The primal animal within

1940sWerewolves and cat people

• Horror films that were made, produced and released during The War and the rest of the 1940’s were purely American products.

• Film production was curbed throughout Europe, giving Hollywood the go ahead to begin churning out horror films one after the other.

• Because of the war restrictions, this was no means the most innovative era, but it focused on the more ‘primal animal within man’ and showcased that, in ways such as werewolves and animal/human mutants.

• Wolves especially played a massive part in symbolizing the horrors of wartime as Hitler himself identified with the ‘legend of the wolf’ meaning that it became a big part of 40’s horror films to portray a wolf/human mutant as the evil character.

Cat people • 1942- original made in black and white• Remade in 1982- much more commercial

including a theme tune by David Bowie

Original- more about the narrative

Remake- more sexualised (less focused on the narrative)

The wolf man

• 1941- directed by George Waggner • A prequel was created call Werewolf of London

• After the war there was an increase in the making of sci-fi films due to many people being scared of the increase of technology around that time and how it could harm so many people at once.

• After WW2 people wanted an increase of entertainment and less human faces shown as evil as they wanted to leave this behind, therefore filmmakers created mutants and monsters to be the villains instead of the evil coming from an ordinary human.

Due to this fear of the nuclear weapons that were largely around at that time filmmakers decided to play on this fear of an ‘apocalypse’ a created films where the earth was taken over by creatures and the humans united together against this.

Due to the lack of money around the time of the war a lot of low-budget films were created they were shot in black & white. Surprisingly a lot of these types of films ended up making more money than the high budget films as they seemed to relate more to the audiences around the time of the war as their narratives were cleverly changed by the filmmakers to sympathise with the viewers.