The film has an unusual location – of a small wintertime Montana mountain location (although it has in fact been shot around the resort town of Big Bear Lake, near L.A.). This is unique alone from the aspect that the film has taken the werewolf genre out of doors. Previous werewolf films – WereWolf of London (1935) and The Wolf Man (1941) – had been set out of doors, but they were studio sets. This takes place all in natural locations where the wintry white-on-white snow landscapes add a definite ambiance to the film, especially under the b/w photography. There’s an attention-arresting opening with a man who has no memory of his identity turning up in a small town, attacking a redneck local that he walks home with in an alley, followed by a police manhunt where the footmarks have the hunters uncertain if they are tracking man or beast. The rest of the story is more pedestrian by comparison. Perhaps if the film had had a better director – maybe a contemporary like Jack Arnold – it could’ve been a minor classic.

The Werewolf was also made at a time when werewolf films were dying out (although they were briefly redefined by I Was a Teenage Werewolf (1957) a year later). The most famous of wolf men, Lon Chaney Jr’s Larry Talbot, had become a staple figure in Universal’s Famous Monsters lineup in the 1940s, which had quickly reduced the character to a cardboard threat. In the 1950s the pantheon of Universal monster movies and poverty row mad scientists were becoming replaced by alien invaders and atomic monsters. The Werewolf seems an odd hybrid of both eras. It is the bizarre oddity of a werewolf film trying to be an atomic monster movie with some rather hokey nonsense to try and explain it all about injections of irradiated wolf’s blood. Although at the same time this also makes it fall into the mad scientist genre, a genre that had become relatively outmoded by the 1950s. It’s a film that seems oddly, rather unwieldy, caught between the passing of one form of horror and the emergence of the new.