The following decade, Mike Nichols’s Wolf (1994) took things a step further, shedding the cheesier scaremongering to imagine the werewolf legend as a sleeker, more adult study of male sexual urge and excess, given carnal fizz by Jack Nicholson and Michelle Pfeiffer. Jack Nicholson and Michelle Pfeiffer in Wolf (1994). The 2010 remake, The Wolfman, despite sophisticated Oscar-winning makeup effects, has already vanished from popular memory, though seek it out if you wish to compare and contrast. It may not send viewers screaming the way it did 80 years ago, but George Waggner’s crisp 70-minute film still issues a wintry shiver, and set the style for generations of werewolf movies to come. For all its Disneyfied trappings, Marvel’s werewolf outing pays tribute to the old-school model exemplified by 1941’s The Wolf Man, in which Lon Chaney Jr played the hapless human who turns toothy when the moon is full. As scary creatures go, they conjure associations of cosy fireside folklore rather than anything more horrific, even if there are ways of bringing them more disconcertingly up to date. Their past-tense air is baked into their very name. There’s something oddly comforting about a werewolf – as encountered on screen, at least, rather than in the flesh. Directed by Michael Giacchino, better known for his lively composing work, this nonsense adventure cultivates a chintzier, more retro B-movie aesthetic than most Marvel fare, and is more likable for it. (Despite his name, he turns into something rather more menacing than a terrier when he transforms.) Played here by Gael García Bernal, he’s a monster hunter afflicted with the old hair-sprouting. This isn’t superhero business as usual, however, but a curious screen debut for Jack Russell, a lycanthrope protagonist first introduced in the comics 50 years ago.

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