Paul Naschy (born Jacinto Molina, September 6, 1934, Madrid – November 30, 2009, Madrid) was a Spanish movie actor, screenwriter, and director working primarily in horror films. His portrayals of numerous classic horror figures—the wolfman, a hunchback, Count Dracula, a mummy—have earned him recognition as the Spanish Lon Chaney. He was also known as the “Boris Karloff of Spain” and he had one of the most recognizable faces in Spanish horror film. King Juan Carlos I presented Naschy with Spain’s Gold Medal Award for Fine Arts in 2001 in honor of his work. Paul Naschy died in 2009 from pancreatic cancer.
The werewolf Waldemar Daninsky is without a doubt Paul Naschy’s most famous horror character, since he played Daninsky in 12 different films. In fact, Naschy holds the record for playing a werewolf the most number of times, easily beating out the great Lon Chaney Jr. (who played a Wolf Man only seven times during his career).
Unlike the Chaney Universal films, however… read more
Paul Naschy (born Jacinto Molina, September 6, 1934, Madrid – November 30, 2009, Madrid) was a Spanish movie actor, screenwriter, and director working primarily in horror films. His portrayals of numerous classic horror figures—the wolfman, a hunchback, Count Dracula, a mummy—have earned him recognition as the Spanish Lon Chaney. He was also known as the “Boris Karloff of Spain” and he had one of the most recognizable faces in Spanish horror film. King Juan Carlos I presented Naschy with Spain’s Gold Medal Award for Fine Arts in 2001 in honor of his work. Paul Naschy died in 2009 from pancreatic cancer.
The werewolf Waldemar Daninsky is without a doubt Paul Naschy’s most famous horror character, since he played Daninsky in 12 different films. In fact, Naschy holds the record for playing a werewolf the most number of times, easily beating out the great Lon Chaney Jr. (who played a Wolf Man only seven times during his career).
Unlike the Chaney Universal films, however, which formed a somewhat chronological storyline from picture to picture, Naschy’s Daninsky films were not connected to each other plotwise. Each film was more or less a free-standing story that was not meant to relate to the other films in the series the way the old Lawrence Talbot movies often interconnected. Daninsky’s lycanthropy had a different origin in each film (which many Naschy film buffs find confusing). This was probably for the best, since in the 1970’s, Euro-horror films were often theatrically distributed years after they were completed, and they probably would’ve all been released out of chronological order anyway.
Only eleven of the 12 “Hombre Lobo” films actually exist today. All traces of the 1968 “Nights of the Wolf Man” apparently vanished before the film was ever released, and it remains a mystery to this day whether or not the film ever really existed at all in a completed form. (The producer of the film, one Rene Govar, is said to have died in a car accident in Paris a week after the film was completed, and no one ever picked up the lab bill that was outstanding. Hence it is thought the people who owned the lab may have confiscated the film print. Naschy claimed he only became aware decades later that the film had never been released anywhere.) Some Naschy fans think the film was scrapped by the producer before it was completed and the script was later rewritten to become the 4th film in the series, “Fury of the Wolf Man” (1970). This is possible since Naschy himself vaguely remembered both films as having almost the same exact plot!
Naschy’s only other recurring character was the villainous medieval warlock Alaric de Marnac (who appears in Naschy’s Horror Rises From the Tomb (1972) and returns to life again in Panic Beats (1982)). Naschy claims he based this character on a real-life medieval nobleman named Gilles de Rais, a bizarre serial killer on whose life story Naschy also based the lead character in his 1974 film The Marshall From Hell.
