Hey, it’s Saturday morning.

Mattel’s new “Monster High” dolls are your typical Bratz-style teen divas, but as the name indicates, they’re also monsters. All the usual suspects are represented, including a werewolf girl named Clawdeen Wolf. So we’ve got another toy franchise that seems geared towards training 10-year-old girls to be rail-thin airhead fashionistas… but by making these dolls monsters, is Mattel is also saying “it’s okay to be different”? Perhaps! In a recent LA Times article, Mattel Brands general manager Tim Kilpin said “They’re fun characters to build a world around. Who doesn’t feel like a freak in high school? It started with that universal truth.” Okay, so there’s some positive empathy, which seems promising… but now read Clawdeen’s bio. Am I crazy, or does it only mention her monstrous aspect in neutral or negative terms? This line is particularly worrisome: “Plucking and shaving is definitely a full time job but that’s a small price to pay for being scarily fabulous.” In other words, “I am different and unique, but through constant painful effort I can change myself to fit in.” Great. Picture Clawdeen locked in the bathroom, shaving her legs and crying, “Ginger Snaps” style. Hurry, Clawdeen! If you do a good job and get all that icky hair off, your friends will still like you, and then you can get back to your favourite activities– “shopping and flirting with the boys!” Nice work, Mattel.

There’s a great post about Clawdeen and Monster High at the She-Wolf blog that’s well worth reading, especially if you love to get annoyed about children’s toys like I do!

The conference is entitled She-Wolf: Female Werewolves, Shapeshifters and Other Horrors in Art, Literature and Culture (but She-Wolf for short). It’s on Thursday 9th – Friday 10th September 2010, at the University of Manchester, UK.

This is a smart conference put on by smart people who want to talk about werewolves, women, and werewolf women. They’ve got 40-ish spots left, so if you’re in the area, I encourage you to go. Check out the conference site or the official blog for more info.

I know a lot of people on ~thepackplz, at the Google werewolf group page, here on dA, in personal emails, and many other places around the net have claimed to be werewolves. Thing is, they never have any proof; all they achieve is to tauntingly raise false hopes right out in front of me like a juicy steak, and then yank it away mockingly as I try to take a bite. I’d need solid, concrete evidence such as original-sized photos of yourself in werewolf form, a video of yourself transforming, etc. (Mental shifting or anything like that doesn’t count; has to be an actual physical transformation!).

So what are you waiting for? Give up your most precious secret and put your freedom (or life) in danger for less than two month’s salary some quick cash today!

Today’s Penny Arcade is about World of Warcraft, Gabe’s Worgen character and the artificial nature of game quests. It’s also about the opposite of a glass of warm milk.

Won’t someone please bring werewolves to North American prime time TV in a way that celebrates and enjoys the horror roots of the monster? The closest thing to a horror werewolf we’ve got on TV right now is a show about a serial killer / lab geek in the Miami Metro Police Department. I love you, Dex, but I’d love you even more if you were all about fur and claws instead of rubber aprons and bone saws.

I’m cranky. I’m going to have some tea and listen to some old Mighty Boosh radio shows.

Hat tip: Graham T

Click for the full thing at a (much) larger resolution.

Yesterday I saw a tweet by David Malki expressing surprise over the existence of a codified literary genre called “Bizarro Fiction”. That lead me to a Guardian article on the subject which, while interesting in its own right, was immediately relegated to an inactive browser tab when I saw these words: “Warrior Wolf Women of the Wasteland”. That’s the title of a book by Carlton Mellick III, whose body of work (the most NSFW Amazon search result page ever) makes it abundantly clear that he’s one of the genre’s most prodigious authors. Despite my love of werewolf horror and all the spilled entrails that comes with it, I am a gentle man of delicate sensibilities, so there’s not a single title in that list that I would purposely read… other than Warrior Wolf Women of the Wasteland. That book is now required reading despite (or because of?) its astoundingly, deliberately trashy premise and pedigree. Dig on this synopsis from Amazon:

They call themselves the Warriors, their enemies call them the Bitches. They are a gang of man-eating, motorcycle-riding, war-hungry werewolf women, and they are the rulers of the wasteland.

A century after the fall of civilization, only one city remains standing. It is a self-contained utopian society protected by a three-hundred-foot-high steel wall. The citizens of this city live safe, peaceful lives, completely ignorant to the savagery that takes place beyond the walls. They are content and happy, blindly following the rules of the fascist fast food corporation that acts as their government. But when Daniel Togg, a four-armed bootlegger from the dark side of town, is cast out of the walled city, he soon learns why the state of the outside world has been kept secret. The wasteland is a chaotic battleground filled with giant wolves, mutant men, and an army of furry biker women who are slowly transforming into animals. Trapped on the wrong side of a war zone, Daniel Togg makes new friends and new enemies, while uncovering the mysteries of the people living in the wasteland and how they came to be there.

Sold. Did I mention it’s illustrated? It’s illustrated. I will read this book, and I will report back here with my findings. For werewolves. For science. Wish me luck!

(this one’s not for sale, sadly)

The conference is entitled She-Wolf: Female Werewolves, Shapeshifters and Other Horrors in Art, Literature and Culture (but She-Wolf for short). It’s on Thursday 9th – Friday 10th September 2010, at the University of Manchester, UK.

The conference is being run by myself, Dr. Hannah Priest (University of Manchester), and a final year PhD student, Carys Crossen. I recently completed a PhD on monstrous characters in medieval romance, and Carys is working on her thesis on post-1800 werewolves. The idea for the conference came when I was working on gender and werewolves in medieval texts. I was struck by the fact that all the werewolves I was looking at were male. As a big fan of Buffy and Ginger Snaps, I knew that there were female werewolves out there… and I thought it was about time people started talking about them.

Since I started planning the conference, there’s been a bit of a female werewolf invasion. A number of new books, TV series and films have appeared. So obviously I wasn’t the only person who noted their absence. As a sister-event to the conference, we’re going to have a discussion panel with some writers who are currently working with female werewolves (and vampires) in their own work, and we’ll be discussing the challenges and attractions of such female monsters.

At the conference itself, we’ll have papers on Terry Pratchett, Angela Carter and contemporary fantasy fiction – of course. But we’ve also got speakers lined up to talk about 1940s cinema, Roman literature and Scottish witchcraft narratives. It’s going to be a fascinating few days.

For information on registration, or to find out more about the event, you can contact Hannah Priest at hannah.priest@manchester.ac.uk

You can also visit the conference’s web site, where you’ll find a registration form and a programme of talks and speakers. Registration for students is £40 and £70 for everyone else. The deadline for getting your form in is 5:00 P.M. Friday, August 6th. If you’re in the area you should go; I know I would! See a summary of the programme after the jump– there’s some pretty cool stuff up for discussion.

These items are current as of this post and are subject to change. Check the conference web site for the most up-to-date programme.

Session 1: Monstrous Sexuality (Chair: Carys Crossen)

Tim Snelson (University of East Anglia): ‘Women Can Be Wolves Too’: The Cry of the Werewolf (1944), the Female Monster and the Contested Bodies of Wartime Women

Kerstin Frank (University of Heidelberg): Angela Carter’s Wolf-Girls: Power Struggles, Transformation and Gender in her Rewritings of ‘Little Red Riding Hood’

Eva Bru-Dominguez (University of Birmingham): Reclaiming Desire: the She-Wolf in Mercè Rodoreda’s Death in Spring

Museum Workshop:

Monstrous Material Culture (led by Sam Alberti and Bryan Sitch)

Session 2: Shapeshifting Sisters (Chair: Hannah Priest)

Linda McGuire (Independent Researcher): Magical Transformations: Owl Women and Sorcery in Latin Literature

Geoff Holder (Independent Researcher): Were-Cats, Were-Deer and Were-Whales: Female Shapeshifting in Scottish Witchcraft Narratives

Laura Wilson (University of Manchester): Dans Ma Peau: Shape-shifting and Subjectivity

Session 3: Of Otherness and Conformity (Chair: Linda McGuire)

Brian Feltham (University of Reading): Imagined Identities – The Woman in the Wolf Suit

Shannon Scott (University of St. Thomas): Lycanthropic Representations of Native Americans in Henry Beaugrand’s ‘The Werewolves’

Carys Crossen (University of Manchester): ‘The Complex and Antagonistic Forces that Constitute One Soul’; Religious Conviction versus Feminist Principles in Clemence Housman’s The Werewolf

Keynote Address: Peter Hutchings (Northumbria University)

The She-Wolves of Horror Cinema: Marginality, Transformation and Rage

Session 4: Fantasy and the She-Wolf (Chair: Brian Feltham)

Nickianne Moody (Liverpool John Moores University): Supernatural Hierarchies: The Place of Werewolves in the Paranormal Romance and Contemporary Urban Fantasy

Hannah Priest (University of Manchester): I Was a Teenage She-Wolf: Boobs, Blood and Chocolate

Jacquelyn Bent and Helen Gavin (University of Huddersfield): An Überwald Werewolf Howled in Patrician

Session 5: Creating the She-Wolf (Chair: Nickianne Moody)

Jazmina Cininas (RMIT University): The Girlie Werewolf Hall of Fame: Historical and Contemporary Representations of the Female Lycanthrope

Chantal Bourgault du Coudray (University of Western Australia): ‘You Should Write a Werewolf Screenplay’: Meeting the Challenge

Allison Moon (Independent Researcher): Courting the Lunatic Fringe: Shapeshifting at the Vanguard of Queer Activism and Post-Gender Feminism

Here you go: “Teen wolves descend upon San Antonio high schools“, courtesy of KENS 5-TV.

First, consider the state of special effects in 1981. Yes, the effects work done by Rick Baker and his crew were so far ahead of their time that they inspired a new awards category at the Oscars. But not being able to see into the future, and with only $10 million to spend on the entire production, Landis had to assume that even Baker’s most realistic efforts to create a fully transformed werewolf, if shown full-body and in decent lighting, would have been read by the audience as “dude in a suit”. Instead of fear, the audience’s reaction would become one of artistic / technical appraisal, and it’s difficult to be scared of a monster when you’re looking for its zippers or rubber claws (or CG equivalents like bad compositing or flat textures).

The decision to limit the werewolf’s screen presence isn’t merely practical. Like Valero says, it’s all about the imagination. By showing only brief closeups and the occasional half-body tracking shot of werewolf David, the AWIL audience gains just enough exposure to trigger the mind into creating something far more ferocious than a costumed actor or an animated prop could represent. This is why even the most amazing combinations of CG and physical effects still fall flat today. Baker’s work on the recent “Wolfman” remake, for example, was amazingly, startlingly detailed… but was it scary? The survey says “no“. Everyone who was even remotely interested in the film knew what the Wolfman looked like well before the film came out, and even those who avoided spoilers got to see the beast in full detail before the first hour of the film was up. The initial shock at the vivid detail wears away, and there’s no suspense anymore, no mystery or fear of the unknown. Those are potent elements of fear, and they are easily lost when too much light is shed on the monster.

Every film tries to tell a story, and most werewolf movies are meant to be horror stories. Sadly, rather than being truly horrific, werewolf movies tend to fall into the schlocky domain of the “creature feature”, in which audience-avatar protagonists are menaced by a monstrous presence. In these movies the monster is only a character insofar as it possesses frightening qualities to highlight its “otherness” and status as a threat. The audience wants a clear look at the foe before it’s destroyed; otherwise there’s no payoff or gratification. Zombies, for example, are usually shown in exquisitely gory detail because there’s nothing there with which to empathize. Even if you can see the humans they once were, zombies aren’t people; they’re merely monsters, and are designed to eat housewives and businessmen until they’re destroyed by flame or a 12-gauge blast. The monsters in creature features might be frightening, but as characters they’re no more engaging than the interchangeable aliens foes in Space Invaders. We can’t identify with them, nor do we want to.

Then there’s David, the protagonist of AWIL. We spend a lot of time getting to know David as a character before the appearance of the werewolf. Much of that getting-to-know-you time is spent with the audience well aware of what’s to come, and we empathize with him. He talks with his friend Jack, he canoodles with a pretty nurse, he loafs around a London flat reading books and watching television… and then the moon rises, Rick Baker works his magic, and David becomes the creature we’re meant to fear.

And we do fear it, but why? How is this scenario more horrific than what Lawrence Talbot or Ginger Fitzgerald faced? Like Valero, I think the answer lies in how the werewolf is portrayed: as a shadowy and unknowable presence, seen only in glimpses and heard as menacing sounds from the dark. Just as David has no memory of what he becomes or what he does while in his bestial form, the audience doesn’t really know what the werewolf looks like, so has no way to associate the monster with the man it used to be. This underscores David’s (and therefore the audience’s) horror of the “other” he becomes. Other than the traumatic transformation scene there’s no screen-based connection between David and the werewolf; to the viewer, David is not just transformed but utterly annihilated. Without clear visuals of the beast he becomes, there’s no easy way to equate the likable mop-haired American with the glimpses of fangs and yellow eyes his victims see before they die. Yet we know it’s him, because our minds tell us so, and from that knowledge and our own empathy for the character, a stronger horror is born than that which is derived from an overexposure to props and effects.

What if Wes Craven’s “Cursed” had been filmed with these points in mind? How about any of the “Howling” sequels, or even the dire non-sequel “An American Werewolf in Paris“? No amount of editing or tweaking would turn these into Oscar material, but I think each one could have been more interesting and enjoyable (and less embarrassing to werewolf fans) if the filmmakers had left their werewolves in the shadows like Landis did with AWIL. By focusing on what makes the werewolf a genuinely frightening creature instead of stretching the effects budget in an effort to shock and amaze, I think the the intrepid filmmaker might actually be able to produce a werewolf film worth watching.