La marca del hombre lobo (Enrique López Eguiluz, 1968).
Jacinto Molina grew up in Francoist Spain, the son of an extremely successful furrier. As a young boy, he was surrounded by death in the aftermath of the civil war, losing friends and family members, and passing corpses in the streets and fields around Madrid. Two of Molina’s uncles, both collectors who ran in artistic circles, introduced him to a bohemian lifestyle and range of interests. He met famous painters (Jose Gutierréz Solana), writers (Camilo José Cela), and matadors (Manolete); he was entranced by comic books, the movies, and the occult. When, at his elite boarding school, he was asked what he wanted to be when he grew up, he knew to respond with the respectable aspiration of “architect.” Instead, he would become Paul Naschy.
Naschy is now synonymous with a mid-century surge in Gothic Eurohorror that replicated in continental Europe the success of Hammer Films in the UK. These were bankable horror films: filled with sex and violence, intended for an international audience pushing the boundaries of weakening censorship codes. Naschy, Jesús Franco, and Amando de Ossorio were Spain’s first wave of horror directors; each found monetary success and fame (especially Naschy), but they were also subject to derision from the nation’s literati. Their critics accused them of simply transplanting the quintessentially American stories of Universal Studios’ monster movies to Spain. Film historian Román Gubern dismissed the new wave of “subgeneric” cinema (by which he meant “even worse than genre films”) as “mimetic and repetitive products in their imitation of previous models, which are also repetitive but have at least a genuine and autochthonous cultural character.” Franco’s Dr. Orloff was a mere rehashing of the British mad scientist trope, and Ossorio’s zombies were indebted to George Romero’s (though both were adapting a concept that originates in Haitian folklore). Naschy was the worst offender: his screenplays wore their American influence proudly. He was a movie-monster fanatic, playing many of the classic archetypes throughout his career—vampires, aliens, mad scientists—but he clearly had a favorite.
La monstruos del terror (Tulio Demicheli and Hugo Fregonese, 1970).
From 1968 to 2004, Naschy played the werewolf twelve times in what is collectively known as the Hombre Lobo series. Though Naschy birthed his werewolf, Waldemar Daninsky, out of fanboyish devotion to Lon Chaney Jr.’s Larry Talbot character, his cycle of werewolf films proved to be anything but rote imitations. In each film, Naschy tells a separate but similar tale of a werewolf doomed to kill and doomed to die. This approach allowed Naschy to obsess over the key elements of the werewolf film—the curse, the transformation, the doomed love affair, and the death by silver bullet—without worrying about the pedantic logic of sequels. Over time, Naschy’s werewolf transformed according to the trends in Eurohorror, both following and setting precedents for what was expected to sell at home and overseas Naschy would continue developing the character in light of his current interests until his forced retirement in the 1990s.
Since his backstory changes with each film, there is no single version of Waldemar Daninsky, but some recurring traits emerge. Daninsky is often addressed as “Count,” befitting his impressive mansion, the province of landed aristocracy, though not necessarily royalty. It’s no coincidence that he shares the same title as Dracula, since Daninsky is also usually said to hail from the Carpathian Mountains, where belief in vampires and werewolves was most common. (In that region, according to Matthew Beresford’s The White Devil: The Werewolf in European Culture, the creatures are not always regarded as distinct.)
“Daninsky” was chosen to be identifiably Polish, as the national censors demanded the devilish beast not be depicted as a Spaniard. “Waldemar” is an homage to Naschy’s two dearest passions: Gothic literature (Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar”) and weightlifting (Polish world champion Waldemar Baszanowski). Whereas Lon Chaney Jr.’s Wolf Man was of average American build, Daninsky is notable for his sheer size; he must be the most barrel-chested monster in horror-movie history, his bulky chest and forearms always accentuated with a tight t-shirt when he bothers to wear anything. Naschy dedicates several pages of his memoirs to his various weightlifting championships, and in a long aside asserts that the Olympic selection committee conspired against him. When this werewolf launches his victim across the room, it’s believable. Naschy modeled his werewolf after Chaney’s in making the man behind the wolf a force for moral good.His transformation into the beast and all subsequent violence is the result of a curse, and his greatest wish is always to die so that others may be saved.
There was very little precedent for such a character in Spanish cinema. Six years earlier, Jesús Franco made The Awful Doctor Orloff (1963), considered the first Spanish horror film, whose gruesome narrative and central mad-doctor character call to mind Georges Franju’s Eyes Without a Face (1960). Naschy was venturing into the deep end of a filmmaking culture more familiar with neorealism (Juan Antonio Bardem’s Death of a Cyclist, 1955) or socially conscious comedy (Luis García Berlanga’s The Executioner, 1963) than his more fantastical pastiche of British Gothic and Hollywood vulgarity. His approach was not entirely imported: he also looked to the macabre tradition of Spanish painting, including Francisco Goya and Solana.
La maldición de la bestia (Miguel Iglesias, 1975).
Meanwhile, Francisco Franco was still in power; his Catholic dictatorship would repress and censor Spain’s cultural output until the late 1970s. Naschy attempts to come across as apolitical in his memoirs, noting that one family member was an accidental Nationalist collaborator and another a Republican, but his numerous romantic escapades and eccentric interests would seem to mark him as other than an enthusiastic subject of the regime. How was he able to make a violent, sexually explicit picture about an abomination against God?
One answer lies in coproduction. Spain’s Maxper P.C. found an unlikely partner, Germany’s HIFI Stereo 70 Kg, who were eager to test out their newly acquired 3-D technology on a horror film, a genre already associated with such experiments. These companies produced Naschy’s first script, La marca del hombre lobo, for an international market, where it was known variously as Frankenstein’s Bloody Monster and The Mark of the Wolfman (1968). It was shot in 70mm 3D, per a contractual agreement, though the film would only rarely be screened in that format. Franco’s failure to economically restructure the film industry in 1964 had led to mass closures of screens across the country.1 The industry’s attempt to recover, combined with an increasingly liberal attitude to sex and violence in foreign markets, suddenly made conservative Spain a hotbed of cheap, exportable sexploitation, culminating in the prolific softcore, and later hardcore, career of Jesús Franco.
The censorship Naschy was most often subjected to had nothing to do with the dictatorship; it came from his producers, who were concerned not only about whether Spain might refuse to screen the films, but much more importantly, about anything that would dampen success in the international market. So, Waldemar Daninsky could not be a Spaniard, and neither could Jacinto Molina. Naschy built a myth around this name, claiming that he had a mere 30 minutes to Teutonize his name for marketability—he landed on “Paul” from a random name in a newspaper, and “Naschy” as an homage to his friend and Olympic pentathlon champion, Imre Nagy. Jacinto Molina, Waldemar Daninsky, Paul Naschy: the man was getting used to imposed transformations.
La marca del hombre lobo (Enrique López Eguiluz, 1968).
La marca del hombre lobo is likely what the critics had in mind when they accused Spanish horror of being derivative of American fare. It’s a pastiche of references and familiar beats from someone who clearly loves the source material (not unlike the work of a later film-fan-turned-auteur, Quentin Tarantino). This first depiction of Daninsky, presents a clean-cut aristocrat, outfitted in a bright red turtleneck and modern suit in the garish lighting of the opening scene’s masquerade, itself a clear reference to Roger Corman’s pop-Gothic The Masque of the Red Death (1964). Daninsky is first kind to the central couple, only to steal Janice away and leave Rudolph the bizarrely amiable cuckold. Meanwhile, a Romani couple drunkenly stumble into the castle of the legendary, ancient werewolf Imre Wolfstein and remove the silver cross from his corpse, reviving the creature (recalling the resurrection of Dracula in Universal’s House of Frankenstein, 1944). He runs amok, bites Daninsky, kills others, and retreats as the townsfolk hunt him with torches and pitchforks. Daninsky, now infected with what he calls the “Tibetan Black Star Curse,” seeks a cure from two doctors who later reveal themselves to be vampires. They’ve captured Wolfstein and set him against Daninsky in a duel. Daninsky kills them all, but Janice, the one who “loved him most,” ends his life with a silver bullet.
Every single element about the werewolf is lifted directly from Universal. The idea that silver could be lethal to werewolves stems from European folktales, but the specific notion of a silver bullet was most vividly codified by Curt Siodmak for The Wolf Man (1941). Even the bizarre reference to Tibet comes from Universal’s first attempt at the werewolf picture, Werewolf of London (1935). That the beast can only be killed by one who loves him is lifted from House of Frankenstein. The mark of the beast, the time-lapse transformation, and the protagonist’s wish to die all derive from The Wolf Man. Even the concept of a multi-monster fight comes from Naschy’s childhood excitement upon seeing a Spanish re-release of Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1943). But these elements are updated for the ’60s: the film is shot on location in Madrid’s Castillo de la Coracera in colorful widescreen, borrowing elements from both Hammer Films and Corman’s Poe adaptations.
Naschy would move past this need to prove his horror-buff credentials as he developed the character. Daninsky remained a Don Juan type—the perennial object of feminine desire. Though Daninsky’s Polish origins were at first a quick ploy to evade censorship, the choice of this background also initiated Naschy’s career-long fascination with the people and legends of Central Europe, a region then creeping out from behind the Iron Curtain.
The Fury of the Wolfman (José María Zabalza, 1970).
Naschy’s first horror movie was a box-office success, which allowed him to find funding for his other scripts. By 1970, Naschy had scripted and starred in two more films: Los monstruos del terror (also marketed as Assignment: Terror and Dracula vs. Frankenstein, 1969) and The Fury of the Wolfman (or Wolfman Never Sleeps, 1970) with German and Spanish money. These films still borrow heavily from The House of Frankenstein and Werewolf of London (the revived Dracula of the first, the Tibetan setting of the latter). Even more creature-filled than the first film, Los monstruos features a sci-fi plot—alien scientists revive Earth’s monsters in order to study what makes them so frightening. The Fury again finds Daninsky the subject of a science experiment, but adds a yeti. In both films, Daninsky transforms in a time-lapse sequence, finds a lover, kills anyone he meets, and receives a bullet to the heart from his love. The scientists’ restraints are never enough for Daninsky; his sheer strength proves to the aliens of Los monstruos that these abhorrent products of science, whether werewolf or atomic weapon, cannot be contained. In The Fury, the scientist wants Daninsky to transform because she’s attracted to the werewolf inside him.
These awkward mash-ups of werewolf folklore, Universal horror, and science fiction were marred by funding issues and production mishaps. Hugo Fregonese dropped out midway though Los monstruos, ceding directorial duties to Tulio Demicheli. In his memoir, Naschy alleges that The Fury’s director, José Maria Zabalza, tampered with his screenplay, which pits Daninsky against a woman antagonist who threatens him with her liberated sexual desire. Incorporating light BDSM imagery, Fury has Eva Wolfstein (Perla Cristal) chaining and whipping Daninsky, riling him up for a werewolf-on-werewolf battle with his revived wife. From this point, the Hombre Lobo films stop focusing on monster showdowns and begin contending with the libidinous battle of the sexes in a post-Franco world.
Walpurgis Night (León Klimovsky and Carlos Aured, 1970).
The next two films reinvigorated Naschy’s career and initiated one of his favorite artistic collaborations, with director León Klimovsky, who deviated from the campy excess of the previous Daninsky films. Rather than flatly light everything in the frame, in the kitschy style of the early Hammer films, Klimovsky took a note from the look of gialli, which had flourished in Italy in the prior decade, including unnatural, single-color lighting and plenty of shadows. The director was also keen to cut between wide shots and close-ups, emphasizing the improved makeup. Walpurgis Night (or The Werewolf vs. the Vampire Woman, 1970) finds Daninsky confronting a medieval vampire, Countess Wandessa, as she commands a small army of women to kill the people of the countryside. Countess Wandessa is an inverse of his own Count Waldemar: she intends to live forever, to be in control, and to kill—a villain more terrifying than just another werewolf, as in the previous films.
Dr. Jekyll and the Werewolf (1971) is another mad-scientist tale; Dr. Jekyll’s grandson prescribes the afflicted Daninsky a serum to cure lycanthropy, though its only effect is to give his werewolf counterpart the sadistic, calculating qualities of Mr. Hyde, after which he begins to take pleasure in his killing. With these two films, Naschy had proven himself capable of going beyond mere imitations of established monster movies; now his werewolf figure could pose deeper questions about human nature and relationships.
Dr. Jekyll and the Werewolf (León Klimovsky, 1971).
At this point in his career, Naschy began thinking about the werewolf beyond the confines of the cinema. In his subsequent films, references to Universal movies are replaced by the products of research into the historical occult. He traced the history of the werewolf to early European peoples, finding its possible origins in prehistoric hunting magic rituals for which tribesmen would don a wolf pelt, summoning its powers. In Greek mythology, Lycaon was transformed by Zeus into a wolf. Later, pagan wolf cults like the Hirpi Sorani seem to have bled into the Luperci priesthood of ancient Rome, an empire whose mythical founders were said to have been nursed by a wolf.
The modern werewolf emerged out of late-medieval Christianity, in which a bestial transformation would be an affront to God, who created man in his image. The Christian werewolf was usually a victim of a witch’s curse: a soul doomed to look on as its desecrated body undertook a killing spree. Barry Lopez argues in Of Wolves and Men that these wolf-men were creatures worthy of Christian forgiveness, that “the bestial uncontrolled nature of the wolf is transformed by sanctity, and by extension those identified with the wolf—thieves, heretics and outlaws—are redeemed by St Francis’ all-embracing compassion and courtesy.”2
Walpurgis Night (León Klimovsky and Carlos Aured, 1970).
In later films, Naschy frequently places the origin of the curse in medieval Poland, Hungary, and Romania—lands filled with tales of witches from the old pagan Europe. These films paint Daninsky as a romantic Christian victim-hero, using the curse’s powers to vanquish all of Satan’s forces, including himself. Of course, the idea of dying in battle to defend Christianity would be very welcome in Franco’s Spain.
In Phases of the Moon: A Cultural History of the Werewolf Film, Craig Ian Mann argues that Daninsky is the ideal Francoist male: a physically intimidating aristocrat constantly in battle with an archetype of liberated feminine desire. This chauvinism is inherent in the medieval conception of the werewolf: the male beast is always a mere victim, but the woman who cursed him must die. Naschy so consistently emphasizes the brazen sexual desire of his women that it’s hard to imagine he’s innocently transposing these stories. Though he never explicitly expressed Francoist sympathies, his code of masculinity was informed by the postwar European cult of the strongman. He grew up with comic books by the likes of Esteban Maroto, Emilio Freixas, and Jaime Brocal Remohí, which promoted a traditional, militaristic masculinity as Marvel’s Conan the Barbarian would for the generation after his. His early career in weightlifting was partially inspired by Steve Reeves’s Hercules, as was Arnold Schwarzenegger’s after him.
Perhaps the symbol of the werewolf is fundamentally inextricable from chauvinist military dictatorships. The etymological origin of “werewolf” is unknown: some scholars opt for the literal translation, “man-wolf,” from Old English, while others prefer the Old Dutch wer, making the creature a “war-wolf.” The Nazis, and Adolf Hitler in particular, were obsessed with the “war-wolf” of Germanic folklore and named several buildings and clandestine military operations after werewolves. Rumors circulated that the occult-prone dictator, nicknamed “Wolf,” suffered from bouts of lycanthropy. In his memoir, Naschy admits to having been fascinated as a boy by the spectacle of the Nazis and their occult imagery, noting that “its symbolism of leather and steel, of arcane lore halfway between black and red magic left its mark on me like a white hot flame. The horror of it I found totally abominable, but I couldn’t help being influenced from an aesthetic point of view by the whole devilish, theatrical packaging.”3
El retorno de Walpurgis (Carlos Aured, 1973).
These reflections on history, Europe, masculinity, and the Christian werewolf would heavily inform the next four Hombre Lobo films. Playing off the success of the Countess Wandessa character, El retorno de Walpurgis (or Curse of the Devil, 1973) and El Retorno del hombre lobo (or Night of the Werewolf, 1980) both have Daninsky face the legendary serial killer Elizabeth Báthory, here a Satan-worshiping witch. La maldicion de la bestia (or Night of the Howling Beast, or The Werewolf and the Yeti, 1975) is set in Tibet, where Naschy imagines a werewolf myth outside a European context. Finally, The Beast and the Magic Sword (1983), which Naschy also directed, takes Daninsky to Japan, where he kills a witch who seeks to control him, but dies by the power of her silver sword.
The weakening military regime of 1970s Spain had enacted apertura (liberalization) measures on its regulatory bodies, giving Naschy unprecedented freedom for these pictures. That means more sex and violence (including a threesome with two cannibalistic Tibetan she-wolves), but also higher budgets. Naschy had made several commissioned documentary series for Japanese television and built a strong relationship with his producers, allowing him to shoot Magic Sword on location in that country. There he learned of the okuri okami, a ghostly wolfin Shinto folklore. The Beast and the Magic Sword is the excessive, multi-genre, multinational work of sheer bravado Naschy had always aspired to make. Daninsky’s werewolf is remodeled to resemble a kabuki performer, all manner of occult and religious practices are on display, and the fantastical fight sequences are choreographed like Shaw Brothers duels.
The Beast and the Magic Sword (Paul Naschy, 1983).
Paul Naschy, like Eurohorror, was a product of globalization. He was a Spaniard with a German name derived from a Hungarian one, a filmmaker whose work was censored more by his distributors than by the military dictatorship, and a man who concerned himself with a folkloric symbol that was genuinely pan-European. In his movies, American and British monsters with Central European names run amok around the castles of Spain. The Wolf Man had been the sole American in Universal’s monster lineup, which variously drew upon European and South American exotica; a reluctant victim-hero, he saved Europe from its evils just as real Americans shipped off to the Western Front. By contrast, Naschy’s el hombre lobo was the postwar European who dealt with the continent’s fracturing histories as the forces of globalization began in earnest.
Naschy made two more Daninsky films, Licántropo (1996) and Tomb of the Werewolf (2004). By this point, Naschy had suffered a near-fatal heart attack and had all but given up on his career. The abysmal release of Licántropo confirmed that Naschy was now unbankable; he took on the embarrassing, softcore Tomb of the Werewolf merely to humor its directors, Donald F. Glut and Fred Olen Ray, who were longtime fans. After all, he himself was once a horror obsessive and amateur filmmaker. Five years after Daninsky died his final death, Jacinto Molina passed away.