Regular Episode
#167 – WEREWOLVES AND CHANGE
September 5, 2018

#167 – WEREWOLVES AND CHANGE

🎙️ Blake Smith and Karen Stollznow return to one of Blake’s all-time favorite monsters — the werewolf — for a deep dive into the shifting shape of werewolf lore across the centuries. The episode revisits several “unsinkable rubber ducks” from the show’s earlier werewolf coverage: the persistent hyena hypothesis for the Beast of Gévaudan, the surprisingly recent origins of the silver-bullet requirement, and the even more recent cinematic invention of the full-moon transformation. Blake also floats a possible science-fair project involving silver coins, raw milk, and bacterial growth rates.

The intro audio is drawn from An American Werewolf in London (1981) and The Wolf Man (1941) — both of which, as the episode makes clear, did more to cement modern werewolf rules than centuries of actual folklore.

🐺 From Divine Curse to Hollywood Monster: A Brief History of Werewolves

Blake traces the werewolf from its earliest forms to its current pop-culture incarnation. The oldest layer of the myth involves divine punishment: in Greek tradition, a mortal offends the gods by serving them human flesh at a banquet, and is transformed into a wolf as retribution — the legend of Lycaon being the most famous example.

The Roman-era Satyricon contains one of the earliest narrative werewolf stories: a soldier strips naked, urinates in a circle around his clothes (which turn to stone), transforms into a wolf, attacks livestock, is wounded, and is later discovered to bear the same wound in human form. Significantly, the full moon is mentioned in the scene — but only as atmospheric backdrop, not as the trigger for transformation.

By the Middle Ages, the werewolf had shifted from a divine curse into a deliberate act of diabolism: a witch’s salve, a belt of wolf-skin, and a pact with the devil. The trials of figures like Peter Stumpp reflect this theological framing. There were parallel “werewolf trials” in Spain and France alongside the broader witch craze. Then, by 1941, screenwriter Curt Siodmak recast the werewolf entirely as a Jekyll-and-Hyde figure — a sympathetic man cursed against his will, as Stephen King noted in Danse Macabre.

🦴 The Beast of Gévaudan and the Hyena Hypothesis

Between 1764 and 1767, the Gévaudan region of rural France suffered a documented series of deadly animal attacks — more than 80 people killed, possibly many more. The attacks were real. The supernatural gloss was applied by a brand-new media technology: the broadsheet newspaper, acting very much like a 18th-century social-media amplifier, spreading sensationalized provincial reports across Europe.

Historian Jay Smith, whose book 📚 Monsters of the Gévaudan 💵 MonsterTalk covered in earlier episodes, has also written the article Dreadful Enemies: The Beast, the Hyena, and Natural History in the Enlightenment (behind a paywall, but potentially accessible via library databases), which Blake discusses at length. Smith’s argument: the hyena hypothesis was not modern — it arose during the Enlightenment itself, when naturalists eager for a rational explanation reached for a known animal whose ancient reputation (gem-like eyes, ability to mimic human speech, near-supernatural bite force) was itself a jumble of classical folklore recycled through the Gutenberg press.

The spotted hyena does possess the strongest bite force of any living land mammal — capable of crushing bone entirely — and the disarticulation of victims’ skeletons has fueled the hypothesis. But Blake and Karen find it unconvincing: there is no plausible route by which a hyena (or hyenas) arrived in rural France, and multiple wolves attacking simultaneously can account for the same skeletal evidence. Occam’s razor, and Smith’s deeper research, favor ordinary wolf attacks inflated by tabloid coverage and folklore. The hyena hypothesis keeps resurfacing, Blake notes, precisely because a rogue exotic beast is a better story — in the same way Jurassic Park‘s scaly dinosaurs have never been updated to feathered ones, because the community has locked in the legend.

🥈 Silver Bullets: A Surprisingly Recent Invention

The requirement that a werewolf be killed with silver turns out to be strikingly modern. Blake traces it to roughly the 1880s, when silver bullets first appear in folklore as a specific anti-werewolf weapon — tied loosely to older witch-killing traditions (witches who shapeshifted into hares or cats were said to be vulnerable to silver). Before that, an ordinary sword or bullet apparently did the job just fine.

Guy Endore‘s 1933 novel 📚 The Werewolf of Paris 💵 features a silver bullet — but notably, it is not what kills the werewolf (who instead falls to his death attempting a Wile E. Coyote-style mattress landing from an asylum window). It was Curt Siodmak’s screenplay for The Wolf Man (1941) that made the silver rule explicit and permanent, with the Romani woman’s warning that only a silver bullet, silver knife, or silver-handled cane could kill the creature. Silver’s folkloric purity — in pre-industrial atmospheres it resisted tarnishing more readily than today — likely underpins its association with warding off supernatural evil.

🌕 Full Moons and Lunacy: Another Hollywood Addition

The full moon as a required trigger for werewolf transformation is even more recent. While the Satyricon mentions a full moon incidentally, Blake identifies Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1943) as the first work to make the full moon an explicit, mechanical cause of the shape-shift.

The phrase “bark at the moon” has a separate, older pedigree — Blake traces it in English to at least 1663, where it meant futile defiance against a superior power (the 1810 Encyclopaedia Londinensis glosses it as acting as uselessly as a dog pretending to terrify the moon). By the 1980s, it had drifted to mean simple madness. The underlying folk belief — that the moon drives people to lunacy (literally: luna) — is very old, but empirically unsupported. Scott Lilienfeld and colleagues addressed the full-moon-behavior myth in their book on psychology misconceptions (see Further Reading), and the data consistently fail to show any increase in emergency-room visits, criminal behavior, or psychiatric episodes correlated with lunar phases. Wolves and dogs howl year-round to communicate; the iconic silhouette of a howling wolf against a full moon is aesthetically powerful and biologically irrelevant.

🧪 Science Fair Project: Silver Coins and Milk

While researching the magical properties of silver, Blake came across American pioneer folklore claiming that placing high-silver-content coins into raw milk would preserve it longer. He was unable to find American primary sources for the practice, though European variants of the legend exist.

The underlying science is not entirely absurd: silver in certain forms does exhibit genuine antimicrobial properties — a phenomenon known as the oligodynamic effect — and silver compounds have a long history in medicine (see the links below). Colloidal silver as a dietary supplement, however, is a different matter entirely: it has not been shown to have therapeutic benefit and carries the charming side effect of argyria (permanent blue-gray skin discoloration).

Blake’s proposed experiment: obtain pre-1950 high-silver-content US coins, place them in Petri dishes with raw (unpasteurized) milk alongside a control dish without silver, and observe whether bacterial colony growth is retarded. He notes the historical backdrop here involves Louis Pasteur, whose germ-theory explanation of pasteurization in the 1880s built on a technique Napoleon had incentivized decades earlier — food preservation by heating in sealed bottles, mechanism unknown until Pasteur. If anyone conducts this experiment, the MonsterTalk team would love to hear the results.

📚 Further Reading

– 📚 Monsters of the Gévaudan: The Making of a Beast 💵 by Jay M. Smith
– 📚 The Werewolf of Paris 💵 by Guy Endore
– 📚 50 Great Myths of Popular Psychology 💵 by Scott O. Lilienfeld et al.
– 📚 Danse Macabre 💵 by Stephen King
– 🎬 An American Werewolf in London 💵
– 🎬 The Wolf Man 💵
– 🎬 Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man 💵
– 🎬 The Howling 💵
– 🎬 Brotherhood of the Wolf 💵 (Le Pacte des Loups)

🔗 Related Links

– Beast of Gévaudan (Wikipedia)
– Lycaon – Greek myth of the original werewolf
– Peter Stumpp – the “Werewolf of Bedburg”
– Oligodynamic Effect (antimicrobial action of metals)
– Silver in Medicine (PMC review article)
– Medical Uses of Silver (Wikipedia)
– Lunar Effect and Lunacy (Wikipedia)
– Curt Siodmak – screenwriter who codified modern werewolf rules

Note: ads inserted into the distributed audio alter the timestamps in unpredictable ways, so timing references in these notes are approximate.

When did full moons become required in werewolf lore? Could the beast of Gevaudan have been a Hyena? Why does silver have such power in folklore? Can silver coins preserve milk? In episode 167 of MonsterTalk, Karen and Blake discuss further discoveries about werewolf lore.

Mentioned in this episode

If you’re interested in the science fair project we mentioned, here are some links:

Music

  • Monstertalk Theme: Monster by Peach Stealing Monkeys
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