Interest in supernatural archetypes rises and falls over time like any trend, and right now werewolves are as hot as it gets. With the popularity of new shows like Wolf Pack and movies like Viking Wolf and Teen Wolf: The Movie the demand for wolf media has never been higher. But where did this demand come from and how has it risen to the point that werewolves have now surpassed even vampires as audiences romantic movie monsters of choice?
Werewolves Have Been a Horror Staple Since the 1940s
Werewolves and creatures like them have been part of mythologies all over the world for millennia but they experienced their first peak on American screens in the 1940s with the release of Universal monster movie classics like The Wolf Man (1941) and Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1943). Their next surge in popularity came in the 80s with a glut of werewolf properties that rivals even the number of werewolf shows and movies out today. This included 1981's The Howling and the hugely influential An American Werewolf in London which generated three sequels in just seven years. 1985's original Teen Wolf which capitalized on the popularity of a young rising star Michael J. Fox and from which the 2010s Teen Wolf series draws its inspiration also contributed to the growing trend of these hairy monsters.
The Influence of Twilight on Current Werewolf Stories
The current fascination with werewolves arguably started with the Team Jacob diehards and the release of Twilight in 2008. Its massive popularity kicked off a deluge of both vampire and werewolf IPs and started the modern trend of the werewolf not as a horror monster but as a love interest. While True Blood (2008-14) and The Vampire Diaries (2009-17) are both based on book series that were published before Twilight it was Twilight's popularity that led to their adaptations for television and heavily influenced their on-screen storylines. The Vampire Diaries even spawned two spin-off series The Originals (2013-18) and Legacies (2018-2022), which have a more wolf-centric premise.
Even the Underworld film series the first of which was released in 2005 didn't put serious effort into making the werewolves sympathetic and sexy until the third film in the series 2009's Underworld Rise of the Lycans. While the love interest in the first two films, Michael Scott Speed man enters monste rhood as a werewolf he doesn't even get the chance to fully transform before being bitten by a vampire and becoming a hybrid that looks distinctly more human than Lycan.
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