25 Best Werewolf Movies Ever Made

Cult British horror heroes Hammer Films made nine Dracula movies, seven Frankensteins and four installments of their Mummy series. This, however, was their only werewolf film.

The story sees Oliver Reed in his first lead role as the son of a servant girl who murdered her abusive master after being raped by a prisoner. There is no earlier werewolf to turn him, instead this violent past and the fact of being born on Christmas Day are sufficient to make the curse of the beast run in his blood. Only the love of a vineyard owner's daughter can stop the curse, but Reed's savage wolfman is already knee deep in slaughter before he ever figures that out.

Nominally an adaptation of Guy Endore's novel The Werewolf Of Paris, Hammer's film completely ignores the book's setting in the 1870s Paris Commune (and, thus, doesn't really bother with the novel's leftist politics) to set it in Spain. Why Spain? Largely because the BBFC had refused to sanction Hammer's Spanish inquisition horror script, but only after they had already built the sets.

Nevertheless, those recycled sets do give The Curse Of The Werewolf a lush, lurid look as the previously monochrome werewolf genre arrived in the era of full colour photography with lashings of bright red blood.