creation. The film ends as many period monster flicks do: a literal torch-wielding mob slowly encircling the monster, trapping him in a space with no exits (in this case, a rocky plateau with no way down off the mountain), and firing their weapons at him until he is struck, shot, and killed, reverting back into his human form upon death.

Using the figure of the werewolf as an expression of American post-War paranoia was not a new approach by the time of Sears’s The Werewolf in 1956, and as literary scholar Marisa Mercurio notes in her broad examination of the werewolf and queerness, narrative use of werewolves is done in the service of concepts “bigger, looser, and more fearsome” than what the etymological breakdown of the word implies. Mercurio argues that these lycanthropic monstrosities are “rooted in their disruption of the moral and social fabric of a normative society.”^[2] A prime example of this usage occurs not just with the release of The Werewolf in 1956 but the remaining American werewolf films of the 1950s, beginning with 1957’s I Was A Teenage Werewolf (dir. Gerald Fowler, Jr.). Starring a young Michael Landon, I Was A Teenage Werewolf is the story of a troubled and emotionally unstable teenager who visits a psychologist who treats the teen with hypnotherapy and administers a mysterious serum that causes the recipient to regress to their most primitive and animalistic instincts. The scientific hubris that underwrites the development of the serum is a common one in the science fiction and horror genre of the period: to save mankind from itself. As in The Werewolf, the social order is put in danger by an emerging intelligentsia who, seeking to save humanity from its self-imposed imminent destruction, conducts experiments on unsuspecting small towners. Additionally, like The Werewolf, the transformation occurs not because of a full moon but as a result of the emotional state of the unwilling lycanthrope — pushing back on the well-worn trope of full moons equating to werewolves, and instead, suggesting that man is innately beastial and primal. Further, unsubtle suggestions such as this point toward more than man’s innate monstrosity but that such a monstrosity is inflicted upon humanity by the intervention of the alleged intelligentsia who claims it can control humanity through serums and psychological control. This is observed in a key change to the werewolf mythos during this period: it is not a werewolf attack that spreads lycanthropy (as in Curt Siodmak’s 1941 The Wolf Man). Rather, in both The Werewolf and I Was A Teenage Werewolf, the spread of the disease, as it were, is done through special serums and vaccines distributed by medical professionals. Further, the 1958 follow-up to I Was A Teenage Werewolf, How to Make a Monster (dir. Herbert L. Strock) continues the reliance on hypnosis and psychological care as the impetus for lycanthropy.

Because it is not transmitted through bodily attacks, this lycanthropy is not itself an existential threat to the community but the result of the existential threats posed by the perceived masters of human misery: government scientists and mad psychiatrists. Marsh attacks several townspeople, policemen, and even Dr. Emery Forrest without passing along the werewolf curse to his victims.  However, each of those attacks is born out of fear or in direct response to threats posed to Marsh, not the inverse. This draws a hard line between Marsh and everyone else: because his disease is not the result of viral transmission but rather his victimization at the hands of scientific experimentation, the communal threat posed by the werewolf shifts from ‘Marsh versus the community of Mountaincrest’ to ‘runaway science versus Mountaincrest with Marsh as a symptom.’ Marsh then, as a werewolf, represents an unleashing of a threat on the conservative and libertarian values of small town America emerging in the popular discourse 1950s:^[3] particularly the sanctity of the individual body and the encroachment of big-government on  local authorities by elites in the academy and federal government. As such, it is these dangerous outsiders, not individual Americans like Duncan Marsh, who create the dual threat of nuclear annihilation and its even more dangerous cure. But this is confusing. Afterall, isn’t it Marsh, the individual, who is doing immediate, tangible harm to Mountaincrest? This is certainly the perspective of the townspeople who hunt and murder Marsh by the end of the film.

This disjointed understanding of who the real villain is–the monster or the creator–reflects a sort of cognitive dissonance about American power structures that the people of Mountaincrest are not yet equipped to understand. Consequently, as such psychic splintering is loosed on Mountaincrest, wreaking literal and metaphoric havoc, Marsh must be destroyed by the admittedly reactionary “sane” traditional world represented by the townspeople and their sheriff. In this reassertion of control by local governance, it is the individual citizen who pays the price, with no real curbing of the threats represented by Drs. Forrest and Chambers. Marsh is gone, but his death is a tragic one that neither sustains the “values” of small government nor does it stave off inevitability of nuclear holocaust. This bleak outlook is made palpable as Marsh, the individual American, the victim of the film, transforms back into his human form after being first transformed into a monster and then riddled with bullets by competing political forces. Further, in the view of the film, it is the faction invested in allegedly smaller government that would restore order by eliminating the “monsters” created by their big-government counterparts.

In part, Cold War paranoia wasn’t just that a nuclear holocaust could happen but that it would happen, and that it would not be America’s major urban centers left to traverse and assume control over the wreckage but the ostensibly average and rural parts of the country left to restore order. This is ultimately a reactionary view where it is not the arguably more progressive and educated Americans–those who may challenge the social, political, and economic order–who will rebuild society, but those with values compatible with de-emphasizing the role of “experts” in deciphering the mysteries of human behavior, along with vilifying imaginations of “big government.” These views are emphasized not only by the setting of films like The Werewolf but by the apparent villains of the feature: the university-trained scientists who prey upon the unsuspecting common man and turn him against his rural compatriots, whose folksy wisdom and imagination of right and wrong are the most effective means of staving off disaster.^[4]  Dr. Chambers perpetuates this sureness with cool rationality: “The science of destruction always gains on us, Emery…It could happen tomorrow, next day, next week, I don’t know–but it won’t happen to us,” with the ‘us’ being a “small select group” of like-minded conservative counter-elite.

Late in the film, as the protagonists try to make sense of what is invading their community, the town physician, Dr. Jonas Gilcrist (Ken Christy), points out that even though Mountaincrest doesn’t feel it often, the outside world “is a place of change” where “every day, science and medicine charge up new roads.” As Sheriff Haines tries to absorb this perplexing view, the politics of this moment are clear: change and progress are dangerous, they are assured, and they are a result of social and political forces that do not exist in the serene and stable world of Mountaincrest, whose very name invokes John Winthrop’s infamous “city on a hill”:^[5] Mountaincrest serves as a beacon, if not for the world, then for The Werewolf’s teenage audience. Appealing to such an audience is essential for establishing a distrust in scientists and government solutions as a part of what Louis Althusser would later identify as a part of the cultural Ideological State Apparatus, where the ideology that teens saw on the screen is perceived as “an absolute guarantee that everything really is so” and that by “behav[ing] accordingly, everything will be all right.”^[6] It is not as though we (or Althusser) view The Werewolf’s teen audience as passive recipients and disciples of a message; however, as Althusser, Stuart Hall, Frances Stoner Suanders, Michael Parenti and any number of others have persuasively argued, the production and consumption of media that presents audiences with distorted views of reality in working towards particular social and political ends. Moreover, while we are not arguing that Katzman and Sears are necessarily invested in bringing about an end to big government or the academy, they are, as Althusser would put it, byproducts of “their conditions, their practices, [and] their experience of [class] struggle.”^[7] So, too, is their audience, as they are primed through both their role as subjects to American education and popular media to reproduce particular social and political values, as they receive “daily doses of nationalism, chauvinism, liberalism, moralism, etc.,” by means of the media they consume, in this case movies.^[8]

What is also evident to viewers is that not only is the world below Mountaincrest filled with the turmoil of change and the weighty certitude of nuclear carnage but that it can, and will, pervade their own sanctuary when discordant elements of that nether realm introduce their “cures” and “solutions” for the problems they themselves created. The threat Drs. Forrest and Chambers pose is not just against the physical safety of the people of Mountaincrest, but also to the security of their convictions. In thinking about the types of chauvinism that Althusser and others assert is present in such media, the vaccine that Forrest and Chambers inject Marsh with, turning him into a werewolf, threatens not just the community of Mountaincrest but the masculinity of Marsh who is reduced to a frightened and confused puddle of a person who can no longer face himself, much less others. Marsh is completely dissociated from his family and especially his son, who must witness not only his father’s psychological breakdown but the ostensibly more masculine figures, such as Sheriff Haines, hunt down his father with an eye toward killing him. This patriarchal/masculine element of the film is also at play because, unlike Sheriff Haines or the other men of Mountaincrest, Marsh is presented in business attire, suggesting a white collar job–unlike his peers in Mountaincrest who appear exclusively in buffalo-checked coats and outdoor gear…as though they were all trying to be Rock Hudson in All That Heaven Allows (1955, dir. Douglas Sirk). With Marsh’s comparative masculinity already in doubt, it is also revealed that he gets into this mess because he was literally asleep at the wheel of a car. The result of which is that another of the lessons of The Werewolf is that of masculine vigilance: if Dr. Chambers’s account is to be believed, Duncan Marsh suffered his initial head injury because he fell asleep at the wheel of his car, crashing it, and hitting his head. This theme of vigilance is embedded further through the male townsfolk’s constant watch through the day and night. The townspeople are advised to be on the lookout not just for Marsh (in whatever state he is in), but for any interlopers, as seen in the mountainside blockade.

The Werewolf and similar 1950s B-movies suggest that the ultimate defense against (government) eggheads and outside problems impinging on small town mindsets is a vaccination borne of traditional masculinity and conservative family values, and that bearers of those normative values remain not just vigilant but aggressive toward interloping intellectuals and perceived elites. Resulting from this is a very literal spread of paranoia and weaponization of misinformation echoing the underlying ethos of The Werewolf outlined here. Yet, to relegate the film solely to a study of Cold War mentality would suggest that horror films, particularly B-movies, exist in a silo. Rather, we find The Werewolf’s positioning of cognitive dissonance, conservative paranoia over perceived intellectual threats and interlopers to be exceedingly useful for understanding similar trends emerging in the wake of the 2016 and 2020 U.S. elections, as well as the emergence of COVID-19 as a global pandemic, where individual infections were all-but inevitable.

The pro-Trump and antivax moment carried enforced imaginations of alpha masculinities and reliance on traditional remedies–or even homeopathic treatments and horse tranquilizers–to combat global viruses over any kind of government-endorsed vaccinations. The defense of these positions was propped up by believers who “did their own research” and relied not on the collective knowledge of experts but their own paranoid imaginations. Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and Chief Medical Advisor to the President of the United States, Dr. Anthony Fauci, can be seen as standing in for The Werewolf’s Drs. Forrest and Chambers. Revisiting parallel moments of paranoia, and their dissemination, in American popular culture is a vital component of a more nuanced understanding of the complexity of contemporary U.S. politics. Like all media, B-films, such as The Werewolf, are a part of a larger network of cultural experiences and responses to social and political concerns and, as such, are a part of a larger ideological apparatus that asserts itself over its audience. In the case of The Werewolf, this happens by way of affirming political and social values that prioritize smaller government and masculinity in contrast to the threats posed to these ideals by an ostensibly expanding federal government and its partners in the intelligentsia, achieving this by feeding on Cold War fears of nuclear holocaust. If a nuclear holocaust and the disruptive change is coming, it won’t be because Sheriff Haines let it happen. Locating the (re)production of these politics in B-films is an important recognition not because they are artistically comparable to either their predecessors or big-budget contemporaries, but because these films lived on their wide-profit margins, reached mass audiences, and were developed and marketed specifically towards a youthful audience susceptible to their messaging. What is more is that the audience for these films was both enticed to experience them as they were released, and gave them second and third lives as film fans, anthologizing them in songs from musicians like Roky Erickson, in popular magazines such as Jim Warren and Forrest Ackerman’s Famous Monsters of Film Land, and in the decades to come through decades of television screenings as cheap fillers for horror hosts in local television markets and later appreciation on satirical programs like Mystery Science Theater 3000. Through their initial marketing and their continued financial returns, these films’ messages were delivered to an impressionable audience who would carry them forward into the tumult of later decades, normalizing paranoia and distrust as a key discursive element of American political values. As many Americans delude themselves into believing that by “doing their own research” they can outwit deadly pandemics where infection is inevitable or that they can thwart the eggheads who are making matters worse, the social commentary of The Werewolf persists. These discursive elements lurch forward through time, like atomic zombies, infecting future generations with the fear of bureaucracy, while pointing a crooked, half-devoured finger toward the assurance and stability found in the folksy wisdom of simple, independently governed Americans.

---

Notes:

^[1] Mark Venner, “The Cinema of Paranoia,” Film Ireland 84 (2001): 20-23

^[2] Marisa Mercurio, “Queer Moon Rising: Introducing the Werewolf Reread,” Ancillary Review of Books, (2020): https://ancillaryreviewofbooks.org/2020/10/31/queer-moon-rising-introducing-the-werewolf-reread/

^[3] Kevin Kruse considers this issue in One Nation Under God (2016) as he considers the role of popular media and religion in shifting American attitudes toward libertarian and conservative economic ideals following the Roosevelt era, and Zack Kruse (no relation) takes on similar concerns in Mysterious Travelers (2021) about how libertarian and neoliberal rhetoric eeked its way into popular media–particularly horror comics–in the 1950s and beyond. Kevin Michael Kruse, One Nation under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America (New York: Basic Books, 2016. Zack Kruse, Mysterious Travelers: Steve Ditko and the Search for a New Liberal Identity (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2021)

^[4] Another example of this predation occurs when Drs. Chambers and Forrest bring a town drunkard to the police station as a ruse to draw Marsh’s guards out of the jail, thereby providing the scientists with yet another opportunity to simultaneously prey upon the inoculated everyman and unwittingly release him back on the town one final time.

^[5] John Winthrop, “A Model of Christian Charity,” in A Library of American Literature: Early Colonial Literature, 1607-1675, Edmund Clarence Stedman and Ellen Mackay Hutchinson, eds. (New York: 1892), 304-307.

^[6] Louis Althusser, On Ideology (London: Verso, 2020), 55.

^[7]Althusser, On Ideology, 60.

^[8] Althusser, On Ideology, 28.