25 Best Werewolf Movies Ever Made
15. The Undying Monster
In the Hollywood Golden Age the Universal monsters ruled the horror roost. Inevitably that meant that other studios were eager for monsters of their own.
In the 1940s Fox, who had already enjoyed a canine mystery hit with The Hound Of The Baskervilles, picked up the rights to Jessie Douglas Kerruish's gothic mystery The Undying Monster in the hope of providing them with their own answer to The Wolf Man.
As with Baskervilles, this movie involves a London detective investigating an attack in a small community in which the local gentry are rumoured to suffer from a dog-based family curse. Unlike with that Sherlock Holmes story, though, in this case the secret behind the curse is that the family have been werewolves for generations.
The plot is utterly generic, but director John Brahm, typically a man behind shadowy noirs and moody melodramas, gives it the requisite creepy atmosphere.
Ultimately, this little werewolf mystery did nothing to dislodge Universal as the masters of monsters, but it's worth checking out for anyone looking for a mid-point between The Wolf Man and Basil Rathbone's Holmes.