In this column, we look at two pop-cultural interpretations of ubiquitous Weird legends as portrayed by two narrative television programs… like how The Closer’s Brenda Johnson and The Muppet Show’s Janice both stockpile excess grrl power in their lips. But with monsters. Enjoy.

This week:
I am the werewolf

Tales from the Crypt, Episode 4×13, “Werewolf Concerto”

And

Futurama, Episode 2×18, “The Honking”

Whether they’re eviscerating innocents or surfing atop speeding vans, werewolves play an integral role in the over-active dream life of the human world; they are an indelible personification of the perpetual internal pugilism between ego and id that holds civilization in tenuous balance between perfection and collapse. Humanity, as contemporary society understands it, is a volatile potion derived from a combination of the instinctual primacy of natural functions and hierarchies, and the imposed order of an invented ethical and social structure. Over the centuries, tales of lycanthropy have been used to represent the eternal ego/id conflict in a variety of venues, including mental illness and human sexuality. After all, unlike vampires, demons or yetis, werewolves are full-time humans who only moonlight as monsters, going feral when the extant animal mechanisms inside them are activated, forcing them to tear through the binding fabric of civilized clothing and run howling out into the world with all the anger and force of a captured animal finally loosed from its cage.

Tales from the Crypt and Futurama both take incisive looks at very different aspects of the curse of the werewolf. Both delight in some of the legend’s traditional trappings – the stark pain of transfiguration, the who-dunnit paranoia of knowing someone in the room is harboring a beast within – while exploring different, but in no way mutually exclusive, facets of the larger ramifications of lycanthropy in the modern age. One episode travels down the well-worn path of the werewolf as male sexuality gone awry, before taking a sharp turn that provides an answer to the reckless pubescent violence of repressed masculinity. The other seeks to acknowledge the co-dependence that the wolf exhibits towards the very system that it longs to devour.

In “Werewolf Concerto,” the owner of a werewolf-stalked luxury resort promises vacationers that an anonymous guest is a veteran werewolf hunter who has agreed to kill the creature. One swaggering, rugged guest in particular, a Mr. Lokai (played by a bestubbled Timothy Dalton), who’s first seen wooing a particularly attractive female into bed, seems extremely driven to uncover the identity of the werewolf, conducting subtle interviews and spying on his fellow vacationers. In the end, it turns out that Lokai is the monster, and his actions were meant to out the hunter, who he could then kill. Unfortunately for Lokai, the aforementioned particularly attractive female is the hunter, and also a vampire who travels the world, killing and feeding on werewolves so as not to have to feed on the innocent. Dalton gets vamp ganked.

In “The Honking,” Bender gets run over by a mysterious 20th century car while visiting the creepy robot town of Thermostadt. Upon returning to New New York, Bender discovers he’s acquired a virus that, each night at exactly 12 AM, turns him into a murderous werecar. Bender discovers that to break the curse, he must discover the original bearer of the virus, and destroy it. After following a trail of increasingly strange were-vehicles, the Planet Express crew locates its quarry in the form of an experimental 2019 Chrysler called Project Satan, which was constructed using parts from all of history’s most evil cars. They proceed to demolish Project Satan, thus breaking the curse.

If these episodes work in tandem to do one thing, it’s to show how broad a swath of the cultural landscape werewolves occupy. Both employ similar genre tropes and ideas, but end up using them to shape and resolve completely separate arguments. Fortunately, “Werewolf Concerto” supplies enough of a version of the contemporary werewolf legend to provide a foundation for the fascinating ramifications of “The Honking”’s tale of manufactured lycanthropy and how it relates to the human nightmare of werewolfism.

Up until the latter years of the 20th century, proper werewolves (meaning those whose transfiguration is involuntary) have always been portrayed as male, the curse of lycanthropy often representing the deep-set violent carnality of masculine sexuality, and the danger of allowing it to be repressed by the societal ethos of sexual virtue and monogamy (again, id vs. ego). Even the transformation itself, what with the sudden sprouting of body hair and fevered grunting and panting, presents a sort of hyper pubescence, belying a powerful, but dark, sexual awakening. The torment of the classic werewolf is his knowledge, during waking hours and long sleepless nights beneath the waxing gibbous moon, that this fierce libidinous animalism is a part of him, ever present, living deep inside and waiting to be unleashed.

Tales from the Crypt flips this paradigm by showing a modern werewolf who has embraced these dark urges, the spontaneous, normative sex that he engages in while in human form acting as a welcome prelude to the ruthless acts of murderous penetration he later performs with his claws. While, initially, the end reveal that the woman who defeats him is actually a vampire seems over the top, really, it’s engaging perfectly with the inherent sexism of the classic werewolf mythos (the denial that women also possess deep-set, primal sexual urges) by embracing the calculatingly ruthless sexuality of vampirism and applying it as almost the female answer to lycanthropy, the fangs offering a physical mechanism for the woman’s penetration of the man. Whether the idea that men’s repressed sexuality is one that’s loud, unfocused and wild and women’s is cold, savvy and manipulative is more sexist toward males or females, I’ll leave up to you to decide. The point is that “Werewolf Concerto” crafts a modern response to one of the oldest interpretations of this lupine threat using an equally classic competing monstrosity.
If Tales from the Crypt is asking, “How might a contemporary werewolf habitually embrace the repressive mores of society,” then is Futurama asking, “How is it that the repressive mores of society habitually create werewolves?” Using the creation of robots with A.I. (and, therefore, free will) to parallel the advent of evolved man, the episode demonstrates that, even if the binary of good and evil is accepted as the pre-existing state of the universe, lycanthropy depends on a structured society in order to exist.

At the time that Project Satan is created, the only robots it can infect with the virus are machines that pre-date A.I. – machines that, once attacked, exist in a static state of evil (“evil” here always referring to the subjective mass perception of evil as that which encourages the deterioration of the prevailing ideology); up to this point, then, the threat is still merely the general existence and corruptive nature of evil. Once A.I. permits robots free will, they become responsible for their own decisions. The curse of that original malignance, the curse of the werecar (the pre-android machine to the werewolf’s pre-human animal), now becomes a threat because it represents an internal prehistoric enemy, crafted before the advent of free will, and therefore immune to the absolute individual control that agency ought to allow. This is the root of lycanthropy’s ability to instill terror – it presents an argument for an absence of free will that is in no way based on things like karma or determinism, but rather on the stifling dogma of nature.

To humanize it, the biological imperatives of humanity (eating, sleeping, etc.) eliminate the possibility of complete free will. By building these necessary processes into the structure of society and constructing choices around them (what to eat, when to sleep, etc.), a functional illusion of freedom is created; however, this same structure requires that limitations be placed on other instincts, and it’s these primal, selfish, but natural, instincts, and the threat they pose to the stability of current societal architecture, that the werewolf embodies.
Just as Tales From the Crypt assures the viewer that the werewolf is still actively hunting, even in a more permissive, modern society, Futurama asserts that even the loosest artificial structure can’t shake the fear of inevitable natural chaos, thereby, answering the Cryptkeeper with a resounding, “no, d’uh.”

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