25 Best Werewolf Movies Ever Made

Following the When Animals Dream path of the werewolf movie as a vehicle for a coming-of-age drama about an outcast teen girl, Wildling features rising star Bel Powley (currently seen as the love interest in Judd Apatow's The King Of Staten Island) as a different kind of werewolf. Powley plays a sixteen year old raised in isolation by a man claiming to be her father who doses her with estrogen-suppressing drugs to prevent her mysterious "illness".

Her seeming rescue from this locked down life by the local sheriff seems to offer her a chance at a normal teenage existence, but soon she's sprouting a lot of extra body hair, growing extra sharp teeth and claws, and succumbing to some violent urges.

The analogies to a patriarchal society trying to keep young women docile and childlike and their yearning violently to break free of such chains are obvious and not exactly subtly played. But a werewolf movie has never really been a genre suited for subtlety anyway, not when you're waiting for your hairy heroine to tear her potential rapist's throat open with her teeth.

Debutant director Fritz Böhm makes Wildling a darkly elegant looking film, but it is Powley's wide-eyed, expressive central performance that makes this worth seeing and her Anna one of the most compelling werewolf characters in recent times.