The conference went very well. My talk on werewolves and human cruelty sparked lively discussion, with some interesting questions and a few amused smiles reminding me that the wolf still prowls the imagination.
The talk explored how werewolf myths function as cultural mechanisms for understanding extreme human violence. The following is a brief summary of the talk.
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If humans are indeed wolves to one another, then it is unsurprising that the wolf – a predator at once admired and feared – became a canvas upon which societies projected their darkest apprehensions. The phrase Homo homini lupus, originating with Plautus in the Asinaria (line 495), referred not to generalized ferocity but to the mistrust that lingers between strangers. Erasmus preserved it in the Adagia, Hobbes codified it in De Cive and echoed it in Leviathan, while Seneca, Montaigne, and even Freud would later invoke it as emblematic of humanity’s intrinsic, often inscrutable cruelty.
And yet, a paradox emerges: wolves rarely kill for malice; they kill to survive. Humans, alone among animals, devise the tortures of their imagination and execute them with ritual precision. Beneath our rational veneer lurks a substratum of primal imperatives – subcortical structures governing fear, aggression, and territoriality, the evolutionary echoes of survival strategies predating the cerebral cortex.
So why wolves?
In pre-modern Europe, wolves were predators with the literal power to devastate subsistence economies. Sheep and livestock vanished under their fangs; flocks were shredded, stores plundered. Aristotle deemed them inherently wild, and across languages the term “wolf” became synonymous with savagery. Criminals were designated wargus esto in Norman England; in Germany, a “wolf” was often a robber. Roman rituals draped criminals in wolfskin; Petronius’ Satyricon places human–wolf transformation in a cemetery, while Homer, Aeschylus, and Lucan preserve graveyard scavenging by wolves, linking the predator to both death and the uncanny. Such practices, augmented by rabies or similar maladies, lent credibility to tales of lupine metamorphosis. Wolves, in short, were ideal intermediaries for projecting human violence – a natural exemplar of transgression, fear, and predation.
Prehistoric communities further reinforced this metaphor. Draped in animal pelts for warmth, concealment, or ritual, humans gradually imprinted symbolic significance onto the skins of predators. To wear a wolf’s pelt was to assume cunning, ferocity, and nocturnal supremacy. Anthropologists posit the Indo-European kóryos: marginal war-bands of adolescents adopting wolf-like behaviors to signify liminality and martial prowess. Across cultures, ritualized wolf-behavior appeared – from Herodotus’ Neuri to Greek ephebes, Germanic Harii, and Vedic Vrātyas. Rabid humans, ecstatic trances, and trance-like possession of wolfish behaviors reinforced these proto-lycanthropic beliefs. Myth and ritual intertwined: from Gilgamesh’s Ishtar to Ovid’s Lycaon, divine retribution often entailed transformation into a wolf, rendering cannibalism or violence intelligible through allegory.
Medieval Europe translated these anxieties into jurisprudence and folklore. Extreme acts of violence – children torn limb from limb, livestock slaughtered – posed an existential and moral puzzle: how could a God-fearing, law-abiding society account for the seemingly unprovoked capacity for atrocity? The werewolf emerged as a cognitive prosthesis, a moral exoskeleton. Violence was situated outside humanity, projected into the wolf, the Devil, or the witch, enabling societies to acknowledge atrocity without implicating the social self. Early 15th-century Switzerland witnessed this nexus in the Valais witch trials (1428–1447), where accusations of animal transformation coalesced with diabolic maleficium. By the mid-16th century, France and the German states became epicenters of lycanthropy trials: Gilles Garnier in Dole, Peter Stumpp in Bedburg, and the Gandillon family in Jura testified – under torture or suggestion – to wolfish transformation, nocturnal predation, and communion with infernal powers. Such confessions reveal a remarkable psychological and moral mechanism: attributing the incomprehensible to a liminal figure, the werewolf, which could absorb human cruelty, ritualize it, and render it narratively digestible.
Yet regional and cultural nuance persisted. In Livonia and the Baltic provinces, 17th-century trials reveal an alternate conception: wolves as liminal, even protective spirits. Figures like Thiess of Kaltenbrun denied diabolic allegiance, framing themselves as “Hounds of God” combating witches in the night – a folkloric echo of agrarian spiritual defense and pagan shamanic memory. In the Low Countries and Spanish Netherlands, trials continued, but confessions increasingly reflected trance states, hallucinations, and suggestibility rather than literal belief in transformation.
By the 18th century, skepticism and rationalism reshaped the myth. Johann Weyer, Friedrich Spee, and Balthasar Bekker treated lycanthropy as superstition or mental disorder. Dom Augustin Calmet emphasized moral allegory; Voltaire mocked literal belief. Folklorists such as Jacob Grimm and Sabine Baring-Gould preserved the tales as cultural memory, collecting the horrors of transformation, cannibalism, and silver bullets into literary archive rather than courtroom spectacle.
By the 19th century, medicine had recast lycanthropy as pathology, shifting attention from supernatural malediction to human physiology and psychology. Modern fiction similarly reframed metamorphosis as internal, moral, and psychological rather than magical. Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) exemplifies this transformation: Jekyll’s metamorphosis into Hyde foregrounds psychological duality rather than sorcery. Hyde embodies the repressed, instinctual, socially unacceptable aspects of Jekyll – the “beast within” – mirroring the traditional werewolf’s association with primal violence, now transposed into human consciousness.
Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), adapted from Robert Bloch’s 1959 novel, continues this trajectory. Norman Bates’s split personality manifests in homicidal episodes, preserving the structural and symbolic framework of lycanthropy: a socially respectable figure whose hidden impulses erupt uncontrollably. No literal beast appears; the narrative emphasizes the tension between civility and feral instinct. The 20th century, scarred by two world wars and the mechanization of slaughter, increasingly recognized humanity’s capacity for violence. Horror and crime fiction treated monstrosity as a product of the mind rather than a curse. Lon Chaney Jr.’s The Wolf Man (1941) and Hammer’s Curse of the Werewolf (1961) depict repression and emotional disorder, in which violence erupts from the human psyche rather than a lunar curse. As Stephen King observes, The Incredible Hulk functions in essence as a werewolf tale: an allegory of anger and alienation masked as heroism. Early cinema’s technical limitations also gave rise to the hybrid werewolf, a necessary compromise in special effects.
Explanations of violence no longer required supernatural figures; werewolves became culturally peripheral, appearing more as novelty or incidental motif than central terror. Later iterations – Teen Wolf, Ginger Snaps, Twilight – translate metamorphosis into a metaphor for adolescence, depicting libido, rage, and selfhood emerging under the skin. As King notes, I Was a Teenage Werewolf speaks to every adolescent who recoils from the alien presence glimpsed in the mirror. The modern imagination, hardened by genocide and industrialized death, no longer requires the wolf to personify cruelty. The wolf “monster” has ceded the stage to human monsters – criminals, psychopaths, morally fractured individuals. Figures such as Albert Fish – the “Werewolf of Wysteria,” the “Brooklyn Vampire,” the “Moon Maniac” – illustrate that the real horror now resides within the ordinary citizen. Contemporary horror, from true-crime documentaries to slasher films, has largely dispensed with transformation entirely: the beast no longer lurks in the woods; it inhabits the self. Violence is no longer supernatural but systemic; no lunar curse is necessary.
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The werewolf myth allowed cultures to name cruelty while maintaining innocence: the violence was “in the wolf,” not in us. Its decline mirrors a broader cultural maturation – an acknowledgment that cruelty is not supernatural or monstrous but, unfortunately, mundane. Humanity has brought the wolf indoors, domesticated it in consciousness rather than the forest. The figure of the werewolf persists, but now as metaphor and mirror: a reminder that the darkness we once projected outward resides within the ordinary, rational, and seemingly civilized self.
Lou Costello’s retort to Lon Chaney Jr. in Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein captures this with sardonic clarity. Chaney, as the tormented Larry Talbot, laments: “You don’t understand. When the moon rises, I’ll turn into a wolf.” Costello replies: “Yeah… you and about five million other guys.” The werewolf, once a monstrous intermediary, has become an emblem of the banal ubiquity of cruelty, a cautionary mirror reflecting that monstrosity is not merely elsewhere, in the woods or under the full moon, but here, within us, waiting to be acknowledged, named, and understood. Its enduring power lies less in terror than in revelation: the wolf is us.
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