Full Moon City

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Mostly, we fear them.

When Bela Lugosi’s vampire Count praised wolves in the 1931 film, this was used to emphasize Dracula’s inhuman, otherworldly nature. It produced some of the most memorable lines ever uttered on the silver screen:

The children of the night. What music they make.

I doubt it was ordinary wolves he had in mind, either. The uncanny must surely be sensitive to the uncanny, even though, one imagines, vampires might well envy werewolves. After all, vampires are dead, forced to steal vitality to maintain a shadow existence, whereas werewolves are very much alive, maybe even too vital.

Dracula had lycanthropic powers. He could transform himself into an enormous wolf when need be.

The wolf remains a symbol of power and fear. Very likely this is programmed into our genes from the days of our barely-human ancestors, who once had to take on the fanged and clawed world with no more than a club, a pointed stick, or, at best, a piece of sharpened flint. One wolf, when the odds are more or less even like that, can be formidable. An organized pack can bring down a moose, or a man, with ease. It is hard to believe that in times of famine, in the depths of winter, they didn’t occasionally do so. Wolves remain, in folklore, stories, and fairy tales, one of the terrors that come in the night, despite the efforts of naturalists such as Farley Mowat (Never Cry Wolf) to convince us that wolves have gotten entirely too much bad press.

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