25 Best Werewolf Movies Ever Made

In the late-twentieth century even the best werewolf movies were on some level comedic. It seemed like it was proving increasingly difficult to take human-wolf hybrids seriously as a monster. Wolfen was the one movie really to buck the trend as a gritty urban crime thriller with a supernatural wolf culprit.

There has been plenty of debate over whether the Native American wolf spirits at the heart of this movie really count as "werewolves". While Edward James Olmos's Native activist claims to be a shapeshifter, this is depicted as a psychological shift to a wolf mentality rather than a bodily change. Wolfen can, however, be seen as one of several 80s movies to toy with the bond of man and wolf under a broader "werewolf" umbrella and its use of indigenous American mythology actually ties it back to the silent movie The Werewolf, making Wolfen closer to the genre's first film than most of the rest of this list.

Regardless of whether it counts as a true werewolf movie, Wolfen, a loose adaptation of Whitley Strieber's debut novel, is an intriguingly different sort of horror story.

Its pitch as a police procedural and director Michael Wadleigh's documentary background make for an unusually grounded, realistic setting for a monstrous wolf story. Meanwhile its innovative heat vision-style wolf point-of-view shots proved highly influential on later monster movies, not least Predator.