Hollywood changes everything. A series of successful films and the commonly-held view of things changes. ‘Vampires turning to ash in sunlight’ is a good example. In Dracula, the Count can walk in the daylight but he hasn’t the power to turn into animals or smoke. This literary rigor mortis also happened to the werewolf. The Werewolf of London (1935) and then The Wolf Man (1941) pretty much cemented the werewolf legend into a single track of silver bullets and wolfsbane.
But it wasn’t always so. The werewolf legend had its classics, each different, each exploring a different part of a wide range of ideas. For the agrarian people of the past, the werewolf’s terror wasn’t because they ate human flesh but preyed upon livestock. The werewolf in Petronius’s The Satyricon attacks Melissa’s sheep, not the woman herself. The Medieval werewolf is often a cursed individual paying penance for some crime, a pathetic figure. It is only with the Victorians, people now largely removed from the country, that the werewolf becomes something else. A monster prowling amongst us, usually as a foreigner, fed by all the xenophobic fears of a crumbling British empire.
Bram Stoker’s werewolves in “Dracula’s Guest” and on the ship in Dracula are closely linked to vampires, both being Count Dracula in another form. Despite this, the 1897 novel did inspire many new tales of werewolfry. H. P. Lovecraft in his essay “The Supernatural Horror in Literature” clearly saw The Door of the Unreal as a descendant of Dracula. Biss’s novel does borrow from Stoker in that it features a group of men stalwartly facing a supernatural force. In Dracula, Lord Godalming, Van Helsing, Harker and several others kill the resurrected Lucy Westerna. Lincoln Osgood acts in the Van Helsing role of ghostbreaker and leader while Burgess is Lord Godalming and Bullingdon is Jonathan Harker. Poor Wuffles is sacrificed much as is Lucy Westerna while the soon-to-be-werewolf Dorothy is the pursued Mina Harker.
If you’d like to read the rest, please check out Monster 3:From the Pages of Dark Worlds Quarterly