Werewolves represent our most basic limbic instincts: fighting, fleeing, eating. It is the human id unfettered by ego or super-ego. The werewolf's dual form is the recognition of our own duality: civilisation wrapped around savagery.
Werewolves are horrifying for two reasons: firstly, that the human has become unrecognisable. This reminds us of our own rages, in which we abandon our sense of decency, consideration, kindness and our sense of social self.
Werewolves are also horrifying because of their sheer rapacious power. Fuelled by rage, they can rend and tear beyond comprehension and do so implacably. Insensitive to hurt and careless of the future, they cannot be intimidated, negotiated with, appeased or placated.
The tragedy of a werewolf is not that the man becomes a wolf, but that the wolf becomes again the man. The conscience restored, social restraints returned, the lycanthrope can feel only shame, guilt and remorse.
Lycanthropy is contagious. Having destructive rages visited upon us, we ourselves learn how to rage. Instead of the stiff tantrums of infancy, our adolescent and adult rages become calculated, destructive. We're taught this by watching the rages of our parents and carers.
The lycanthrope most commonly takes the wolf form because in human myth, the wolf embodies exactly these qualities. It is calculating, rapacious, implacable and supremely confident. But unlike natural wolves, werewolves are more often solitary than pack-based. And when they are pack-based they tend to be more restrained and calculating creatures.
The werewolf's achilles heel is silver: the white metal of the moon which commands its rages and can therefore dispatch them. This piece of unashamed paganism highlights a secret cultural fear: that monotheism hasn't really gentled us.
But despite that, for me, the werewolf is an aging monster struggling to find a place in the modern horror bestiary. Where the savage wilderness of nature has receded from our suburban lives, a werewolf is an implausible curio. Werewolves have migrated now to the distant edges of society - out in remote farmlands, large parks and distant developing nations. They have become tamer and increasingly are sad, sentimental mascots of a wilderness that we no longer remember.
But the need for a raging monster contiues. In our urban pragmatism we have stripped the werewolf of its rapacity, and handed this power to monsters whose form is always human: implacable axe-murderers, psycho-killers, human cannibals. Perfectly camouflaged, guiltless, remorseless sociopathic denizens of an urban jungle who do not need to wait for a full moon to transform.
They need only get you alone in an alley, their van, their home...
Or your home.
But your furry fanged guys are fun to read.
