How can our search for love, and a violent
outcome, be chained together so intensely?
How many of us can remember and regret,
hurtful things we’ve said to the person we love most?
Why do Frankenstein and
Bride of Frankenstein move us, sometimes to
tears?
Probably because we feel two enormous forces
at war inside ourselves:
First, our search for love; someone we can
love, someone to love us.
Second, our inner beast—trampling over our
loved one, and over ourselves.
At one time or another, how many of us have
wished we could take out a knife and physically cut
out the beast in ourselves?
The credit sequence of
Curse of the Werewolf achieves something rare,
especially in 1960. It shows you the
beast—crying actual tears. He looks back on his life
and realizes what might have been. His story will
spatter you, shower you with a mix of tears and blood.
Curse is basically a story of
good and evil. Its director, Terence Fisher was not
interested much in current psychology, for example: cycles of
abuse, dysfunctional families,
subconscious motivations. (Although you can watch the
movie on that level, and get plenty of insights.)
Fisher wanted more to tell a story about an
evil legacy; how so much evil can find its focus on one truly
gentle man, Leon.
To understand Leon’s heritage, you need to
know the story of the Marquis’ wedding day. A beggar
(Richard Wordsworth) enters a small town and hears bells
announcing a wedding. But no one he meets feels any joy
for the Marquis; a cruel man who abuses his power. For
some reason the villagers tell the beggar to go to the
Marquis’ castle if he is looking for food.
When the beggar reaches the castle, the
wedding feast is in full swing. Right away the
doorman warns him, “Go away before he sees you.” He
knows the Marquis; too much drinking is about to turn the
celebration ugly.
The Marquis does his best to turn the beggar
into a cruel joke, offering him to his bride as “her pet,”making
him dance for food but giving him only wine first. Then
throwing food to him like a dog.
As the Marquis and the bride get up to leave,
the beggar offers the mildest of off-color remarks.
For this, the Marquis imprisons him in the castle dungeon.
The narrator tells you the beggar was
forgotten. But “forgotten” only hints at what he suffered.
He loses his freedom, and all that goes with it:
laughter, conversation, the chance of love, the sight of a
beautiful sunset, a road to walk on. Everything is lost to
him but the smile of a little mute girl who feeds him scraps.
Years pass. The Marquis’ wife dies.
The little girl grows into a beautiful
woman. The beggar is still forgotten. The
Marquis looks just like the monster he is inside. When he
tries to drag the serving woman into his bed, she bites his
hand. The Marquis orders his men to throw her into
the dungeon with the old beggar.
The horror of his imprisonment has turned the
beggar into a monster too. All hefeels for the
serving woman is lust. He rapes her, but she stabs him
to death the first chance she gets. She is brought
back to the Marquis who is sure she has learned her
lesson. He is wrong. She stabs him to death too,
then runs away.
Sometime later, the serving woman (you never
find out her name) is found, near death. The man who
saves her, Don Alfredo, and his servant, Teresa are clearly two
compassionate people. The nameless woman is pregnant
and dies giving birth to a son, Leon.
Even before Leon is born, you sense the battle
beginning for his soul. On one side his savage father,
and the man who brought out the beast in him, the Marquis.
On the opposite side, Don Alfredo,Teresa, and the village priest.
Teresa is afraid that Leon will be born on
Christmas Day, a traditional omen of misfortune. She
hires a folk-healer who tries her best to prevent this.
But she is unsuccessful. The day Leon is baptized
the sky suddenly turns dark, and the water in the font begins
to boil.
Leon grows into a goodhearted, sensitive boy.
He is too young to explain hiscomplicated, opposing impulses
but they’re tragically clear. Leon describes his only
experience with hunting to Don Alfredo.
He shot a squirrel, and seeing it dead, tried to
kiss it back to life. But he tasted blood for the
first time, and has loved the taste ever since. When
the moon turns full, goats outside the village begin to turn
up dead, their throats ripped out. Leon’s kitten dies the
same way.
Don Alfredo and Teresa find a trail of evidence
leading back to Leon. They decide the only answer is to
fit Leon’s windows with metal bars. Their fears are correct,
but the bars do the job. The next scene is the most
terrifying in the movie. Leon, his face contorted
with animal lust, grips the bars and struggles against them,
shaking insanely. Justin Walters, the young
actor playing Leon is superb here. Terence Fisher’s
direction is as usual, excellent. But I don’t want to
forget the script too. Anthony Hinds was a high-level
executive at Hammer Films during their most creative period.
He wrote several fair-to-average screenplays and a few very
good ones; probably he came up with his all-time best in
Curse.
More than 45 minutes pass before you meet the adult Leon (Oliver
Reed), venturing out for the first time. Don Alfredo
and Teresa understood that they can only protect him for so
long. Leon has the same gentle, caring nature, but he’ll
soon find that the outside world is not a safe place.
Most people he meets are not as evil as the Marquis or as kind as
Don Alfredo. But they are people trapped by tradition
and class boundaries. Closed-minded people, knowing only
what they were brought up with.
The winery owner who hires Leon refuses to shake his
hand; that is a privilege saved for fellow aristocrats.
All he cares about are his business, his finances, and a suitable
match for his daughter, Christina. Christina’s fiancé
is a greedy man with no real feelings. Only Christina has
the heart and the insight to see what is inside Leon.
Soon, they are in love.
A great deal has been written already about the way
Fisher sees the world. Fisher does not view it as
an evil place. Much of the time, people with true
faith can overcome evil. But the world can be uncaring,
a constant struggle for someone like Leon. To
Christina’s father, Leon is just another peasant. End
of discussion.
Sadder still, Christina’s love is able to save Leon
for a while. With the moon full and the curse at
work, Leon spends an entire night with his head in
Christina’s lap, immune to the werewolf. But
stronger forces soon keep them apart.
Many critics have pointed out how little time the
werewolf is onscreen. But what you do see is effective;
Roy Ashton’s excellent make-up lets you see Leon’s agony and
anger. This is not a beast who takes pleasure in
killing. On the contrary, he is screaming in pain.
Leon–beginning to transform
You don’t know the adult Leon in detail, but you do know he is the
same good-hearted man he was a child. He desperately
wants to do the right thing.
Work hard, learn a trade, save his money, read all
he can. Most of all, marry Christina. The thought of
spending his life chained up in a monastery makes
himfurious. Christina’s love is his only path to
salvation and he knows it. When he realizes her father means
to keep them apart, Leon wants only death.
It is the characters and their struggle against fate
that make this movie so powerful.
You will most likely remember Leon’s pain and
yearning more vividly than the killing he does. Oliver
Reed (Women in Love, The Devils, The Brood, Gladiator) is powerful as the adult Leon. Anthony Dawson as the
degenerate Marquis is also excellent. His scenes as an old
man are some of the scariest in the movie.
The beast–screaming in pain