Free Luke Skywalker Can't Read by Ryan Britt

with the first two black-and-white Universal Pictures werewolf movies. Prior to 1941’s
The Wolf-Man
, Universal had put out a movie called
Werewolf of London
, which you’d think would be
A Werewolf of Paris
, only in London, but it’s not. Instead,
Werewolf ofLondon
is more like a remake of
The Strange Case of
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
, a Robert Louis Stevenson novel you might have heard of, which, if you squint, is a quasi-werewolf story, too. The notion of a split personality, of being one thing one moment and being something else in another, is, at least in most versions, part of what werewolf stories are all about. With its mad scientist and potions,
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
is bona fide science fiction; what if chemistry and
not magic
could turn a person into a monster? Sir Arthur Conan Doyle plays with the exact same idea in the 1922 Sherlock Holmes story “The Creeping Man,” * in which an old geezer named Professor Presbury injects himself with monkey testosterone in order to become younger, but accidentally just starts acting like a monkey.
    For me, a weekend, full-moon monster is markedly different than an I’m-a-monster-all-the-time thing like Dracula. The biggest difference between Dr. Jekyll and the Wolf-Man is that the Wolf-Man—as represented by Lon Chaney Jr.’s Larry Talbot—didn’t ask to be bitten. Instead, this sort of monster is a regular person who
becomes
a monster; and through biting, the conversion from a regular person to a monster is shared by both vampire fiction and werewolf fiction. The difference with the latter is that werewolves seem to contain the monsters inside of them, which, instead of having a deranged outside reason for your relationship not working out, actually turns that monster–home-wrecker thing back on you. See, it’s not the monster’s fault you can’t commit to a date; it’s yours.
    Larry Talbot wants to have a nice relationship with Gwen in
The Wolf-Man
, but unlike King Kong snatching Ann Darrow away from Jack, or Dracula brainwashing Miss Mina to screw over John, Larry has only himself to blame when his particular relationship doesn’t work out. If we have sympathy for Larry as he’s beaten to death by his dad in the final scene of
The Wolf-Man
, it makes sense, but what we’re rooting for in this movie is a little more confusing than with
Dracula
. The Wolf-Man isn’t cool, nor is he suave. In human form, Larry mumbles and embarrasses himself while flirting with Gwen. And as the Wolf-Man, he’s not hypnotizing anyone with his ghoulish charm; he’s just a fucking really scary wolf. And unlike Bela Lugosi, his pants are baggy and lame.
    Lugosi gave us cool monsters in the ’30s when he told us to listen to “the children of the night” and took them away in the ’40s when he bit poor Larry Talbot. He changed the way we think about monsters, twice, in the blink of a cultural eye. First, he made monsters dashing, and something we wanted to root for and, perhaps, go to bed with. And then, when passing monsters to a new generation, he turned them into our worst fears: outrageously hairy people who can’t control themselves, who can’t commit to a relationship, and who also have no sense of style whatsoever. You know, realmonsters.



The Sounds of Science Fiction

    M y mother didn’t really believe me, but this was the album I wanted.
    â€œYou understand what the word ‘symphony’ means, right?”
    I said that I did, even though I didn’t. Being into science fiction when you’re eleven often means you assume new words are actually just sci-fi things. I’m confident that watching Star Trek and reading science fiction and fantasy novels improved my vocabulary, but I’m not totally confident that the line between vocabulary words for real things and for fake ones was ever made all that clear. Rudimentarily, a lot of kids learn the word