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I Was a Teenage Werewolf

by Charlie Largent May 30, 2023

I Was a Teenage Werewolf
1957 / 76 Mins. / 1.33:1
Starring Michael Landon, Whit Bissell, Yvonne Lime
Written by Aben Kendal, Herman Cohen
Directed by Gene Fowler Jr.

CineSavant Revival Screening Review

In 1953 a surge in juvenile crime unleashed a wave of panicked PTA meetings, chest-beating editorials, and finally, in April of 1954, a congressional investigation. The committee took aim at a convenient villain—comic books—but made it clear that Hollywood was on the chopping block. Studios went into a defensive crouch, removing provocative material from the script for The Wild One and adding pious disclaimers to Robert Altman’s The Delinquents.

Unsurprisingly, more than a few independent producers welcomed the controversy, stocking drive-ins with an unending supply of teen-bait like High School Hellcats and Dragstrip Riot. Even though the sex was off-camera and the violence only suggested, those films managed to thrill adolescents and horrify parents. If mom and dad were worried about their kids turning into wild animals, producer Herman Cohen offered no comfort; in the spring of 1957 he transformed one troubled teen into a literal monster.

I Was a Teenage Werewolf went into production on March 14, 1957, and wrapped six days later. The majority of the interiors were shot at the drably appointed Ziv Studios with a few exteriors of nearby Larchmont Village. Gene Fowler Jr. directed and Joseph LaShelle was behind the camera. Fowler was one of Hollywood’s preeminent editors, working with Fritz Lang on Hangmen Also Die! and While the City Sleeps. LaShelle was a frequent cinematographer for Otto Preminger and Billy Wilder, including Preminger’s Laura and Wilder’s The Apartment.

Longtime collaborators Cohen and Aben Kandel wrote the script, a mish-mash of science and superstition based on current events and horror movie cliches. The movie followed a standard blueprint in the juvenile delinquent genre; the aimless misfit corralled by a sympathetic parental figure. In Cohen’s world that concerned adult usually harbored unseemly motives, a fraught plot device that, from 1959’s Horrors of the Black Museum to 1973’s Craze, became, for better or worse, Cohen’s brand.

As for the Romanian born Kandel, he apparently contained multitudes—the screenwriter for both Anatole Litvak’s City for Conquest and Freddie Francis’s Trog, he spent the last decades of his career injecting a measure of authenticity into some fairly ludicrous situations—for Teenage Werewolf he brought pathos and a little blue collar drama to the story of  Tony Rivers, a motherless child and Rockford High’s resident shapeshifter.

I Was a Teenage Werewolf was at heart an old-fashioned creature feature—to give Tony’s plight a contemporary sheen, the screenwriters relied on the then popular theme of regression, an unconventional procedure made infamous by Morey Bernstein, an amateur hypnotist who found fleeting celebrity when he claimed to connect a Colorado woman to her past life as a 19th century Irishwoman.

Consummate character actor Whit Bissell plays a sinister version of that would-be miracle man—a psychiatrist named Alfred Brandon. Since this is a horror film, Brandon harbors a few theories more suitable for a mad doctor—he believes that society’s problems will be solved only when man regresses to his primitive state. The unpredictable Tony is already pretty primitive, provoking daily brawls so ferocious they attract squad cars. The boy is played by Michael Landon in his film debut and the newcomer is in full James Dean mode—a mixed-up kid with a chip on his shoulder and a heart of glass.

Performative brooding comes naturally to the self-pitying teen but his violent outbursts emerge from a truly primeval place, the perfect specimen for Brandon. A devotee of both Larry Talbot and Timothy Leary,  the shrink has developed a psychoactive chemical that will free the beast in Tony—and supposedly free Tony from himself.  The boy is understandably nervous about the syringe being waved in his face but the doctor promises a serene vacation in wonderland: “Think of this as a ‘trip.'” But wonderland isn’t so wonderful—Tony begins to have nightmares of moonlight murders, dreams that are starting to come true; a classmate is slaughtered and the bloody evidence points to a wild animal. But Tony thinks differently—he knows he was responsible. His one steadfast ally is his girlfriend, a flesh and blood Barbie doll named Arlene.

Yvonne Lime took a walk on the wild side in High School Hellcats but as the pony-tailed Arlene she’s that rare thing in JD flicks, the untarnished platinum blond. Such porcelain perfection can be daunting for a wary soul like Tony—which may explain why he succumbs to the more primal appeal of the alluring gymnast he spies in the school gymnasium. Unaware she’s being watched, the solitary teen is simply practicing the parallel bars—but to the spellbound Tony she might as well be working a stripper pole. His reverie is broken by the clatter of a school bell—but it signals something more alarming than the end of class: the boy’s transformation into a monster.

In a dreamy succession of lap dissolves (this is the “trip” Brandon promised), Tony sprouts a shaggy helmet of hair, talons, and gnarled teeth. The metamorphosis is prelude to a sex and violence fever dream that Brian De Palma would have dined out on: as the creature inches forward, the audience sees the beast from the dangling gymnast’s perspective—upside down. It’s an audacious directorial flourish, both disorienting and unnerving.

The gymnast is played by Dawn Richard, Playboy’s  May Playmate of the Month (on newsstands the month before the film was released), and she has the same effect on this wolf man that she had on Hefner’s subscribers. With just two minutes of screen time Richard became the iconic image for the film; the movie’s poster child and primary scream queen of the trailer.

In spite of the hallucinatory horror of that sequence, I Was a Teenage Werewolf works better as a kitchen sink drama than a monster movie. Fowler handles the scenes of distressed parents and their ungovernable offspring with real sensitivity. But Cohen’s marketing skills are at the heart of the film; teenagers in 1957 weren’t just interested in cars and sock hops but monsters too—the producer  tapped into the outsider status of James Dean and Boris Karloff in their most famous roles and adolescents responded—they felt a kinship to those lonely figures no adult could understand (or like Wendy Darling’s mother, had forgotten).

Cohen’s instincts paid off, with a budget of $82,000 the film grossed over $2,000,000. Predictably the werewolf spawned a brood of copycats—sired by Cohen of course. Whit Bissell was back just five months later to mentor a different famous monster in I Was a Teenage Frankenstein but more intriguing was that film’s co-feature,  Blood of Dracula directed by Herbert L. Strock. A gender-flipping remake of Teenage Werewolf, Louise Lewis (the school principal in Fowler’s film) takes the Whit Bissell part as a chemistry teacher who turns her pupil into a homicidal debutante. In 1961 Michael Gough starred in Cohen’s Konga—which was for a brief moment was titled I Was a Teenage Gorilla—it would have been the cherry on top of that simian sundae.

I Was a Teenage Werewolf was released on VHS in 1991 but that was all she wrote, home video-wise. A Blu ray would be welcome, if only for the chance to appreciate not only LaShelle’s cinematography, but Dawn Richard in the highest possible definition.

Here’s Glenn Erickson on some more info on the film’s locations.

Here’s Christopher Landon on his father’s feature film debut:

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