Category: Movies

Marck Mancini and Mental_Floss present 12 Howling Facts About The Wolfman.  Here are three of my favorites…

3. BELA LUGOSI WANTED TO PLAY THE MAIN CHARACTER.
Lugosi lost the role to Lon Chaney Jr, whose performance in The Wolf Man propelled him into stardom. Nevertheless, the former Count Dracula didn’t get left out. Universal cast Lugosi as a mustachioed Gypsy fortuneteller named “Bela.” This character is later revealed to be a werewolf who gets the plot rolling by biting our friend, Mr. Talbot.

4. THAT SUPPOSEDLY ANCIENT POEM WAS MADE UP BY SIODMAK.
“Even a man who is pure at heart and says his prayers by night may become a wolf when the wolfsbane blooms and the autumn moon is bright.” Over the course of the film, this spooky verse is recited on several occasions—usually by a character who claims that it’s some sort of ancient rhyme. But the poem was really authored by Siodmak himself. In 1989, he told journalist Tom Weaver “nowadays, film historians think it’s from German folklore. It isn’t. I made it up.” Authentic or not, the poem was repeated verbatim in 2004’s Van Helsing.

12. THE WOLF MAN WAS CHANEY’S ALL-TIME FAVORITE ROLE.
The film’s success secured Chaney’s place alongside Lugosi, Karloff, and Rains on the Mount Rushmore of horror icons. Over the next few years, he’d more or less become Universal’s go-to guy whenever a new monster role became available. Between 1941 and 1949, the rising star played a mummy, the vampiric son of Dracula, and Frankenstein’s monster. Still, the role of the Wolf Man always held a special place in his heart. Later in life, Chaney wrote “Of all the character’s I’ve been, I liked Lawrence Talbot, the Wolf Man, the best.” Like Siodmak, Chaney regarded him as a tragic figure. “He never wanted to hurt anyone,” noted the actor. “During his period of sanity, in between full moons, he begged to be confined, chained, even killed to avoid the horrible consequences of his curse. He was a classic product of misunderstanding.”

Rob Hunter and Film School Rejects present 25 Things We Learned from Kathryn Bigelow’s Near Dark Commentary.  Here are three of my favorites…

1. The realization that they were going to film a real mosquito interacting with an actor meant they had to grow it from scratch “so that there were no contaminants that he would be exposed to.” It became a six-month process.

8. Each member of the vampire family has “their own quandary, their own private hell that they’re living with.” The exception is Severen (Bill Paxton) who’s “the prototypical vampire, he’s the one without remorse, without guilt, without regret. He’s the perfect vampire.”

15. Paxton ad-libbed both the theft of the sunglasses and the line “I hate it when they ain’t been shaved!”