The Many Metaphors of Lycanthropy
It’s there in every werewolf movie, lurking just beyond the corner of your vision, filling you with the creeping sense that we are being shown one thing but actually talking about another. That’s right, I refer to the dread horror of metaphors.
Horror is certainly the most metaphorical genre of film and literature (although sci-fi finishes a close second). Its visceral emotional beats and inherent unreality provide rich fodder for exploring real-life issues from a safe distance, especially those considered inappropriate or distasteful for direct discussion. And werewolves may be the most metaphorical of all horror monsters.
While I was building my survival-horror choose your own adventure game The Wolf of Derevnya, I had the pleasure of watching and reading a prodigious chunk of the contemporary werewolf corpus¹, with a particular focus on portrayals of women. Amid the red corn syrup and unconvincing CG, several themes stood out, some as common wells that the genre perennially returns to, others as innovative new takes. Let’s make like a werewolf and tear right into them.
This article contains squick and spoilers. Consider yourself forewarned about both.
Lycanthropy as the Id
The secret side of me I never let you see
I keep it caged but I can’t control it
So stay away from me, the beast is ugly
I feel the rage and I just can’t hold it
-Skillet, “Monster”
This classic metaphor wends its way through nearly all werewolf stories of the 20th century. It appears in classic media like The Wolf Man (1941), new media like The Wolf Among Us (2013), and too many metal songs to count.
Once upon a time, it would have been the Devil or a demonic force; in the age of Freud, it’s the id. (You’re telling me that Freud just reskinned religious concepts with pseudoscientific language? Surely not!)
Either way, the metaphor is the same: There’s a primal, violent force within you that you must suppress in order to live as a functioning member of society, but it’s growing stronger and it wants out. It’s easy to see why this Jekyll-and-Hyde archetype has enjoyed such enduring popularity: It immediately creates an inner conflict that allows the viewer to simultaneously empathize with and be repulsed by the protagonist.
It is also a fundamentally relatable conflict. Whether you think there’s anything to Freud’s theories or not, we all experience the basic tension between what we want to do and what we know we should do, and unless you’re some kind of Zen Buddhist monk, the former probably wins out more often than you’d like to admit. You might go so far as to say that there are two wolves ins…you know what, never mind.
But over time, shifting social mores have changed how we perceive this struggle. The classic battle of the civilized, rational hero against the unadulterated evil within is on the wane now that the former hallmarks of evil (such as, say, horniness) are no longer the primary causes of pearl-clutching in our culture (now, an inner monster who made you act problematic on social media, that would be a werewolf story for our times).
Instead, modern instances of the id metaphor ask whether, after all, we should reject the dark side. Is civilized society really all it’s cracked up to be? And if not, why do we fear to embrace our animal instincts?
This is the phenomenon of the hopeful monster, and it is one of horror’s greatest strengths. Since horror by its very nature explores the deviant, dreadful, and disgusting, it has a unique freedom to explore socially unacceptable topics with plausible deniability. The best horror dances tonally between condemnation and celebration, encouraging the viewers to ask “Yes, but what if?” And because the monster usually dies at the end, the moral guardians can feel safe in the knowledge that the deviance has been put to rest (never mind that the idea of it is alive and well in the minds of the viewers).
Many hopeful monsters will rear their heads throughout the course of this article.
Lycanthropy as Predation
Oh, what an innocent child, what a beautiful prey
When those wolves come around, you better keep them away
-Bad Seed Rising, “Wolves at the Door”
This one is on the outs. When I ran a poll about favorite werewolf metaphors, it received zero votes. This came as a surprise to me, since the most recent important werewolf novel (Red Hood by critical darling Elana K. Arnold) tackled precisely this angle. But perhaps it shouldn’t have.
What might surprise you is the recency of this metaphor. Prior to the 20th century, in keeping with changing societal views on men’s and women’s sexuality, the female seductress werewolf was the common archetype, as exemplified by the 1839 story “The White Wolf of the Hartz Mountains” by Frederick Marryat. These two types are not simply gender-swapped counterparts, however. There are key differences: The seductress werewolf typically doesn’t directly assault the man (dear God, it’s such a crushingly straight metaphor) and the power in the situation is still presumed to be his, which she tries to circumvent through trickery. The predator werewolf, on the other hand, does have the power, and the woman is presumed to have already lost by being in the situation at all.
The male sexual predator werewolf only became predominant alongside second-wave feminism², with the central text being the delirious 1984 fever dream Company of Wolves. Of all the werewolf metaphors, this is the only one that looks outward, seeing the wolf as an external threat rather than an internal force. (Also they’re always Little Red Riding Hood retellings.)
There are a lot of reasons to dislike this metaphor: It seems insulting to both men (qua insatiable monsters incapable of keeping it in their pants) and women (qua little lost lambs who should probably just stay in the house. There’s the prudish sex-negativity and the tedious morality-tale trappings (Little Rosaleen walked home alone and look what happened to her!). There’s its tendency to jag into bioessentialism (once you notice how often Arnold mentions penises, specifically, as a vehicle of harm in Red Hood and her other works, you can’t un-see it).
While Company of Wolves has deconstructive elements that make it a complex text (not to mention German Shepherds dressed as 18th-century aristocrats), it ultimately circles back around to the same “there are dangerous people out there” theme, which is simply not that profound or revelatory.
If this one gets relegated to the shelf, I won’t be heartbroken.
Lycanthropy as Puberty
Werewolf Bar Mitzvah
Spooky, scary
Boys becoming men
Men becoming wolves
-30 Rock
You know this one: You wake up one day and suddenly you’re huge and sprouting hair in weird places. Surely you didn’t really experience puberty unless at some point you thought you were transforming into a horrifying monster. And werewolf media often leans hard on this angle (often with the observation that, like puberty itself, it’s extremely funny when you look at it the right way).
But the puberty depicted in werewolf stories is a male-coded puberty. Of course girls grow body hair too, but as Elizabeth Clark argues in her thesis “‘Hairy Thuggish Women’: Female Werewolves, Gender, and the Hoped-For Monster,” women onscreen may be violent and muscular under certain circumstances, but absolutely never hairy. So what does female puberty look like in a werewolf story?
We had to wait for 2000’s Ginger Snaps to get the answer: “I woke up covered in blood and I don’t know why!” (Better still, a traditional werewolf — though not Ginger — wakes up covered in blood once a month³.) And it explores this metaphor richly, tackling menstruation from multiple different angles: The mom who’s a little too gung-ho about the whole “becoming a woman” thing; healthcare professionals who tell you everything is normal even when it’s clearly not; the bizarre expectation that you’re just supposed to go about your normal business without, like, getting a sick day or anything.
The metaphor extends elsewhere as well. In Ginger’s sudden libido. In the scene where Ginger’s sister Brigitte tapes down her tail in the locker room, evoking all the ways teen girls learn to conceal bodies that in their natural state are no longer acceptable in public (for me it brought back fond memories of the ol’ Band Aids-over-the-nipples trick).
A similar puberty appears in The Wildling (2018) — not, perhaps, strictly a werewolf movie but certainly part of the broad werewolf-like subgenre — where Anna’s “daddy” gives her puberty blockers to prevent her from maturing into a monster. Here, too, menstrual blood is associated with violence, power, and embracing one’s inner beast — a hopeful monster that patriarchal power attempts to but cannot suppress.
“But wait,” I hear you cry, “Who’s bioessentialist now, Mrs. Menstruating Werewolves?” Which I do think is a fair criticism of this theme. I would argue that the key, however, is that Ginger and Anna don’t lose the male-coded aspects of the transformation —they take on both, effectively experiencing a hermaphroditic puberty. Hell, Ginger even grows a pseudo-phallus. Taken in that light, these stories are gender-exploratory, rather than gender-essentialist.
Ginger Snaps is the kind of bold, aggressive filmmaking that you only find in horror; it revels in making you look at something that might make you uncomfortable. It poses the question of why painting the set from top to bottom with blood is fine as long as it came out of someone’s jugular, but smearing a little blood on someone’s inner thigh is crossing a line.
Okay, this is not a Ginger Snaps cheerleading article. Let’s move on.
Lycanthropy as Queer
Hey babe, take a walk on the wild side
- Lou Reed, “Walk on the Wild Side”
Ah, queers and cryptids. It’s practically proverbial that every young queer had a phase when they felt a strong kinship with aliens, robots, mermaids, Mothman, the Babadook, or of course, fairies⁴.
But werewolves are especially well suited to this metaphor, particularly (but not exclusively) for trasmasc people. In addition to the physical traits we’ve already discussed, wolves’ association with nature, freedom, and primality are resonant to anyone connecting with an inner nature that runs at odds with societal expectations.
Werewolves are also, by their nature, concealed. Those around the werewolf don’t, at least initially, know its true nature, and the werewolf must negotiate whether to hide who they really are or reveal themselves and face a hostile world. As we saw in metaphors of the id, lycanthropes often struggle against their inner self in an attempt to conform to societal norms — never successfully.
Queer metaphors in speculative fiction became widespread in the late 90s and early 2000s, an era when the American general public was beginning to be tentatively open to the idea of gay rights but not necessarily to actual gay people. Thus The Matrix, the X-Men movies, and so on, which feature characters who look like other humans but have differences that are not immediately apparent, sometimes featuring overt coming-out scenes. These stories served as an important bridge to breach the topics of equality and tolerance to audiences who weren’t yet open to a direct conversation about gay rights.
This type of metaphor remains common today. The female friendship of Wolfwalkers (2020) certainly has queer overtones, as Mebh frees the tomboyish Robyn from the strictures of a rigidly gender-defined society into a world of joyous discovery. The coming-out scene appears in a sequence where Robyn rehearses what she’s going to say to her father, filling in his supportive responses — only for the real conversation to go completely differently.
Tales of childhood freedom and escape are common throughout the fantasy side of monster literature, but they are particularly resonant with LGBT+ youth, who are often reluctant to grow into an adulthood that brings with it gendered roles (or worse yet, a gendered body) that they don’t feel comfortable in. This theme also appears in Ginger Snaps, especially in Brigitte, who hides behind uncombed hair and a baggy sweater while feeling threatened by Ginger’s oncoming adolescence and heterosexual desire…dammit, I’m back on Ginger Snaps.
But rarely in werewolf movies has subtext erupted into actual text, and never so gloriously as in the criminally underappreciated Good Manners (2017), which stepped up to finally answer the prayers of everyone who has ever asked for a gay werewolf makeout scene. The romance between Anna, a white, privileged pregnant mother, and Clara, the black, impoverished nurse she hires as a nanny for her unborn child, cuts across race, class, and social circle. The scene where Anna catches Clara sleepwalking and the insensible Clara kisses her, only to draw blood, provocatively mingles violence and desire.
Witness the hopeful monster: One surely cannot be held culpable for who one might kiss as a werewolf-gestating somnambulist, but should one happen to kiss a girl and like it, well, nothing is preventing you from a repeat performance while awake.
Sadly, thanks in large part to a certain Mouse Corporation, queer content remains rare onscreen in Hollywood, where for the most part we still have to be satisfied with metaphors and the execrable queer-baiting. However, equality in written SFFH has grown by leaps and bounds, and there, as we’ll see, explicitly queer werewolves are not a rare breed at all.
Further Gender-Diverse Metaphors
Look me in the eyes, oh wolver
This ain’t your fairytale
-Sonata Arctica, “Ain’t Your Fairytale”
Recognizing that werewolves don’t need to be straight and male opens the door for a wide range of new creative interpretations. In the Silver Moon series by Catherine Lundoff, lycanthropy is a metaphor for menopause. This functions similarly to the puberty metaphor — abrupt unwanted changes to your body.
Taken in the light of the hopeful monster, however, there’s another level to the metaphor. Half a century after the second wave, women still almost always have to give up careers, hobbies, and goals to meet family obligations, a compromise which men still are not expected to make. Women with families typically only regain the ability to choose their own path when their children leave home — around the same time as menopause. Thus lycanthropy represents freedom in a very concrete sense. This connects back to Wolfwalkers and lycanthropy as a vehicle for escape from gendered obligations.
Additionally, Becca, the protagonist of Silver Moon, is divorced and her transformation is accompanied by her burgeoning sexual attraction to her female neighbor — both lycanthropy as coming out and another expression of the exploration that becomes possible when freed from the binds of heterosexual marriage.
We can’t wrap up this article without returning to Good Manners (2017) and its use of lycanthropy as a metaphor for pregnancy. I’m filing this one under “Things that had simply never occurred to me, but which make perfect sense once you think about it.” Something is growing inside you that is both a part of you and yet not you, that drastically alters your body, and that you may or may not actually want. And the existential fear that the inner wolf will completely consume you becomes terrifyingly real in the scene where the infant werewolf rips its way out of Anna’s womb, a physical embodiment of the worst fears of pregnant people in a world where maternal death rates are still far higher than they should be.
Queerness and maternity intermingle thematically in Good Manners. Blood, horror, and gender find a new intersection in the scene where Clara, who has no milk, allows the infant werewolf to bite her nipple and nurse on her blood (with far more stoicism than I would have in that situation). The act is simultaneously intimate and violent, heartwarming and repulsive, and evocative of all the ways queer families find to make their nontraditional structures work.
Joel, the young werewolf, is seven when the film ends, so he doesn’t experience puberty during the movie; for him, lycanthropy is a metaphor for growing up more broadly, and for conflicts between well-meaning parents and children too young to understand why rules exist. Most of us don’t shackle our progeny to the wall at night, but your child shouting “I hate you!” when you tell them to go to bed is a moment every parent can relate to.
Yet Joel’s struggles still parallel puberty: Confusion about girls, rebellion against authority, and a growing need for independence. So, directly or indirectly, Good Manners discusses pregnancy, puberty, queerness, and even (through a gorgeous hand-drawn flashback that describes Joel’s conception) predators. (It also wins handily for cutest werewolf ever depicted onscreen.) Bravo, Good Manners.
So where do we find ourselves at the end of all this? What, fundamentally, is a werewolf story?
It may seem tempting to say “They’re all about sex,” but aside from the odious predator stories, that interpretation doesn’t really hold up to scrutiny. Sure, sex is present in all these narratives, but generally as an expression of the conflict, not the cause of it. For example, while Ginger’s transformation is sexually charged, Brigitte’s transformation is sex-repulsed, and she— oh, for the love of God, there’s Ginger Snaps again.
I would argue that the stronger underlying theme that ties these narratives together is our tenuous and sometimes uncomfortable relationship with our own physicality.
Throughout human history, people have struggled to reconcile the fundamental paradox that humans are simultaneously brilliant beings who write poems, do philosophy, discover calculus, and so on, but also animals with sex drives and bodily functions. The split nature of the werewolf provides a powerful illustration. It dovetails neatly with Cartesian dualism, if that’s your bent.
I, as it happens, am not a Cartesian dualist, and I do not believe that we are divine spiritual beings tragically imprisoned in squishy meatsacks like genies in bottles (get back in your oven, Descartes). Rather, as I see it, the divine spiritual being and the squishy meatsack are one and the same — the experience of having thoughts and emotions fundamentally is the experience of being physical. Depending on your era, culture, religious beliefs and so on, the latter may be seen as evil (the id) or just kind of gross.
The fact of the matter is that the basic acts of our species’ survival — sex, birth, nursing — are discomfitingly sticky. They upset the rather delicate balance of mind versus body that we all, one way or another, have to achieve, sending the squishy-meatsack side surging to the forefront in all its oozy, dripping glory. Werewolf stories expose this side of human existence, which we usually don’t highlight. Werewolves excel at externalizing bodily fluids.
This survey of werewolf fiction leaves me excited about where the genre will head in the future. New voices are shaking up the genre and expanding it with creative approaches and new variations on this age-old monster. However film and literature evolve in the future, I have no doubt that werewolves will be there, reminding us of the fundamental gooeyness of human existence.
Although, as Freud might have said, sometimes a wolf is just a wolf.
— —
¹ Werewolf fiction can be divided into three periods: Premodern (prior to the 16th century), early modern (16th to 19th centuries), and contemporary (20th century). Themes vary extremely widely between these periods, and premodern werewolf stories diverge sharply from modern expectations, beginning with the assumption that werewolves are evil. But that’s another topic for another post.
² Although “wolf whistle” dates quite abruptly from 1940. Tsk tsk, GIs.
³ There is, however, no scientific evidence that menstrual cycles sync up with moon cycles. It’s a myth.
⁴ In the interest of full disclosure, my avatar was Chimera of Arezzo for a solid ten years.
If you enjoyed this article, be sure to check out my werewolf survival-horror visual novel, The Wolf of Derevnya, available now on Steam.
