I was a Teenage Werewolf (

1957

)

As you could probably tell from my review of Blackboard Jungle (1955), I find a lot of youth-focused 1950s movies to be intolerably preachy and self-satisfied. One can only listen to the bland commands to ‘respect your elders, follow society’s rules, and don’t stick out from your peers’ so many times before you want to slick back your hair, grab a leather jacket and do a little bit of recreational drag racing. Yet to appreciate what makes I was a Teenage Werewolf special you have to get a feel for the landscape which unfortunately means having to wade through a great number of these sub-par Juvenile Delinquent movies. Fortunately for my readers, there are masochistic completionists like me who will do the leg work for you. So you’ll just have to take my word for it: from moral fables like Girl Town (1958) to sleazy dramas like High School Hellcats (1958) just about every juvenile delinquency story follows the same beats. Either the teens in question reform and accept the help offered by their elders, or they sink ever deeper into the pits of depravity.

Tony is a troubled teen just like any other in a low-rent exploitation movie: He gets into fights, acts sullen when questioned about his behavior, mouths off to adults in positions of authority, and spends entirely too much time styling his hair into a pompadour each morning. This is the 1950s, with its hyper-focus on perfect suburban families, so of course, all Tony’s behavioral problems are traced back to his single-parent household (his father never remarried after the death of his wife, the monster). Now Tony’s not in denial about his problems, he knows that he’s on the fast track for the state penitentiary if he doesn’t learn how to get a handle on himself. The only thing is no rebel without a cause worth his salt is gonna go hat in hand to The Man and ask for a bit of help, so Tony figures he’ll deal with his problems in his own way. At least until he loses his temper at his singularly annoying friend and slugs him. That in-and-of-itself probably wouldn’t be enough to make Tony reach out for help (seriously, I’ve seen this friend of his sing, and I don’t think I could keep myself from punching him IRL), but the fact that he nearly lays into his girlfriend Arlene too, really starts to make him wonder if he shouldn’t listen to the advice everyone is giving him and get psychiatric help.

Now in most films, this would be the turning point and from here on out we’d watch Tony gradually become more socially fit until he’s a taxpayer with a cardigan sweater and white-picket fence. Yet crucially, the adult that Tony goes to for help, Dr. Brandon, does not have the wayward youth’s best interests at heart. Brandon is a mad psychiatrist, a nuclear age variant of mad scientist that began to play larger roles in TV and movies as the American public became better acquainted with theories of psychoanalysis. He’s also batty as hell and has a plan that makes no sense at all. He wants to hypnotically regress Tony back to a state of ‘prenatal savagery’ al la The She-Creature (1956) and somehow unlock the key to world peace in the process. How producing a sub-human savage is going to stop WWIII is anyone’s guess, because I sure as hell can’t find a causal link. Brandon uses Tony as a guinea pig and has no expectation that the boy will survive the process either physically or mentally. What’s more, he plans to publish the results of his experiment for all to see and is always prattling on about getting proof sufficient enough to convince the skeptical scientific community. How does he expect to present these findings without being sent to jail?

In short order, Tony is transforming into a werewolf and snacking on his former peers. The first is an unfortunate boy who cuts out of a party early to walk home through the woods, next up is an unnamed member of the girl’s gymnastics team. On the later occasion, more than a few students witness the attack and somehow manage to identify the culprit as Tony. This one really baffles me because aside from Tony’s letterman jacket (which should be a common sight on all student-athletes) there’s nothing to identify the werewolf as Tony. Still, the cops get wise to Tony’s transformation and begin to comb the woods looking for the teenage monster. At the same time, they post patrolmen and detectives with Tony’s Dad and with Arlene, hoping that the troubled youth will make the really bone-headed move of going to either of them. Despite the numerous eyewitnesses describing Tony as a werewolf, the only member of the police department that doesn’t think they are dealing with a mass hallucination is Pepe the Transylvanian janitor. His warnings fall on deaf ears, as no self-respecting copper is going to take advice from the weird little man who mops the floors.

Tony is only dimly aware of what he’s done; he remembers his actions as a werewolf as if they were a dream. But he knows enough to know that something is seriously wrong and that the only person who can help him is the mad psychiatrist Dr. Brandon. Brandon though has no interest in curing the boy; the very existence of a werewolf-like monster is proof of all the psychiatrist’s theories. That said, a little bit more evidence could always help the scientist when he starts to type up his paper on the subject of monstrous hypnotic regression.

I was a Teenage Werewolf works best not as a horror film (like most 1950s horror movies its not really scary to anyone over the age of 10) but as a tragedy. It works because while Tony really does have problems he needs to address, but he’s also trying his best to fix them. When it becomes apparent that he cannot manage on his own he takes the advice of some adults in his life, most notably the police detective who responds to his latest fistfight and gets professional help. Yet the doctor who is supposed to help him regards him as something less than human and then transforms him into just that. It's not just that visiting this particular doctor would be a bad idea either, the other adults in Tony’s life are also quite incapable of helping him out or even comprehending his issues. Tony’s father, in particular, seems particularly worthless. His advice to his son is basically ‘give up on your dreams and follow the path of least resistance.’ It’s a stunningly depressing worldview, made all the more horrifying given how understated it is. This is a man who has given up hope for himself advises his son to do the same.

This along with Invasion of the Saucer People (1957) was one of the first films to convince AIP that there was a lot of money to be made catering to the teen demographic. It seems like an obvious move now, teens have allowances and few responsibilities making them ideal targets for entertainment and luxury goods, but in 1957 this was revolutionary thinking. They weren’t the first to market films to teenagers, see productions from the majors like Blackboard Jungle (1955). They were just the first to realize there was more money to be made by sympathizing with the plights of teenagers than by lecturing them. The success of I Was a Teenage Werewolf would be followed up by the obvious variants like Blood of Dracula (1957), I was a Teenage Frankenstein (1957), and then a rather clever meta-horror film called How to Make a Monster (1958). When horror movies started to dip in popularity in the 1960s, AIP dropped the monsters but kept the teen angle releasing Beach Party (1963) along with a whole series of clones and variants. The studio would make a boatload of money off of these and similar films. Indeed, they piled up so much money that a few years later they’d be willing to make a comparatively big-budget film, House of Usher (1960) under the direction of one of their most capable young directors, Roger Corman. The teen market would help transform AIP from a scrappy underdog into a venerable institution. Of course, they would never have the clout or resources of the majors, but it's still possible to detect a noticeable change in the scale of the AIP projects and the scope of their ambitions starting in the early 1960s, and I suspect that the success of their teen films was to blame.