10 Most Terrifying Horror Movie Werewolves

10. The Howling

Gore master Joe Dante dials up the squick in this 1981 horror comedy. A few years before carrying off a similar trick with Gremlins, Dante veers rapidly between daft and goofy blood and guts and genuinely unsettling body horror. Just as you think you’re safe to relax into a silly monster pastiche, he hits you with a traumatising transformation scene or a bucket of acid in the face, catching you with your guard way down.

Lycanthropy is treated as halfway between a cult and a disease in The Howling, with a colony of wolfmen and wolfwomen who’ve learned to transform at will being the setting of the final stand off. Admittedly the effects are hit and miss (star Dee Wallace’s transformation is a little truncated, and when we finally see her wolf form, she looks like a socialite’s handbag dog), but when the shocks are on point, like the ambush in the office, they work a treat. Dante’s werewolves look simply disgusting, forever dripping with a translucent goo and as tenacious as any onscreen monster.

The film spawned a forgettable franchise, but this first entry stands up as well as most werewolf flicks you could hope to see.