Werewolf links, news, and reviews
Trendy werewolf stuff for trendy werewolf people.
I’ll bet you can think of nine movie werewolves lamer than Taylor Lautner’s CGI husky in New Moon. So can Movieline! I don’t agree with all of their calls (I still really like the Underworld Lycans), but from Michael Landon to Van Helsing, there are definitely some stinky screen werewolves out there. Anyone care to share their own worst werewolf (that wasn’t on the list)? Personally, I just can’t get behind the slimy pink were-boar of the original Ginger Snaps.
J!NX is selling a World of Warcraft Three Worgen Moon t-shirt, which will be hilarious to werewolf-loving, meme-knowing geeks like me, and which will only mystify the uninitiated. Ladies, is it irresistible? Hat-tip to @electricdog and @tshirtmeme.
So you’ve got a thing for wolves and you’ve got some Zoolander in your blood. But do you feel like the loser you are when you succumb to buying the latest nerdcore Hot Topic Worgen shirt? Do you feel like you have KICK ME, I’M A FUR-FAG written on your forehead when you rock your shitty “Team Jacob” Twilight-themed pawprint shirt around the mall foodcourt or local combat-breakdancing arena? Fear not – Roukas is here to help with this quick guide to some of the most unique, eye-catching lupine apparel out there. My only caveat is that you should do your own ebay checking in addition to the shirts featured here. Ebay listings fluctuate rapidly, and you never know when some obscure member will auction off the most awesomely retro holy grail of werewolf shirts, baseball caps, or whatever.
With that said and done, let’s move on to the goods!
Forget all those Spencer Gifts and TapOut shirts with pseudo-tough designs of tangled thorns, tribal tattoos, thunder, and wolves screaming and flipping out for no reason. Throughout my years of rocking the Adidas track jackets with boot-cut jeans, I’ve learned that simplicity is usually best. This werewolf shirt not only fits that criteria, but it also comes in a hoodie, a long-sleeve shirt, and even on a nifty messenger bag! I suggest ordering it half a size down; that way you can border on the sexy-beast emo thing without looking like you have a complex.
I’m no authority on women’s fashion, but I will say that this is practically the only shirt that would put me in the shoes of that ‘Jizzed in my Pants’ fellow if I saw a young lady wearing it (provided she wasn’t 300lbs or anything). Careful though — shirts like these are easy to wear wrong because the success of you manifesting your wolfy awesomeness is directly proportionate to your attitude. So the bottom line is that if you’re a 17 year-old female who gets moist whenever the weatherman says anything like “…in the mid to low 50’s by TWILIGHT tonight,” then I’d recommend passing on this shirt. However, if you’re a nanometer more mature than that, then you may be able to get away with sporting this baby on the train, at the mall, or on campus. For maximum style and aesthetic trail-blazing, I recommend pairing this up with one of those short-billed Fidel Castro caps you can get at The Gap.
Remember how I said that simplicity is usually best? Well, with this juxtaposed image of a werewolf with party balloons, that principle comes back into play with a sexy vengeance. It’s one thing to be a douche bag and wear shirt featuring a grinning wolf with a PARTY ANIMAL logo, but it’s quite another to rock something indirect and suggestive while bringing the lycanthropic factor to the forefront at the same time. I mean, the people who rock werewolf shirts are normally rolling dice and arguing over magic missiles, and the people who rock the Abercrombie shirts are normally out partying. This shirt bridges that seemingly unbridgeable gap. Few shirts wed nerdcore, beastly, and street-wise so well.
Sporting a good werewolf shirt is a delicate art. You can’t express your affiliation with all things lupine too strongly, otherwise people will avoid you at worst or roll their eyes at you at best. Therefore it’s often best to be retro and indirect when you’re preaching the lycanthropic gospel. This baby here can pass for a shirt that just about anyone would wear. Hey, on one level, it’s just a shirt with a werewolf on it as an advertising kicker. But therein lies its charm: the damn shirt is beastly-beautiful without it knowing that it’s beastly-beautiful, and the same can be true for you, its wearer. As usual, order half a size down and act nonchalant and a little surprised when people comment you on it.
This shirt not only obeys the simplicity rule, but it’s also Celtic and enigmatically beautiful as a misty nightfall on the dew-damp moors of some small British village I know nothing about. Like the Devil’s Breath Chile Company shirt, this baby is lycanthropicly indirect, although I’d recommend wearing it during your low-key moods or occasions. Few things are more literary and soul-stirring than a subtle Celtic art werewolf booking it across the plains with his corvine brethren behind him. Moreover, the people who comment you on this shirt will likely be the same people who are chilled and introspective enough to see shit like this. Rock this at study group or during late-night videogame sessions with friends as you sip an obscure wine or designer-beer.
Okay, I’ve had enough. Every time I pick up a paper or a magazine, browse through blogs or read a news web site, someone is going on about the “werewolves” in Twilight. Aside from being boring, clichéd, visually uninteresting and a misappropriation of Native American culture, the werewolves in Twilight aren’t real werewolves. This fact is even printed in Breaking Dawn, the last book of the series (chapter 37, look it up). I was willing to let this go, but it’s getting so I can’t even walk down the street without hearing someone sighing dreamily over “those hot Quileute werewolves”. People are making their own Twilight-inspired werewolf stuff out of craft supplies and selling them to each other online. There are dozens of Twilight-based “OMG R U A WEREWOLF OR A VAMPIRE??” online quizzes designed to fill up your sister’s MySpace page and destroy the signal-to-noise ratio on Twitter. Don’t even get me started on the blog discussions.
So what can I do? Well, as an Internet-savvy werewolf fan, I can try to enlist your help in making a number get bigger:
http://werewolf-news.com/twilight/
It’s not much, but it’s something. If you feel the same way I do about this crazy business, please share the URL. Post it on your blog, spread it around on Twitter, and participate in the grim satisfaction of having complained about something on the Internet. You might feel a little bit better– I did.
The classic werewolf film An American Werewolf in London has been getting a lot of press lately, what with the Blu-ray edition on the way this September, and Dimension Films getting ready to shoot a remake. Today, Den of Geek is taking a look back at AWIL in the form of an article about the film’s groundbreaking status when it was released in the 80’s, and its status today as (some would say) the Holy Grail of werewolf films. Supplemented with some great still-frames and some interesting trivia, it’s well worth a read.
ArmchairAccomplice sent me a link to “Harry Palms”, an episode of The Receptionist by Travis Betz. The link was accompanied by a note that read “low tech werewolf musical hits youtube, the less I say the better.” I watched. I bit my fist. I went to Travis’s web site and confirmed my suspicions: Travis Betz is a demented genius. And now, I share the video with you.
The art of making a good werewolf book cover must be tough shit. For reasons that modern Roukasian science has yet to discover, most monster-fans shun lycanthropes in favor of books featuring thin pale guys who sip blood, sparkle, and languish in a dark existential tardzone. Of course, this may prompt me to smoothly remove my box-frame emo glasses as I lounge in my Panera booth-seat and say something like: “Well then what, dear reader, constitutes a monster to begin with? Perhaps his multifacetedness is all too eager to transgress our subjective demarcations of criticism and culture?”
While that’s a legitimate question, fuck it for now. There are tons, tons of werewolf book covers out there that suck royal truckloads of ass, and I have some ideas why. Perhaps it’s because the awesomeness of snarly animal-humans is just too hard for people to capture. Perhaps it’s because the human mind, when it gets its hands on the demonic cauldron of Photoshop, goes 100% more bat-shit crazy than it already is. Perhaps because, dear reader, a populace that exalts its own divorce from Thoreauvian nature will, by implication, fail to capture the energy of predation, especially if it fails to even remember that the Grande Columbian Dark-Roast Almond Latte always comes with soy, not SKIM milk.
Anyway, here are some more shitty werewolf book covers. A while ago, Werewolf News ran a feature of mine called “The Top Five Worst Werewolf Book Covers Ever,” and now I’m back to do it again.
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Before he passed away, Michael Jackson was getting ready for “This Is It”, a 50-show residency at London’s O2 Arena. Now that Michael’s gone, refunds are being issued for tickets, but the official Michael Jackson tour web shop is still selling This Is It merchandise, including this “Cartoon Thriller video Michael Jackson Werewolf shirt“. Questions of taste and decorum aside, I want this shirt.
While searching for an image to accompany a post about the inclusion of Michael Jackson’s Thriller werewolf costume in a stage performance he was working on, I found this fantastic illustration by storyboard artist Shane Lewis. From the oh-so-80’s jacket to his tremendous mane, Shane totally nailed Michael’s werewolf look from the epic music video. Truly, werewolf Michael Jackson is not like other guys. For starters, no other guy would wear loafers like that. Shane posted this around Halloween 2007, back when the Internet only had miserable things to say about Jackson, so he earns quadruple karma points for being a kick-ass artist and a nice guy. Check out Shane’s blog for more awesome art (and to learn about his apparent fear of being eaten by sharks and / or bears).
John Tebbutt of Fast Forward Weekly recently posted a great article about the history of the Little Red Riding Hood story as told in various films over the past 80 years. While not strictly about werewolves, it’s a great look at the role that “wolves”, both animal and human, have played in motion pictures. Worth a read, and it might help you expand your rental list.