The Werewolf vs The Vampire Woman

The Werewolf vs Vampire Woman, by Arthur N. Scarm

No month stated, 1972  G-H Books

Ramble House trade paperback reprint (As The Werewolf vs The Vampire Woman), 2007

I’m certain I have a copy of this obscure paperback tie-in somewhere, but I’m unable to find it – thankfully, Ramble House has reprinted The Werewolf vs The Vampire Woman, and their reprint might be even superior to the original, as it contains cool interior illustrations by Alan Hutchinson. 

This novelization of an equally-obscure Spanish horror film is probably more well-known today than it was in 1972. In fact it’s interesting that this movie, part of the cycle of werewolf movies starring Paul Naschy, was even slated for a novelization in America; too bad more drive-in fare wasn’t novelized at the time, but at least we’ll always have Coffy. 

I have not seen all twelve (or thirteen, if you count the rumored “lost” film) of the Naschy werewolf movies, but I have seen a few of them, The Werewolf vs The Vampire Woman among them, and that’s more than can be said for tie-in author “Arthur M. Scarm,” who clearly has not seen the movie, and here turns in a wholly original novel that is like nothing I have read before…and given the amount of trashy, bizarre stuff I’ve reviewed on here since 2010, that’s really saying something. 

Instead of the Gothic yarn lensed by director Leon Kilmovsky, with Naschy’s werewolf character in rural France and trying to save a pair of cute co-eds from a resurrected black magic sorceress of a vampire, Scarm’s “novelization” is a dark comic epic in comparison, a nasty, mean-tempered, but nonetheless humorous story about a werewolf and a vampire queen, and the havoc they wreak together. 

It’s also insane, and seems to be a booze and/or coke-fueled first draft, jumping wily-nily from one atrocity to another, Scarm laughing madly at the typewriter as he pounds the keys. And yet for all that, there is something to The Werewolf vs The Vampire Woman that ascends the nasty nature of the book and instead comes off like the morbid tale of two doomed characters. 

Scarm isn’t content to just make up his own story instead of following the film; he also comes up with a new approach to werewolves and vampires. For the former – well, despite those cool interior illustrations I mentioned in the Ramble House edition, which show “hero” Waldo the Werwolf (presumably Scarm’s version of Waldemar Danisnsky, which is the name of Naschy’s character in the films) as a full-blown wolf man, complete with fur and fangs, Scarm specificies in the novel that Waldo looks for the most part like a normal man…save for a curious “band of hair around his middle,” which is the sign that he is a werewolf. 

As if this wasn’t WTF? enough, we also learn that once a year all werewolves become actual werewolves, ie with the fur and fangs, and Waldo’s night happens to be New Year’s Eve. This is the night the werewolves go really wild and murder with a total bloodlust…not that they don’t kill the same way every other night of the year. Even more strangely, Scarm has it that the werewolves don’t kill by tearing people apart, or by strangling them like Larry Talbot in the old Wolf Man movie; no, Waldo uses stakes, which he carries around in his back pocket and hammers into the hearts of his prey: men, women, and children. 

Vampires in Scarm’s world are also different: they can go out in daylight and they can be photographed and filmed. Actually, Scarm doesn’t mention that this is even notable, giving the impression that he’s not aware that vampires traditionally are supposed to shun daylight and cast no reflection. There are parts where Wandessa, the vampire queen – the same name the character has in the film, though she isn’t referred to as a vampire queen there – looks at her reflection in the mirror, admiring her beauty…not to mention the part toward the end where she becomes a movie superstar. 

I also forgot to mention, but in addition to being “daywalkers” and having reflections/images that can be captured on film, vampires also have “hollow teeth” for fangs, and drink blood direclty through these teeth, like straws. They also don’t seem to be very averse to religious iconography; at least, nothing of the sort is used against Wandessa in the book. 

I’ll refrain from comparing the novelization to the actual film, as there is no comparison. Other than the very beginning, which sees “Waldo” being brought back to life by a foolish coroner who takes the silver bullet out of the dead man’s chest, not believing there’s any such thing as werewolves. As with the film, Waldo kills the man and escapes, and also as with the film, we have a pair of coeds – Genevieve and Elvira – who are interested in the legendary Wandessa, and want to find her for a class project or something. 

It’s here that the novelization deviates, and wildly so, but for posterity, the movie proceeds on an altogether level-headed narrative, at least when compared to Scarm’s story: young Genevieve (hotstuff German actress Barbara Capell) accidentally brings Wandessa to life, and the sexy vampire babe (as played by Patty Shepard) is out for blood – and meanwhile Waldemar and Elivra (big-haired Gaby Fuchs) fall in love. Overall it’s a pretty cool movie, and I’m sure it was a blast to see at the drive-in. 

Scarm says to hell with all that. Genevieve and Elvira are college students who want to find Wandessa, the queen of the vampires, and somehow Waldo the Werewolf hears about this and decides to tag along – that is, when he isn’t banging them, usually both at the same time. Now let me tell you right here and now, while you will often see Arthur Scarm’s The Werewolf vs The Vampire Woman described as sleazy, or filled with sex, I want to specify that all of the sex either occurs off-page or is not even described at all. 

Indeed, there is an almost “storytelling” vibe to the tale, a half-assed omniscient tone that gives the impression that Scarm has pulled up a chair and is telling you a tall tale; there is no real attempt at conveying a proper story, and the entire thing comes off more like the booze-fueled recounting of a legend or myth. It also occurred to me that Scarm’s story is like a ‘50s pre-code horror comic, operating as it does in a non-reality, almost fairy tale-like atmosphere, with a vibe that is both vicious and humorous. 

Waldo is certainly a hard character to relate to, and it’s clear Scarm doesn’t intend him to be a hero. Waldo is a murderer, killing hundreds of men, women, and children in the course of the book, if not by a stake to the heart then by other ways. Wandessa is equally as sadistic, though there are several parts where she tries to break free of her vampire ways, “drinking just enough blood” to keep her satiated, but ensuring that her victims don’t die. 

Actually another interpretation of Scarm’s The Werewolf vs The Vampire Woman is that it’s a thinly-veiled account of two alcoholics getting on and off the wagon. Waldo is the driver, comfortable with his murderous ways and constantly pushing Wandessa to embrace her bloodlust, and Wandessa will put up a struggle but ultimately fall off the wagon and start killing again. But soon enough they both want to be free of their addictions, leading to crazy parts where they go to a therapist. 

There’s no attempt whatsoever at conveying realism; I don’t expect that from a horror novel, but Scarm sets the novel in an entirely different reality. This is apparent from the beginning, in which a pair of college co-eds want to wake up a vampire queen for their college thesis. Scarm doesn’t even bother much with background material; Wandessa has been “dead” in a coffin since the late 1800s, but cannot remember how she got there, and Scarm never bothers to fill in the blanks. As for Waldo, we have no idea how he became a werewolf, but we know he certainly wasn’t born one, because, in another curious tidbit Scarm relays to us, werewolves are made, not born, because werewolves cannot have orgasms. 

Crazily enough, Scarm sticks to his bizarre supernatural theologisms through the book as if they were holy writ; after reading this novel, I thought maybe I’d missed something and maybe werewolves really did look just like normal people, only with a band of hair around their “middle.” And hell, maybe they do stake their prey instead of strangling them or eating them. Hell, who’s to really say?? 

The first chapter alone is nuts. Waldo comes back to life, hooks up with the coeds, and they go looking for Wandessa’s grave. And as mentioned Waldo has his sexual way with both gals, and while the stuff isn’t explicit we do learn that Waldo has a giant “wang,” which is another indication he’s a werewolf. Oh and there’s a third girl, Ruth, who didn’t even exist in the film, a nurse who fell in love with Waldo when he was brought back to life by the coroner (after which Waldo promptly took advantage of her there in the operating room – but she liked it, of course), and who is now in love with Waldo and wants to go wherever he goes. 

Waldo is a bad guy for sure, and to his credit he tells the girls – and us readers – this from the get-go: “Only expect evil from a werewolf.” He treats the girls roughly (though again, they enjoy it), kills to slake his bloodlust, and secretly plots to drive a stake into Wandessa’s heart when they find her because he hates all vampires. “And yet, I was in love with a vampire once,” Waldo ruminates, but this hint of actual backstory is so quickly cast aside that I actually laughed aloud. 

Scarm is like that throughout; he trades between total lurid vileness and soul-plumbing introspection. To be honest, if I hadn’t known better I would’ve suspected The Werewolf vs The Vampire Woman might have been an early novel by Len Levinson, as Scarm’s style is not totally dissimilar. Then again, I might be just as inclined to suspect Russell Smith, given the breathless narrative tone and the overall deranged vibe. But as it turns out, according to the sleuthing of Paul Collins, “Arthur Scarm” was really a writer named Leo Guild…who it turns out I’ve reviewed on here in the past, at least a short piece he wrote about Hollywood for a men's magazine. 

Oh and I forgot to mention, but Scarm (I just prefer to refer to him by his goofy pseudonym) gives werewolves all kinds of bizarre powers…like, Waldo can enter the dreams of people, turning the dream into a nightmare, and also he can…shrink a woman’s breasts, which he promptly does to one of the girls, leading to the unforgettable line, “My wonderful breasts!” Not to worry, as Waldo later grows them back, all via black magic…this scene alone is very Len Levinson-esque and would’ve had me emailing Len asap to see if he wrote the book. 

The novel goes from one atrocity to another as Waldo kills all and sundry – even, suprisingly enough, characters we thought were going to be important to the plot. In one instance Waldo gets so mad that one of the three girls tricked him into having sex with her that he bashes her to pieces…then, in one of Scarm’s frequent bizarre interludes, Waldo runs away and disguises himself as a clown, apropos of nothing, and starts following the two remaining girls as they hunt for Wandessa’s hidden grave. He even buys the circus so he can follow them around “without drawing attention.” 

Unlike the film, Wandessa is the co-protagonist of this novelization; upon her resurrection in a graveyard, she hangs out with the group, fighting against or alongside Waldo for the rest of the book. Waldo plans to kill her, but due to comic reasons is unable to put his silver knife in her heart, but after thinking of it a bit he’s happy because the two can team up and kill people together – the first pairing of a werewolf and a vampire, we’re told. 

Eventually, Wandessa is the only recurring character outside of Waldo who remains in the book, and this only furthers the fairy tale nature of Scarm’s narrative; these two are like the center of the universe, despite being impossible to track down by the police. They rove across the country, killing with abandon – and even here it’s not traditional horror novel stuff, with bizarre, darkly comic stuff like the two of them fixing the switches at an intersection, causing a horrific pile-up of cars, and then Waldo and Wandessa going into the wreckage to kill the maimed survivors. 

Scarm shows no limitations with how far he will go, with an especially repugnant scene where Waldo puts his murderous eye on a group of kids, even luring them back to his apartment so he can kill them. Even Wandessa is sickened when Waldo murders a young boy by smashing his head; for her part, Wandessa “only drinks a small amount” of a little girl’s blood, just enough to satiate herself but to not kill the girl. 

Waldo is even more crazed on his “werewolf night,” ie New Year’s Eve, where he turns into your traditional-looking furry werewolf and goes on a kill spree. Even here Scarm follows his own path; on his special night, Waldo is granted additional powers, and indeed can will himself anywhere he wants just by thinking about it(!). So we have crazy horror movie stuff where he’ll just appear on a train and start staking people in the heart, travelers who find themselves confronted by a werewolf that has come out of nowhere. 

Scarm shows a definite talent for keeping the madcap, vicious plot moving, but it seems clear that he writes himself into a corner, as the second half of the novel goes into freefall. First, Wandessa, who like a recovering alcoholic keeps trying to reform, only to be dragged back down by Waldo, sets her “friend” up with the cops and then takes off to hide in Hollywood…and here we go in an entirely different direction, as a naïve Wandessa somehow lands herself a contract with a movie studio. 

Now it’s essentially a Hollywood novel, only our aspiring starlet is a vampire. Of course Scarm has it that she’s starring in a horror movie, as a vampire no less, and soon Wandessa is using her true vampire nature to become a bigger and bigger star – “actually” biting her co-stars and whatnot. Things get progressively goofier when Wandessa tells the director she knows a “real werewolf” and Waldo gets hired onto the picture! 

Now the narrative has changed entirely, and instead of murderers on a killspree, Waldo and Wandessa are big Hollywood celebrities. They’ve also found true love – though Scarm toys with the idea, he never has Waldo and Wandessa become an item – and are about to get married(!), Wandessa to a black actor and Waldo to a butch sort of stunt woman. Meanwhile the cops are closing in…which is itself goofy, as these two commit atrocities throughout the novel, yet are always “hiding” from the cops…cops who can never seem to catch them. 

Not to make this sound like War and Peace or anything – though to be sure, I’d rather read The Werewolf vs The Vampire Woman than War And Peace – but Scarm does a good job working in the “doomed couple” nature of Waldo and Wandessa, particularly when it comes to their (super)natural hatred for one another. This plays out in a rushed but memorable climax which sees Wandessa having some hot lesbian lovin’ with Waldo’s fiance…much to Waldo’s fury. 

I do appreciate that Leo Guild/Arthur Scarm took the opportunity to write an entirely new story, yet at the same time it would’ve been just as cool if he’d novelized the actual film. I haven’t seen all the Naschy vampire movies, just the ones from the ‘70s, and The Werewolf vs The Vampire Woman is one of the better ones, and a book that actually told its tale would have been welcome. I’m going to bet Naschy himself was unaware that this novelization told a completely different tale than his movie. 

Thanks again to Ramble House for making this bizarre novel available for the masses – head over to their website for your copy today! Guaranteed to be the strangest book you will read this year…or any other year! To be honest, I feel that I’ve barely even described how whacky and disturbed this novel is. 

Here’s the cover for their edition, with artwork by Gavin L. O’Keefe:

Black Samurai #6: The Warlock (Second Review)

Black Samurai #6: The Warlock, by Marc Olden

January, 1975  Signet Books

It’s hard to believe, but it’s going on 15 years since I reviewed this sixth installment of Black Samurai. This was the first volume of the series I read, and at the time I was unaware that it had been the source material for the film adaptation. I loved the book when I read it back in 2010, and reading it again now in 2025, I loved it again. 

For one, I’m a bit more familiar with the work of Marc Olden at this point, so I see how his style is so evident in The Warlock. Stuff that I might not have noticed in my first reading of his work, all those years ago. But it’s all here – the large cast of characters, the frequent cutting between perspectives, the occasional lapse into stream-of-consciousness as we dip into the thoughts of various characters. 

Yes, it’s all here, but this time Olden reins it in, to the point that very little of The Warlock comes off as padded. And it’s pretty impressive because Olden clearly indicates he has not become bored with the series; six volumes in, and he turns in the most entertaining installment yet, filled to the brim with crazy characters and situations. It’s almost like he took a brief survey of the mid-‘70s men’s adventure field, saw how lurid everything had become, and decided to turn the dial of his own series to 10. (Or 11, for you Spinal Tap fans.) 

But man, Marc Olden really threw in the kitchen sink with this one, and not to sound redundant, but it’s impressive. I mean it opens with Robert “Black Samurai” Sand being attacked by a pair of transvestite dwarves, for pete’s sake, with the dwarves wielding razor blades and slicing them at Sand. Not long after that our hero is attacked by “Lion Men,” brawny black dudes in leopard costumes, like they came out of a ‘30s Tarzan movie. (Tarzan And His Mate of course being the best of the lot – complete even with full female nudity in an underwater swimming scene…pretty impressive for a movie from 1934!) 

Again it surprises me that Al Adamson chose this volume to adapt for his movie version of Black Samurai. Reading the book again, after having finally seen the movie a few years ago (as mentioned in my review from back then, I was waiting forever for the uncut version to come out), I see how much content Adamson changed, likely for budgetary reasons…yet, at the same time, he added a bunch of stupid shit that wasn’t in the book that certainly increased his budget. Like a sportscar for Sand. Not to mention a friggin’ jetpack a la Thunderball. And even a moronic fight with a vulture. 

No, none of that stuff is in The Warlock. In fact, Adamson could’ve done a straight adaptation of the source material and he could’ve done it with the limited budget he was working with. He also toned down on the lurid element Olden brought his tale. Janicot, the titular “Warlock,” is a total freak in the novel, filming black magic snuff films for his jet-setting followers and making scads of money off the proceeds; as I mentioned in my review of the movie, the Janicot of the film comes off more like a poor man’s Uncle Arthur from Bewitched. 

Femme fatale Synne also suffers greatly in the movie. I’d forgotten how much Olden puts into her character in the novel: here she is a force of unbridled sex, a hotstuff black babe with silver hair and lipstick. In fact I wish she was in the novel more than she is. She’s Janicot’s second in command, and Olden has it that she’s so blown away by Robert Sand that she jeopardizes her standing with Janicot. That said, nothing much comes of this, and Sand bluntly turns down Synne’s offer for sex – indeed, Sand goes without for this particular volume. 

But as usual I’m getting ahead of myself. Looking at my surprisingly-short original review of The Warlock, I see that I failed to note what the plot was about. Well, in this one Sand is tasked by his boss, former president William Baron Clarke, to take down Janicot, an Aleister Crowley type who runs a satanic cult. Janicot specializes in getting politicians in compromising positions in his sexual rituals, which are filmed for blackmail purposes, and an old colleague of Clarke’s has gotten in too deep. 

We meet Sand as he’s already in France, researching. As with most Black Samurai novels – and, come to think of it, a lot of Olden’s Narc books as well – the action takes place in Paris. I’m not sure if Olden lived there or was just fascinated with the place, but he constantly has stuff taking place in Paris. And that’s where Sand is as The Warlock opens, walking into an ambush courtesy a pair of leather-clad transvestite dwarves. 

Olden really brings home how sadistic these little bastards are; they are the bodyguards of Janicot, we’ll later learn – cross-dressing psyco dwarves who carry razor blades. The opening of the book features a great bit where Sand kicks one of the little bastards. Olden wisely keeps the dwarves a minor presence (lame pun alert); I don’t believe he even names any of them. Nor does he name any of the “Lion Men” who also serve Janicot – burly black men in leopard costumes who battle Sand in the opening sequence, but who then essentially disappear from the narrative. 

This is because Olden, as usual, has a ton of other characters he focuses on. As ever this means Robert Sand himself is lost in the shuffle, but the villains this time are so colorful the reader doesn’t much mind. I mean, there’s Bone, who serves as Janicot’s henchman, a gay albino sadist. There’s Rheinhart, a friggin’ werewolf, who was raised (as a cub?) by Janicot and is the most fierce fighter in the Warlock’s employ – and also we’re told of the creature’s various attacks on women, Olden building on the overall lurid tone of the narrative. 

There’s also Chavez, returning from the fourth volume; in belabored backstory that doesn’t make much sense, Chavez has hired Janicot to capture and kill the Black Samurai. We briefly met Chavez at the end of The Deadly Pearl, where he swore revenge for his brother’s death; the dude certainly has a roundabout way of getting revenge, as he’s hired Janicot to track down Robert Sand, capture him, drug him, and kill him on-camera in a black magic ritual or something…which is the sort of thing Janicot does. 

Reading the book again, I was impressed once more with how lurid Marc Olden got, particularly with Janicot…I’d forgotten the hinted-at backstory that Janicot was a Nazi in the war, one who renamed himself and gradually drew an international following as a mystic guru. Olden delivers a few jet-setter party sequences Janicot throws in Paris that could come out of a contemporary trash paperback. There are also a few scenes where Janicot kills off people who have run afoul of him or his cult, and Olden really brings to life the plight of the unfortunates; some of the material here could come out of the sweats of the era, focused on torture and suffering. 

What’s interesting is that Olden has enough for a novel with this setup, but he also throws in Toki, Sand’s Japanese beloved, not seen since (I think?) the first volume. Janicot has also been hired to blackmail a Vietnamese politician who has campaigned on an anti-corruption platform, and this dude just happens to be married to Toki. Janicot is supposed to get the guy and film him in some depraved satanic orgy to use as leverage on him. And meanwhile, Janicot has learned that this guy’s wife is also the love of the Black Samurai’s life (how Janicot’s learned this is left vague), so the Warlock figures he can get double bang for his buck – kidnap Toki and use her as Black Samurai bait. 

And yet even this isn’t enough for Olden; Sand is already on the trail of Janicot at novel’s start, unaware of the Warlock’s plans for Toki. This is because Janicot has pulled the same blackmailing trick on a French politician the Baron is friends with, and so the Baron has asked Sand to go over to Paris and get the goods on the Warlock. So in other words “it’s personal this time” for this particular installment; there’s no big global threat the Black Samurai is looking to stop. 

Curious, then, that director Al Adamson gussied up the plot with so much fluff. For those who have seen the film but never read the book: Sand doesn’t drive a sportscar. He does not, at any point, put on a rocket pack straight out of Thunderball. He doesn’t fight a vulture(!). And he doesn’t wear a tracksuit at any point of the novel. Indeed, watching the movie again after re-reading The Warlock, it blew my mind that Adamson was too foolish to just do a straight adaptation, as the ensuing film would have been more senastionalistic…and likely cheaper, too. 

One thing the movie did get right with its “fluff” is more in the way of sex and nudity. There’s little of either in the novel. Robert Sand does not have sex in this one, though the, uh, carrot is dangled – courtesy Synne, certainly the most interesting female character yet in the Black Samurai series, if not the entire men’s adventure genre. She’s a black beauty who serves as Janicot’s vassal (or something), a former hooker from the American South who was discovered by Janicot and turned into essentially the embodiment of sex; the Warlock uses her to screw VIPs, and though there is not a single sex scene in the novel, we’re informed that Synne can keep a man happy. Oh, and she has long, straight hair that’s been dyed silver, and also she wears silver lipstick and silver nail polish. This is something Al Adamson also chose to ignore in his film adaptation…but then, actress Marilyn Joi doesn’t look much like how Synne is described, anyway. 

Even Robert Sand is taken back by her staggering and exotic beauty; we are told that his stern, “samurai!” façade is tested by Synne. But it’s all simmer and no boil. Synne catches sight of Sand, and – in the frequent cutovers to Synne’s perspective that occur through the novel – we learn she’s developed a thing for the Black Samurai. He’s a real man, she can tell, and not like the sadistic brutes she has to screw to keep Janicot happy. Men like Chavez…who, by the way, engages Synne twice in the novel, off-page, as does another guy Janicot is keeping happy, a stuffy British doctor. 

As I mentioned in my original review, the Sand-Synne stuff is ultimately anticlimactic. They have a “meet cute” early in the book, when Sand, dressed like a movie cowboy with a Lone Ranger mask, crashes a Paris party of Janicot’s. He runs into the silver-haired Synne, and there’s a clear mutual attraction. But when they have their actual face-to-face, later in the novel, not much comes of it. Synne offers herself to Sand, but as usual he’s all business – plus at this point he’s learned that Toki is in danger – and Sand turns Synne down. Something that makes the silver-lipped beauty freak out in rage, as no one spurns her. But man, that’s it – there’s never another meeting between the two. 

Olden does deliver on the action front, though. And not since that first volume has Sand been so put to the test; he must rely on his samurai resolve quite often in the narrative, being outnumbered and outgunned at frequent points. There’s a fight with the werewolf late in the tale that’s pretty cool – again, shocking that Al Adamson, who made schlocky, low-budget horror movies, didn’t include the werewolf in his film adaptation – and, though brief, the fight is brutal, with the additional element that Sand is injured at the time, with a broken wrist. 

There isn’t a big fight with Chavez; indeed, Olden follows his usual template in that the novel is so busy that he must hurriedly bring everything to a close in the final pages. Chavez is for the most part a secondary character; in his frequent cutovers we see him mulling over how whacko Janicot is (which of course makes the reader wonder why Chavez hired Janicot in the first place), and also chomping at the bit for “the black man to die.” 

The action takes place for the most part in Paris, including an extended action sequence where Sand tries to kill Janicot at a small airport – leading to a tense capoff where Sand commandeers the plane on the tarmac. This leads to a strange bit where the Baron, all the way back in Texas, somehow knows that it wasn’t really Janicot at the airport, and it was all a fake-out to get Sand. Another strange miss is all the stuff with Toki; this is another bit Al Adamson made more of a deal of. But in the novel itself, Sand and Toki don’t even really have a moment together; Sand saves her, but she’s out cold at the time. 

Since I’m on a spoiler kick, skip this paragraph if you don’t want to know what happens. But the resolution with Synne is also lame. She’s killed off-page…by Chavez! Olden delivers one of his customary rushed finales with Janicot’s people all holed up in a remote house once the action has moved Stateside, and Sand leads a team of the Baron’s men into the compound to kill everyone. When Sand storms into the house, he catches Chavez as Chavez is coming out of a room. Sand kills him without much fuss – there’s no big dramatic payoff – and then Sand discovers Synne’s corpse in the bedroom. Material from her perspective has already hinted that Chavez is rough and sadistic in the sack, so this turns out to have been foreshadowing on Olden’s part; Chavez apparently killed Synne during some rough sex. Still, it’s a bit of a letdown. I wanted more from this unusual character. 

As mentioned in my original review, Janicot is still around at novel’s end; there’s a horror-esque finale where his ghostly voice calls to Sand in the dark of the night, and we’re to understand the Black Samurai is properly bugged out. But I do not believe Janicot returns; the series only lasted for two more volumes, and looking at the back covers I see no mention of the Warlock’s return. But then, villains not getting their comeuppance was a staple in Olden’s Narc series. 

Overall though, I enjoyed The Warlock just as much on this second reading, and I was very impressed with the level of insanity Marc Olden injected into it – comparatively speaking, it’s a lot crazier than the previous five volumes of Black Samurai, and displays a more pulpy side of Olden than those familiar with his work might expect.

Atomic Werewolves And Man-Eating Plants

Atomic Werewolves And Man-Eating Plants, edited by Robert Deis and Wyatt Doyle

August, 2023  New Texture

Robert Deis and Wyatt Doyle knock it out of the park again with another gift-quality hardcover anthology of vintage men’s adventure magazine yarns. The theme this time is similar to their earlier publication Cryptozoology Anthology, but whereas the men’s mag stories in that one at least attempted a “realistic” vibe, the stories in the fantastically-titled Atomic Werewolves And Man-Eating Plants are for the most part straight fiction with a supernatural bent. That so many such stories could be collected for this 300-page tome once again indicates how fertile the men’s mag genre really was; it wasn’t just all war stories and the like. 

Publication quality is phenomenal, with thick, pulpy paper and full-color art reproduced throughout the book, as well as copious black-and-white illustrations. If you are looking for a nice Christmas present for that men’s adventure magazine lover in your life, then Atomic Werewolves And Man-Eating Plants would make for a fine gift. Or if you’re still in the Halloween spirit, pick up a copy for yourself; I read my copy around that time, and it made for a perfect seasonal read. For indeed herein you will find werewolves, man-eating plants, bloodthirsty stone age cults, and even post-nuke mutant hellbeasts. 

The book opens with a few well-written essays from various sources, going over the connections between the pulps of the early 20th Century and the later men’s adventure magazines, noting how some of the latter would even reprint stories from the former. As ever Bob Deis’s intro was my favorite, as he provides an overview of every story collected along with what’s known about the writer. In most cases not much at all is known, likely because the author was a pseudonym; especially true in Atomic Werewolves because so many of these stories are the b.s. “as told to” yarns that constantly ran in men’s magazines – meaning a fictional narrator tells you “what really happened” directly. Bob also does a great job giving details on the various men’s mag artists who worked on these stories. 

As usual the stories are arranged chronologically by order of publication. Thus first story “The Flag Of The Stonewall Brigade,” from the March, 1953 Action, is the earliest, taking place while the Korean War was still going on. This fun story, credited to Ronald Adamson, really comes from a different era, as Bob alludes to in his intro: the gist of it concerns an old Confederate flag which brings luck to a battered platoon in the thick of it in Korea. Hoisted by a new guy from deep in the South – the flag belonged to his grandfather – the flag seems to keep the soldiers from any casualties. And when things get real bad, the ghosts of the old Stonewall Brigade show up to help! A fun, goofy tale, one that tries to retain the “true” conceit of most men’s mags – our narrator just knows that no one will believe him, but he knows what he saw, dammit! 

“When The Vampire Was Captured,” by Ward Semple and from the March 1953 True Weird, takes a page from Bram Stoker (again as noted by Bob!). This one tells us of “England’s famous Croglin Grange vampire,” told in an expose sort of style. The titular vampire gets his fangs into a local virgin, and some concerned folk set a trap for it. Very gothic story, and worth noting that the vampire isn’t the lothario type that woos his female prey but is instead a decayed and repugnant freak. 

“Vampires Ripped My Flesh,” by Lewis Greer and from the March 1956 Man’s Life, features a title that calls back to a more famous men’s mag story (even though as Bob notes in his intro, this one was published first), and the story could’ve come right out Bob and Wyatt’s I Watched Them Eat Me Alive anthology (review forthcoming!). It’s 1946, the jungles of Colombia, and the narrator tells us how he and his companions had just “escaped the spears of the savages” when they ended up in a worse predicament – a cave filled with blood-thirsty vampire bats. 

Up next is one that could’ve appeared in Cryptozoology: “Island Of Doom,” by Bill Wharton and from the Spring 1957 Sport Trails. This one’s in third person and concerns a trio of guys on an island with a fifteen foot high, fifty foot “dragon,” one that has a taste for human flesh. (A recurring theme if ever there was one in this anthology!) Wharton plays fast and loose with his “true” vibe, telling us at the end that the dragon might’ve been a really big iguana! 

Those “man-eating plants” of the book’s title appear in the ghoulish “Trapped By A Man-Eating Tree,” by Robert Moore and from the March 1958 Man’s Life. Another “as told to” yarn, this one purports to be the account of a Dutch guy who escaped a Japanese camp in 1943 and ended up shipwrecked on an island. His two companions, hungering for a smoke, set upon a tree with tobacco-like leaves…but it’s a tree that friggin’ eats people, setting off a gharish story – one with very nice, Hannes Bok-esque art that is nicely rendered in green-and-black duotone on the front and back covers of Atomic Werewolves And Man-Eating Plants. 

One of my favorite stories here is “The Hunted,” by Rick Rubin and from the October 1961 issue of Adventure. Decades before he produced the Beastie Boys, Rick Rubin turned out this piece of fast-moving sci-fi. (Just kidding – it’s another guy of the same name…or pseudonym.) It’s a third-person tale in which a male and female, both described as “big” and “rugged,” escape the slavepens humans are kept in by robots in this grim future – where “The strong will survive” is emblazoned on posters everywhere. The two lose some comrades as they make their way across harsh terrain, occasionally chased by robots, while also (inevitably) becoming close with one another – not that the story has any naughty stuff. Indeed, their relationship is based off mutual need for survival, then blossoms into respect for one another. This one also features a goofy “surprise” ending that, despite being goofy, just feels right. Oh, and a great line’s in this one: “Maybe brutality is the price of freedom.” 

We get the titular “werewolf” of the anthology next, in “The Werewolf And The Cowboy,” from the November 1961 See For Men and written by Stuart Evans. Set in 1937, this one’s about a werewolf plaguing a rural area, showing up each fool moon and killing sheep or people. Features an evocative finale in which the protagonist sets up a trap for the werewolf and waits for him with a .44 magnum; if Stephen King had ever written expressly for men’s adventure magazines (not withstanding the stories he had printed in girlie mags and whatnot), it would’ve been something like this. 

“Mad Doctor Of No-Name Key” is really along the horror lines; it’s by Peter Aldridge and from the December 1961 Adventure Life. This one was pretty ghoulish, but not done in a very exploitative style, concerning an old doctor who falls in love with a young girl – a love that spans into necrophilia (helpfully explained for us…a sad indictment of our times that “necrophilia” no longer has to be explained!). 

Probably the most (intentionally?) funny story in the book follows: “Her Body Belonged To The Devil,” a paranoid trip into the narrator’s psyche, courtesy George Venner and from the December 1961 Man’s Look. This one’s really over the top – “You see that pretty girl over there? She could be a WITCH!” and the like. I got a good laugh out of it, particularly how the narrator informs us that a sexy young gal back in Omaha once took him to a party…one that turned out to be a Black Mass, and he ran away from her in a panic. Now he has “the mark” on him, and witches and warlocks all over the world are coming for him…maybe! 

“Their Bodies Glowed With Fire,” by Dave Marshall and from the December 1961 Peril, is my favorite story in the collection. This one almost seems like an abdridgement of a longer work: told in first person, it concerns Joe Rainwater, an American Indian ex-GI who sees a UFO land in the desert and is soon approached by its occupants – a trio in form-fitting metallic spacesuits that glow. But things are getting more risque here in the early ‘60s, as these aliens are hotstuff women of the most curvaceous sort (indeed, with “voluptuous breasts”)…and buddy they each want a go at Mr. Rainwater. The one in charge tells Joe he will become their “high priest,” after which the three alien babes take him through “the rites of love.” It’s all pretty crazy, but also pretty vague given that it is just the early ‘60s, but features a crazy ending where Joe Rainwater tells us that, like Nietszche’s Zarathustra, he’s now coming down the mountain and he has “plans” for those yokels who used to race-bait him. Man, I almost wish this one was a novel. 

“Fowl Play” by William Bayne, from the May 1962 Escape To Adventure, is like an EC Comic without the art. It’s also very much on the Stephen King tip, about a guy whose job it is to chop off chicken heads plotting to kill his wife and mother-in-law. The dark comedy is thick in this one, climaxing in a scene as illustrated in the splash, of our “hero” strapped to a bed and about to find out how those poor chickens feel. 

“Strange Cult Of The Vampire Tarantulas,” by Rick Manners and from the September 1962 Peril, again shows how things are getting a bit more risque in the world of men’s mags here in the early ‘60s: our narrator, a “marine growth” researcher or somesuch, is sent on an expedition with his colleague Elaine who has “luscious breasts.” Hey, my favorite kind! There’s a lot of heavy petting between the two (“My hands sought the twin globes of her breasts…”), but no sexual hijinks – the two keep putting it off, wanting it to be “good” when they finally do the deed. Meanwhile we’re in sweat mag territory, as their ship crashes, same as the previous expeditions did, and they’re washed up on an island with…giant tarantulas! And there’s a psycho named Dr. Unicorn who runs his own castle! It’s all straight out of Ed Wood, and also ends on a humorous final note about there not being any cobwebs in the narrator’s apartment these days. 

Up next is a sweat mag yarn I’ve wanted to read for a while, if only for Norm Eastman’s typically-crazy cover art: “Soft Nudes For The Nazis’ Doktor Horror,” by Martin Bowers and from the September 1964 Man’s Story. True to the men’s mag style, the story opens depicting Eastman’s illustration: a hotstuff, half-nude babe is strapped to a table while some deformed Nazi sadist saws off the arm of an ape…and then proceeds to saw off the babe’s arm. Why? So to see if the sutures and whatnot will work and the ape’s arm will latch onto the girl’s body. From here we go into an almost perfunctory overview of the “Traveling Circus” of Nazi doctors who went all-in for sadism; typical of a lot of these sweat mag yarns, only the opening itself is a piece of horror fiction – likely catered to the art – after which the story becomes a dry sort of overview on the topic. I personally hoped for a story of a Nazi-brainwashed babe raising havoc with her surgically-implanted ape arm! Oh and also, there’s no character named “Doktor Horror” in the story! 

Next up is another sweaty one: “Stone Age Lust – Today,” credited to Geoffrey Costain and from the July 1965 Man’s Daring. Another first-person yarn in which “Geoffrey,” a British anthropologist or something, is tasked with looking into a recent string of cult killings. His sexy colleague Doris wants to come along on the trip, but Geoffrey tells her it will be too dangerous. The future #metoo movement be damned, Doris changes our hero’s mind the old fashioned way: she offers herself to him in his office. We already know Doris should’ve heeded our narrator’s initial refusal, however; typical of men’s mag yarns, this one opens en media res, with Doris the bound victim of a cult of druids – and indeed she will be gang-raped by them before Geoffrey manages to save her. Interesting note of comparison here: in “The Strange Cult Of The Vampire Tarantulas,” Elaine is not raped after being captured – she is about to be, but the narrator saves her. And remember, the narrator and Elaine have not had sex yet. But here in “Stone Age Lust – Today,” the narrator has already had his way with Doris before she is captured…and in the climax she is gang-raped by the villains. So it’s very similar to the slasher movie gimmick of the ‘80s in which the girls who have sex are the first ones to be killed. 

We’re in post-nuke pulp territory next: “Killer Of The Cave” by Gene Preen and from the April 1966 Adventure. This one doesn’t even fool around with pretending to be true: it’s a third-person tale concerning Don Newman, one of the few survivors of an atomic war. Spelunking in some caves with a handful of others, Don came out to find the world destroyed. They try to survive in this hellish new world, living in the safety of the caves, but something keeps killing them one by one every night. It’s more of a suspense yarn, one with a shock twist ending that becomes more and more apparent the longer the story goes on. But special mention must be made of Basil Gogos’ art, featured on the front cover of the dustjacket for Atomic Werewolves And Man-Eating Plants; it almost looks like a still from a never-made film in which John Philip Law played a werewolf. 

This hardcover edition contains a bonus story that is not featured in the other editions: “Tonight Satan Claims His Naked Bride,” by Ted McDonald and from the December 1971 Man’s Story. This one is definitely in “sweats” territory, part of the hippie-killer craze of the early ‘70s; I reviewed a few such yarns in a previous sweat mags round-up post. Bob provides a special intro for this one, but one thing I wondered was if “Ted” McDonald was a pseudonym for Jim McDonald, a prolific sweat mag writer of the day. And this one follows the same template of the other such yarns: our narrator, a doctor, tells us of how a mind-blown hippie girl was brought into the hospital one day by the seductive and mysterious Monique…who kept coming by to check on the girl’s condition. It all leads up to the narrator’s lovely and innocent girlfriend, Alice, about to be the sacrificial victim of a cult of Satanic hippies! Overall a fun one, not too exploitative but still with more of a sleazy and lurid vibe than the earlier stories in the collection; I know these sweat yarns aren’t Bob’s favorite, but it might be fun to do a special Halloween edition or somesuch devoted to them. 

In addition to all the above we also get vintage pulp stories from Manly Wade Wellman and Gardner Fox, as well as frequent pieces of art from assorted men’s mags that fall within the collection’s theme. All told Atomic Werewolves And Man-Eating Plants is yet another stellar publication from Robert Deis and Wyatt Doyle, and as mentioned would make for a great gift this holiday season – even if it’s just a gift for yourself! Here’s hoping there are many more of these collections on the way.

Hawkshaw

Hawkshaw, by Ron Goulart

No month stated, 1974  Award Books

(Original hardcover edition 1972)

Around twenty years ago I picked up a handful of Ron Goulart sci-fi paperbacks from the ‘60s and ‘70s and eagerly looked forward to reading them, given that they seemed to be along the lines of the funky freaky post-psychedelic sci-fi I have always loved. Then I tried reading one! I think it was Gadget Man. And I realized that Goulart’s schtick is more of sci-fi satire comedy, and that just wasn’t what I was after at the time. 

Flash forward twenty years and I figured I’d give it another go. Hawkshaw was one of the paperbacks I got back then (of course I kept them all, even though I had no plans to read them!), so for no particular reason it became the one I’d try to read. And it seems to be along the same lines as Gadget Man, perhaps even set in the same world – a dissolved United States of (what was then) the near future. In this case it’s 1997, but it’s essentially the 1970s taken to absurd proportions…sort of what Lawrence Sanders did in The Tomorrow File, but much more “comedic” in nature. 

At 156 pages of big print, Hawkshaw is essentially a fast-moving spoof that doesn’t have the time for any elaborate world building. It’s mostly formatted like a mystery, with cipher-like hero Noah Kraft, a reporter, venturing to the “colony” of Connecticut to investigate some supposed werewolf sightings. The werewolf stuff turns out to just be a distraction, as ultimately the plot revolves around Noah chasing a Maguffin: a document with the locations of concentration camps a right-wing group called The Robin Hood Foundation is supposedly running on the east coast. 

If I’m not mistaken this “Fragmented America” was the setting for several Ron Goulart novels; in fact I think most of the ones I have are set in this world. He doesn’t much explore the setting here in Hawkshaw, it must be said – the novel is basically a fast-moving slice of pulp with a definite comedy vibe. And spoiler alert, but there’s hardly anything in the way of sex or violence. All such risque material occurs entirely off-page, and for that matter Goulart isn’t much for the exploitation of the female characters: Noah hooks up with a sort-of agent named Donna, and about the most we get is that she’s “slim” and “pretty.” 

But for that matter, Noah Kraft is himself a cipher. He’s a reporter of the old school, looking to track leads and get the scoop. There isn’t much in the way of technology in his line of work, other than a “pix phone” he uses to call his boss. I also loved the tidbit that he sits on an “air-cushioned seat” while talking on the pix phone with his boss; very 1960s Haus-Rucker Co. space age. Otherwise Ron Goulart is not one for word-painting, and the reader must do some heavy lifting throughout, because Goulart doesn’t much describe anything. He doesn’t even really provide much backdrop for this fractured America, other than errant notes like the fact that the country split up in 1989. 

Instead, Hawkshaw essentially exists so Goulart can lampoon the late ‘60s/early ‘70s. This extends to even underground comix, with the appearance of Bud Tubb, a heavyset “comix” artist known for drawing risque material. I got the impression he was inspired by Vaughn Bode. Upon arrival in Westport to look into the supposed werewolf, Noah soon meets Bud Tubb, who tells Noah of both the mysterious Hawkshaw, leader of the liberal movement, and also the equally-mysterious Robin Hood Foundation, which is based here in Westport and is right-wing in its composition. It’s also led by a colorfully-named mystery man: George Washington II. 

The werewolf is just window dressing, and is quickly found and explained: some guy who was the victim of some Robin Hood Foundation chemicals. More time is spent on oddball shit like a practicing group of cannibals who capture Noah and Donna while they are out driving around. Goulart tries to get a lot of comedy mileage out of this group who come off ultra polite but proud of their newfound taste for human flesh, courtesy a popular TV show: “I might not have turned to cannibalism if the United States had held together,” explains one of them. 

There’s also weird nonsense like Uncle Kidnapper, a guy who employs clowns and works as a contractor for the government; his speciality is saving kidnapped people for a fee. Then there’s the part where Noah goes to New Jersey, which is entirely run by the mob, with more “funny” stuff like the border patrol guards – Mafia wiseguys – handing out “The Mafia does not exist” pamphlets to tourists entering the former state. My favorite of all the random crap though is the actor who goes around in a one-man show as Norman Mailer, reading from Mailer’s work and getting in fistfights with a planted audience member he’s paid to call him a “liberal son of a bitch.” 

All the comedy of course takes away from any tension or suspense; there are a few times where Noah’s in danger, or Donna has been adbucted, but none of it has any bite. Nor does the revelation of who Hawkshaw is; indeed, more time is spent figuring out who the mysterious George Washington II is. At no point does Noah Kraft fight or shoot anyone or do any other sort of action-hero stuff. In fact, the fate of a somewhat important character is left unexplained by novel’s end, which sees Noah returning back to his home base for another story. I’m too lazy to see if this character appeared in any other Goulart novels. 

Well, as mentioned it’s taken me a long time to get around to Ron Goulart. In fact, I’ve put off reading William Shatner’s Tekwar series precisely due to the reason that it was ghostwritten by Ron Goulart, even down to the “funny androids” Goulart was known to populate his own novels with. And I have to say, now that I’ve finally read one of Ron Goulart’s novels, it will likely be quite some time until I read another.

Mark Of The Werewolf

Mark Of The Werewolf, by Jeffrey Sackett

February, 1990  Bantam Books

Jeffrey Sackett published a handful of horror paperbacks in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s; I have a few of them but Mark Of The Werewolf is the first I’ve read. I was looking for a good werewolf yarn and that’s what this one promised – that, and a cool-sounding plot about a group of neo-Nazis who hope to figure out how to create werewolves of their own and use them as a sort of super-army. 

Sounds like a great B movie-esque plot, but unfortunately it’s all squandered. What Mark Of The Werewolf is really about is immortality…and this too is squandered because the immortal can’t remember anything about his life. The reader must be prepared for some long-haul tedium as the majority of the novel turns into episodic flashbacks about this man’s life through the ages, almost coming off like short stories that have nothing to do with the novel itself. Werewolf action is scant, and when it does occur it too is squandered by some rather lifeless prose – in the action and horror stuff, at least. Otherwise Sackett is a good writer insofar as the character introspection goes; there’s just nothing whatsoever visceral about the horror sequences, and the violence is rendered in such blasé prose that it lacks any impact. 

Things start off okay, though, with enough in-jokey references that there’s no question Sackett is a fan of the classic Universal Monster franchise. For one we have character names like “William Henry Pratt,” which happens to have been the birth name of Boris Karloff. We also have the name “Hull,” as in Henry Hull of Werwolf Of London. The opening of the novel seems to pick up a few decades after The Wolfman; a group of Gypsies, including an old woman who is 100% based on Old Magda from that film (and its sequel), are rounded up in North Dakota, and among them is a haggard man all the other Gypsies seem to be afraid of. Of course he turns out to be a werewolf…not to mention the immortal mentioned above. His name is Janos Kaldy, and in a detour from the Universal classics he’s nothing like Larry Talbot…indeed, he will turn out to be someone else entirely, but by the time we learn this the novel has spiralled very far from this setup. 

And dammit, the setup is kind of cool. Sackett presents a sort of collapsed society; no year is mentioned, but it seems that Mark Of The Werewolf takes place in some “near future” in which an army of neo-Nazi thugs patrol the country, snatching non-whites and taking them back to a secret facility in North Dakota for imprisonment, torture, and death. Kaldy and the Gypsies are captured in the opening – but only after an effective scene in which Kaldy turns into a werewolf and makes quick work of the “whips,” ie the Nazi thugs. Yes, just like those hokey Universal classics, stuff always seems to be happening during a full moon, and that’s the case here. But Kaldy and his Gypsy minder Blasko are taken anyway…and they will spend the rest of the novel stuck within the Hulltech Center for Genetic Research. 

Here's where the tedium sets in. Janos Kaldy isn’t even our protagonist. That duty is sort of shared by a trio of characters: Bracher, the sadist in charge of the genetic experimentation and who hopes to ultimately create a werewolf army to conquer the planet for whites; Louisa, Bracher’s cousin and the voice of reason in the novel; and finally Neville, Louisa’s simpering loser of a husband, who happens to be a preacher…and a doctor capable of performing autopsies…and a psychiatrist capable of performing hypnosis-induced regression therapy. The novel flits between these three characters for the majority of its 300-page runtime; eventually we have another Hulltech doctor, Petra, a hotstuff brunette who has a burning yearning to kill werewolves, given that her parents were killed by a werewolf. 

But man, I italicized “cousin” above because I just couldn’t get over how flat-out lame the setup was; I mean Bracher’s this shitkicking sadist who was in the military and various black ops and CIA and other shit, and now he’s heading up this secret genetic research facility which has the ultimate aim of killing off all the non-white races…and the dude goes out looking for his friggin’ cousin who he used to argue with all the time when they were kids(!). Why? Uh, because her husband can do autopsies or something like that. It was just such a disconnect for me. And of course Bracher’s a total control obsessive in true Nazi fashion, and lords over everyone with an iron fist…yet he puts up with his cousin’s browbeating and arguing for the entire novel. 

That’s just the start of it, though. Around page 100 Neville, in the hopes of figuring out what makes Janos Kaldy tick, starts putting him under hypnosis. Now as mentioned, Kaldy lives among the Gypsies, but it soon becomes clear he’s only been with them a few decades…and his minder Blasko, now an old man, was a young father when Kaldy first appeared. (Oh, and Kaldy the werewolf killed Blasko’s wife and child, but Blasko’s forgiven him…) So Janos Kaldy cannot die. Absolutely nothing can kill him. This has been established in other werewolf yarns, but Jeffrey Sackett takes it into new dimensions: Janos Kaldy is immortal, if not eternal. But the helluva it is, folks, he’s lived so long that he can’t remember anything about his past. 

Imagine, if you can, the frustration of reading a novel about someone who has lived thousands of years but can’t even remember what his real name is – nor even how he became a werewolf! Mark Of The Werewolf is in some ways like a continuous kick to the crotch. You keep wanting a werewolf novel, but intsead it becomes a slog of episodic flashbacks to the ancient past. And a lot of these flashbacks are underwhelming. Like for example, it turns out that Kaldy at one point had a traveling companion named Claudia, who traveled with Kaldy for centuries. She too is a werewolf, cursed with immortality, and accuses Kaldy of making her a werewolf…though neither Claudia nor Kaldy are really sure, because even Claudia can’t friggin’ remember anything about her past. Well anyway, at one point in a flashback they’re in Hungary and tracking down none other than Dracula himself, and the whole scene is so damn stupid…Dracula talks like a pompous oaf, taunting the werewolves, then apropos of nothing turns himself into a werewolf when they themselves transform (per tradition, Kaldy and Claudia have come to see Dracula on the night of a full moon, dontcha know), and then Dracula flies off and is never mentioned again. 

We get flashbacks to ancient Rome, to the Biblical era (complete with walk-ons by such personages as Pontius Pilate – just the type of character you’d expect in a werewolf novel, right??), and further back to the origins of prehistory. Each sequence is yet another clue in how Janos Kaldy – or the man known now as Janos Kaldy – became a werewolf. Sackett ties in an apostasy angle here that also plays on the title of the novel. I felt it was a bit too much and really detracted from the mythos of lycanthropy, gussying it up way too much. The helluva it is, the non-flashback material is pretty cool; Bracher is a true sadist, using prisoners as unwilling test subjects for various serums Petra creates in order to turn people into werewolves. There are a lot of brutal parts here of poor people being pulled into an exam room by Whips and Petra jabbing them with a syringe and then everyone waiting expectantly for the results as the prisoner goes into paroxysms of unbearable pain. 

Other than the belabored “flashback to prehistory” setup, what really hampers Mark Of The Werewolf is that the writing lacks much bite, if you’ll pardon the lame pun. There is nothing visceral in any of the scenes that are supposed to be tense or scary; Sackett writes in an almost “blah” prose style that robs everything of impact. For example: 

If you didn’t pick it up, the above sequence detailed a werewolf chasing after a car full of people. And still being behind them even after they’ve been driving for “hours” (though supposedly all this takes place in a small town?). Yet it’s written in such blasé terms that Sackett just as well might be documenting something as mundane as a person crossing the street. 

Even more grandscale sequences lack any drive, like when two “good” werewolves take on the “bad” werewolves that have finally been created by Hulltech: 

Violence and tension are relayed in an almost offhand, casual fashion, almost giving the impression that you’re reading the outline of a more gripping novel. That really is what took me out of Mark Of The Werwolf. That, and the fact that the actual werewolf stuff was scant. Sackett is more concerned with the unending turmoil one experiences as an immortal than he is in writing a werewolf story; in this book the titular mark of the werewolf casts you into a millennia of suffering, longing for a death that you can never have. To the point that even fun pulp stuff is taken from us; Kaldy and Claudia, having lived so long, don’t even have libidos anymore. And Kaldy makes for a lame werewolf protagonist; he’s so clueless about his past that he comes off as a moron, which was surely unintentional on Sackett’s part. 

One thing Jeffrey Sackett is guilty of is one of the lamest “surprise reveals” I’ve yet read in a novel. No spoilers, but late in Mark Of The Werewolf we learn that a certain character is really someone else. But what makes it so stupid is that another of the characters knew this all along, yet never said anything. And when confronted with this he basically shrugs and says, “I had no reason to tell you that I knew.” Like I said, I won’t give anything away, but it’s just super, super lame. Also you might notice from the above two excerpts that Sackett has a tendency to render everything in summary. Endless sentences that spin out into forever – hey, sort of like Janos Kaldy’s life! While it might work with Sackett’s theme, it doesn’t work in horror fiction, at least horror fiction with the B-movie plot of neo-Nazis who want to create an army of werewolves. 

On the plus side, I did read the whole thing, if only to learn Kaldy’s origins. But as mentioned, I found the apostasy angle underwhelming. Actually I found the entire novel underwhelming. Bantam Books was fully onboard the Jeffrey Sackett train, though; Mark Of The Werewolf features a few pages of Sackett’s Blood Of The Impaler at the end, a Dracula riff that Will at Too Much Horror Fiction seemed to like about as much as I liked Mark Of The Werewolf. Not only that, but it even features a few pages from an untitled novel Sackett hadn’t even yet finished; looking online, it seems to be the novel that would be published in 1991 as The Demon.

The Wolfman

The Wolfman, by Carl Dreadstone

August, 1977  Berkley Books

In the late ‘70s Berkley published a few novelizations of the Universal horror classics, all under the house name “Carl Dreadstone.” While I don’t think all the novels have been accounted for, it is known that this one was written by Ramsey Campbell, who also provides an intro under his own name. But to address the pink elephant in the room straightaway, the title is incorrect: the movie was actually titled “The Wolf Man,” ie two words. It’s incorrectly “The Wolfman” throughout this Berkley paperback, even in Campbell’s intro. I was of course outraged. 

Otherwise, Ramsey Campbell takes a story that encompassed slightly over an hour of screentime and turns it into an epic tragedy; in some ways his novel, more introspective, dark, and violent than the 1941 film it is based on, seems to have more in common with the 2010 Benecio Del Toro remake, which by the way was also titled “The Wolfman.” Curiously, in his intro Campbell enthuses over the acting of Lon Chaney Jr. in the film, and the way Chaney brought to life the plight of his doomed character, Larry Talbot, destined to become the Wolf Man. Chaney makes his Talbot an affable, good-natured lug; there is a lot of smiling in The Wolf Man. There is not much smiling in Campbell’s novelization. 

Instead of the affable lug of Chaney’s portrayal, the Larry Talbot of this novel is already a wolf before he even gets bitten. He is a driven, angry man, quick to lash out and quick to prove himself – even when the challenge only exists in his mind. It was not much fun spending 212 pages with this Larry Talbot. He is very much in the vein of the average Manning Lee Stokes protagonist, only even more aggressively macho. His background is similar to his film counterpart: born to wealth in Wales, but leaving home for America at some point and now returning, in his early 30s, due to the sudden death of his brother. There are some additions to this in Campbell’s novel: Talbot’s brother was his twin, and Talbot left home at 16 due to a fight. 

This Larry Talbot lacks however all of the affable nature that Chaney brought to the role. In his intro Campbell states that the novel makes use of material that was in Curt Siodmak’s original script but didn’t make it to film. One wonders if Siodmak’s version of Larry Talbot was this much of a prick. If so, the producers made a wise choice in making him more likable. Thus, the Larry of the film – and you can’t help but think of Chaney’s character as “Larry” and not “Talbot” – is more of a tragic hero, and one feels sorry for him when his life is thrown into chaos. But the “Talbot” of this novelization already has the nature of a wolf from the start. It isn’t so much a tragedy as it is inevitable that he will come to a bad end. 

This was to me the greatest difference betwween Campbell’s novelization and the film. The story follows mostly the same beats, only with the added resonance of a novel, with more characterization and more introspection. I don’t believe I have ever read a Ramsey Campbell novel before, but he does a great job of turning this old film into a sort of timeless thriller with Gothic touches; it seems we are reminded of the fog or the mist every other page. He also gets it right by setting the novel in the era of the movie’s release; the Universal horror movies are notorious for taking place in uncertain time periods, but it seems clear that The Wolf Man is contemporary. Campbell follows this, with an errant mention early in the book of “Hitler’s Germany.” 

Campbell opens the novel same as the film, with Larry Talbot being chaffeured to his childhood home in Wales. Actually that should be “childhood castle;” as mentioned, Larry comes from wealth. But whereas the Larry of the film is all smiles and warm handshakes, here in the novel the trepidation and anger is laid on thick; Talbot’s almost in physical pain at the thought of returning to this hell he once called home. Also here in the novel the town itself is named “Talbot.” The reunion with his father, Sir John, is also more tense than in the film; another addition to the saga here in the book is that Talbot’s mother died in childbirth. This is nice subtext from Campbell, that Talbot is so driven perhaps because he blames himself for his mother’s death. 

Even if so, this Larry Talbot is hard to root for. He is of course a ladykiller, but even more toxic about it than a Stokes protagonist. Like in the film, Talbot helps his father set up a powerful new telescope and then accidentaly spies pretty blonde-haired Gwen in her bedroom, down in the village. She’s left her curtains up and she’s putting on some earrings before heading downstairs to the antique store her father owns. In the movie, this is played as an innocent lark; a goofy variation on the “meet cute” scenario of contemporary screwball comedies. In the novel, as with everything else, it’s much darker. First of all there is the recurring line that Gwen is “just a girl.” Courting her is just another challenge to be surmounted. Talbot spies on her with the telescope, then goes into town and starts coyly referring to her bedroom and all this other stalker shit – same as in the film, and while the entire premise was a bit “off” even there, here it’s just downright creepy. 

Gwen has also changed a bit in the novel. Here she is presented as younger than the character Evelyn Ankers portrayed in the film; the way Gwen thinks and acts, she could still be in her teens. It’s also quite clear she is a virgin. Campbell tries his damnest to make the spark between Gwen and Talbot believable; again, in the film it’s kind of easier to buy, given the aw shucks demeanor Chaney gives the role. But the Talbot of the novel is a wolf and he aggressively goes after Gwen; the rapport between them is more along the lines of a battle, with Talbot ever trying to press his “advantage” and then Gwen scoring points with an acidic rejoinder. Particularly amusing from our wisened era is when Talbot insists Gwen go out with him at night, despite her firm “No.” His “I’ll pick you up at eight” is practically a threat here, whereas, again, it’s more of a good-natured joke in the film. 

The date of course is to the gypsy camp, that night, where Talbot’s life changes course. Again Campbell stretches the tension more than in the film; Gwen brings along her dowdy friend, Jenny (we learn that Gwen is thinking of setting her up with Talbot), who gets a reading from a gypsy named Bela (Lugosi himself!). Overall the characters in this novelization are just meaner than their film counterparts; whereas Bela sends off Jenny with concern in the film, here he snaps at her to the extent that she runs off in tears – only to be attacked by Bela in wolf form. A curious thing is that the Bela werewolf is basically just a wolf, on all fours, whereas Talbot becomes a wolf man after being bitten by it. Maybe there’s some hierarchy in the world of lycanthropy. If so, Campbell doesn’t dwell on it in his novelization. One thing he does a good job of is noting that the chest wound Talbot gets from the wolf quickly heals, to the point that it can barely be seen…though Talbot is certain it’s shaped like a pentagram. I only say this because we never see the pentagram wound in any of the films; Larry will just open his shirt and the other characters will gawk at what is apparently a pretty nasty wound. 

One of the biggest differences in the novel is a scene, supposedly filmed though no material exists of it any longer, in which Larry Talbot fights a bear. This happens at the gypsy fair, another scene that Campbell brings more to life than in the film. Talbot’s just killed what he claims is a wolf, but all the cops can find is the body of a man (Bela the gypsy), and this has only served to make him seem more of a bad seed; Campbell also has a recurring subplot about an old biddy, who was responsible for Talbot leaving town years ago, still gossiping that he’s nothing but trouble. The bear fight is another display of Talbot’s uber macho drive; the bear is old, pushed into fights by its greedy owner, but a driven Talbot beats the shit out of the poor animal anyway. At this point the werewolf in him is driving him to be even more aggressive, especially toward other animals – another cool part is where Gwen’s fiance Frank comes in with a dog, and Talbot rushes out. In the film, again, it comes off like Larry is just nervous and awkward. In the book, he leaves because he has the sudden desire to tear the dog apart. 

Ramsey Campbell’s The Wolfman is really a slow burn affair when compared to the fast-moving film. Talbot doesn’t even turn into the titular monster until page 126. Curiously, he leaves some of the Wolf Man material off-page, rendering the action from the point of view of the victims. For example, Talbot’s first kill is a gravedigger (who happens to be digging Jenny’s grave), and the attack is more about the mounting terror the poor guy experiences before he is killed. While the novel is not violent, Campbell does bring more gore to the post-attack scenes: we learn that Jenny’s head has almost been severed from her body, to the point that Sir John pukes at the sight. 

As The Wolfman progresses, it seems clear that Campbell is more interested in Larry Talbot than the Wolf Man. While the monster continues to appear “in the shadows,” as it were, we get even more probing of Talbot’s confused thoughts; he is certain he has become a werewolf, though no one believes him. The way this dawns on him is clever, but involves more of that slow-burn vibe, like another scene (unsure if it was filmed or a product of Campbell’s imagination) where Talbot tries to go to church but gives in to a sudden impulse to run out of the place. Otherwise the novel goes on to follow the film faithfully, only with more character depth…and basically different characterization for Larry Talbot. The part at the end where Gwen is willing to leave town with him is especially hard to buy, given how this version of Talbot is such an unlikable, hate-filled prick. But then maybe that’s Gwen’s type. 

The conclusion of the novel is the same as the film, too, but again Campbell does a good job of making Sir John more of an empathetic character than the self-involved Sir John of the movie, who almost came off as maliciously indifferent to his son’s plight. Here one feels Sir John’s horror as he realizes the “creature” he just brained with his son’s silver-headed cane happens to be his son. As with the film, here the novel ends…though of course Larry Talbot would return for a handful of sequels. Unfortunately none of them were novelized as part of this Berkley series. 

Indeed, the Berkley editors chose some oddball titles; in addition to The Wolfman, there were novelizations of expected classics like The Bride Of Frankenstein (also apparently by Ramsey Campbell)…as well as unexpected ones like The Werewolf Of London. One would think they would’ve gone for more obvious choices, like maybe a novelization of 1943’s Frankenstein Meets The Wolf Man. It would’ve been a lot of fun to read Campbell’s take on that; perhaps we would’ve gotten the cut material of the Monster actually speaking. At any rate these Berkley Universal tie-ins are woefully scarce and overpriced on the collector’s market; I was lucky to get this one, and happy to read it. I’d love to read some of the others someday.

On a related note, check out my Neca Glow-In-The-Dark Frankenstein Monster!  All the Monster Kids on my block are jealous!  I saw it in a Target and couldn’t resist:

The Wolf Man vs Dracula: An Alternate History For Classic Film Monsters

The Wolf Man vs Dracula: An Alternate History For Classic Film Monsters, by Philip J. Riley

No month stated, 2010 BearManor Media

I’ve wanted to read this for a long time. The story on this slim trade paperback is that The Wolf Man vs Dracula is an unproduced script written in 1944 by Universal Studios screenwriter Bernard Schubert, who went on to write the Universal picture The Mummy’s Curse. The script then sat in a box in Schubert’s garage for “forty years” before he and book editor Philip J. Riley got it out. 

The curious thing of course is that Schubert’s name is not printed on the cover of this publication, only Riley’s. Also, Riley has copyrighted the book himself – even though he himself does not contribute anything to it (other than finding the script and talking to the people who worked on it, that is). What I mean to say is, there is no introduction from Riley, or summary of the project, or anything. Indeed this book would have greatly benefitted from a bit more background. As it is, we get a few short introductory pages comprised of the hazy, decades-later memories of two men involved with the aborted project: Schubert (who died in 1988), and special effects man David S Horsley (who died in 1976). 

So in this regard we are presented with the thoughts of men who are no longer around to support the claims. I only note this because apparently Philip J. Riley has come under heavy fire from the Monster Kid community for such stuff: see the Classic Horror Film Board thread on this publication for more on that. The majority of the thread is nothing more than character assassination of Riley, accusing him of everything from plagiarism to theft. To his credit, Riley briefly appears on the thread to defend himself, acknowledging his occasional gaffe (it would appear his greatest “sin” was mixing up the names of a few actresses) and stating that he is merely a fan, publishing material for other fans. 

One of the biggest accusations is that the script for The Wolf Man vs Dracula is shall we say fake, a product of Philip J. Riley’s mind and no one else’s. This is because none of the “major” Universal historians (ie David J. Skal, Gregory Mank, etc) had ever heard of it prior to the publication of this book, and apparently there are no mentions of Schubert’s script in the official Universal records – though some people on that thread I linked to did find a trade announcement from 1944 which confirmed that Bernard Schubert was working on a script of this title. Of course, the answer is that the script sat in Schubert’s garage, and Riley kept the discovery of it to himself. And also, all those accusing Riley of making it up could have saved themselves some trouble and just read the damn book: it is quite evident that this script was written by a Universal screenwriter in the mid 1940s. 

Anyone who has seen the “monster rally” films of the ‘40s, ie Frankenstein Meets The Wolf Man, House Of Frankenstein, and House Of Dracula, will know one thing: the monsters seldom actually appear in the movies, and when they do it’s brief. And the producers never take advantage of having all these monsters together in one picture; indeed, the monsters will usually have their own separate plots and never come together. Only in the final minutes of Frankenstein Meets The Wolf Man or the finale of Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein do the monsters really interract. Compare to a modern-day approach to the concept, a la Return Of The Wolf Man, in which the monsters share a lot more “screen time” with one another. 

But that ‘40s mindset is front and center in The Wolf Man vs Dracula. I mean first of all, and I apologize for any spoilers, but the title itself is misleading. The “Wolf Man” doesn’t fight Dracula at all in this script! Instead, it’s Larry Talbot, ie the man who is cursed with being a werewolf (Lon Chaney Jr), fighting a giant bat in the climax. There is no scene where the actual Wolf Man fights the actual Dracula. And, true to the underwhelming vibe of the monster rally films (at least insofar as actual monster stuff goes), Talbot is human for the majority of the script, only turning into the Wolf Man at the very beginning and the very end. As for Dracula, he turns into a “giant bat” a bunch of times, but spends the majority of the script trying to get his fangs into some random countryside girl, for reasons never properly explained. 

Here's where more of those accusations come in, because in that hazy-recollections prologue, special effects guy David S. Horsley claims that The Wolf Man vs Dracula was to be shot in technicolor, and that color test photos were taken of Lon Chaney Jr. These photos have never been seen, though Riley intimates in the intro that he has seen them – however they are not reproduced in the book. Also, the historians claim there’s no indication Universal had any plans for a technicolor film in this genre at this time. But Horsley’s claim is backed up by the hazy-recollections of screenwriter Schubert, also in the prologue, who states that he was hired for the job precisely due to his work on a technicolor picture, thus he knew how to cater his script to the increased cost involved with color. 

What this means is that The Wolf Man vs Dracula would look pretty cheap, only taking place in a few locations (re-used sets from previous pictures, as thriftily noted by Schubert in his script) and only featuring a few actors. Oh and I forgot – another claim is that none other than Bela Lugosi would once again play Dracula, playing him for the first time on screen since the 1931 film. Horsley in his recollections says he’s unsure if color photos were taken of Lugosi, but one thing insinuated is that Lugosi was too old at the time for the physical action of a monster fight, thus the necessity of replacing him with a giant bat in the action scenes. This is where Horsley came in, trying to work up a giant mechanical bat to look realistic in technicolor. 

So there’s your buzzkill early in the review: the cover (created by Philip Riley and taken from period illustrations – and in fact I seem to recall a thread once upon a time that he was even accused of ripping this illustration off!) is a total lie. The “Wolf Man” does not fight Dracula. I mean technically he does, but it’s Larry Talbot in his non-wolf form. And he’s fighting a giant bat, not Bela Lugosi in a cape. Interestingly, the actual Lon Chaney Jr. Wolf Man did indeed fight the actual Bela Lugosi Dracula in Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, one of the saving graces of what I consider an altogether annoying movie. Also that film established Larry Talbot as a vampire hunter…and curiously the seeds of that idea are planted in this unproduced script. Oh and that’s another thing…throughout the book it is “The Wolfman vs Dracula.” Every Monster Kid worth his salt knows the Universal character is referred to as “The Wolf Man,” ie two words. 

Another thing to handle straightaway is that the intro features a more serious goof, and again it’s “voiced” through the recollections of Schubert, who died many years before this book was even published. Schubert – or Riley speaking for him – states that The Wolf Man vs Dracula “would have been a natural sequel to Frankenstein Meets The Wolf Man.” Within the first few pages of the script we realize how innacurate this is: The Wolf Man vs Dracula is actually a “natural sequel” to 1944’s House Of Frankenstein. According to that Classic Horror forum I linked to above, Philip Riley apparently acknowledged his mistake in this regard on some social media forum. But goofs like this are no doubt why he is disparaged by the Monster Kid community. 

Anyone with even a passing interest in the Universal monster rally films will recall that Larry Talbot “died” in the finale of House Of Frankenstein after being shot by a silver bullet, fired by a gypsy girl who loved him. This is how Talbot is discovered in the opening of The Wolf Man vs Dracula, lying beside the skeleton of a girl in gypsy clothes. So in other words the script picks up right after the climax of that film…several years later, but still. It sure isn’t a sequel to Frankenstein Meets The Wolf Man, which ended with Talbot as the Wolf Man being swept away in a flood beneath Frankenstein’s castle while fighting the Monster. 

So here is the plot of The Wolf Man vs Dracula in a nutshell: Larry Talbot is revived, briefly turns into the Wolf Man in the hospital and kills a guy, then escapes into the countryside. When next we encounter Talbot he is back in human form, still in Transylvania, and has, apropos of nothing, hunted down a local man named Anatole. This is because Anatole, we learn, is the town hangman, and somehow Talbot thinks the hangman will be able to kill him. For good. Meanwhile, none other than Count Dracula has designs on Anatole’s “dowdy” young daughter, Yvonne, if not for that pesky crucifix she wears. Talbot marries Yvonne to force her dad to kill him(!?), and Dracula claims he can “help” Talbot die…if only Talbot will get rid of Yvonne’s pesky crucifix! The action climaxes with Talbot fighting Dracula (in giant bat form) and saving Yvonne from the vampire’s clutches. After this Talbot turns into the Wolf Man and runs roughshod over the local gendarmes in Dracula’s castle, finally being gunned down by Anatole. 

In the opening, Schubert implies that his script went unfilmed because Universal had met their picture quota for that year or somesuch. I think another reason might be that his script is subpar. Sure, this is likely his first draft, but as it stands, Schubert’s The Wolf Man vs Dracula is pretty lame (and pretty tame), and it makes even the most maligned monster rally film, House Of Dracula, seem like Citizen Kane in comparison. Maybe an inventive director could have brought some life to the proceedings, or maybe just the novelty of seeing Chaney and Lugosi in color would have sufficed. But the story itself just sucks. (If that’s too lame of a monster rally pun for you, you could instead say it lacks any bite.) 

And I’m judging the script by the merits of its filmed contemporaries, not from a modern-day perspective. I mean the monster rally films weren’t exactly grounded in logic. Look at Frankenstein Meets The Wolf Man, which detours into nonsense in the middle half: Larry Talbot starts the picture wanting to die, but halfway through he’s suddenly maddened to revive Frankenstein’s Monster. Even considering that, The Wolf Man vs Dracula suffers from illogical plotting. Like most notably, Larry Talbot barges into Anatole the hangman’s home, announces that he is a “murderer” and wants to die…and Anatole is like, “You can stay here for the night! Oh, and this is my daughter, Yvonne!” It’s just ridiculous. 

Even more ridiculous is Dracula’s fixation on Yvonne, which makes no sense. Actually, Dracula’s presence itself makes no sense. He’s not introduced in any grand fashion; literally we are just informed he happens to be sitting in Anatole’s home when Anatole himself is introduced in the script. Dracula’s just dropped in to chat with the town hangman. That’s literally the guy’s big introduction. And also the dialog, later in the script, intimates that there’s some confusion at play…that this Dracula is only a “relative” of the Dracula who caused all that trouble in London some years ago, ie the events of the 1931 film. Of course it’s the same vampire, though none of the locals realize he’s a vampire. 

And why Dracula is obsessed with Yvonne is a mystery. The impression I got was that she must be the only attractive young woman in the area. But the script makes it clear that Yvonne is not attractive…at least in how she presents herself. Only Dracula can see how hotstuff she really is…something we viewers get to see when Talbot marries Yvonne and she suddenly transforms into a mega babe. But then in the actually produced monster rally films, Dracula (as played by John Carradine) was also a bit of a lothario, so I guess the whole Yvonne storyline makes sense in that regard. What I’m trying to say is it’s so unexplored and unexplained…and so humdrum. We’re talking about Count Dracula here. Literally all he does in The Wolf Man vs Dracula is try to get some young Transylvanian girl to remove her crucifix so he can bite her neck. 

Another thing is that Dracula doesn’t even have any good dialog. In fact, the dialog throughout is without note, though Schubert does successfully capture the whining of Larry Talbot. I could see Lon Chaney Jr. delivering all of Talbot’s lines, so Schubert succeeds in capturing his voice; in Schubert’s comments in the intro, he notes that the Wolf Man was screenwriter Curt Siodmak’s “baby,” but again Schubert got this particular writing gig due to his experience writing to technicolor. There are very few speaking roles in the script; it really is almost a situation horror-drama concerning the core characters of Larry Talbot, Count Dracula, Anatole, and Yvonne. A character who briefly appears is “The Commissioner,” and it seems evident that the role was written with Lionel Atwill in mind; by this point in his career a beleaguered Atwill mostly just had supporting roles in Universal horror pictures. The Commissioner only appears in two or three scenes, but his dialog has a very Atwillian bent. 

Monster action is almost nonexistent. Early in the film Talbot turns into the Wolf Man; given that he’s in the hospital when this happens, the scene comes off like a retread of a sequence in Frankenstein Meets The Wolf Man. After this Talbot doesn’t transform again until the finale, when he again becomes the Wolf Man after fighting Dracula(!!). Schubert does present a little more “Wolf Man carnage” than was seen in the other films of the day; the Wolf Man tears into several gendarmes in the finale before being brought down, yet again, by a silver bullet. Schubert not only recycles sets in his script but scenes as well. Throughout The Wolf Man vs Dracula Talbot pushes Anatole to make a silver bullet to kill him with…which again is more illogical stupidty because Talbot goes to Anatole because Anatole is a hangman! Why the hell would he suddenly expect him to craft a silver bullet? But anyway Talbot as the Wolf Man meets the exact same end as in House Of Frankenstein, gunned down by a silver bullet. 

Other monster action: Dracula transforms into a giant bat a few times, flying back to his castle. There’s also a part where he turns himself into a wolf and attacks some townspeople, trying to frame Talbot. Now a curious thing here is that Dracula, like everyone else in the script, tells Larry Talbot he’s crazy to think he’s a werewolf, because werewolves don’t exist. I thought this would go somewhere, like Dracula of course knowing there are werewolves and looking to turn the Wolf Man into his vassal. Like for example in the contemporary Bela Lugosi flick Return Of The Vampire. But Schubert does nothing with the setup. About the most we get is a part where Talbot ventures into Dracula’s castle and discovers some monster lore in Dracula’s library; in an uninentionally humorous scene, Talbot spends all night reading the books, suddenly becoming an expert on vampires! In fact it is Talbot who keeps insisting to Anatole and Yvonne that Count Dracula is a vampire. This means that Talbot spends the majority of the script trying to convince people that monsters exist: that he himself is a werewolf and Dracula is a vampire. 

But it’s the biggest miss that the Wolf Man and Dracula never actually meet, at least in their monster forms. Talbot heads into Dracula’s castle in the final scene, battling the giant bat and staking it – another special effects shot which would see Dracula dissolve into dust. But it is an ignoble end for Dracula for sure. Even Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein realized the value of having the actual monsters fight one another. My assumption is Schubert was writing under the notion that Lugosi would be physically unable to handle an action scene, but this too is odd because Lugosi, as the Frankenstein Monster, battled Lon Chaney Jr. as the Wolf Man in Frankenstein Meets The Wolf Man, released just the year before. Who knows. The long and short of it is that it’s underwhelming, not to mention a letdown given the title of the script. 

So in conclusion, it is not to the loss of the Universal horror franchise that The Wolf Man vs Dracula never came to be. The titular characters come off poorly and the story hinges on one illogical development after another. I wonder though if the script made the rounds in the Universal screenwriter department. Curiously, Larry Talbot is suddenly alive and well in 1945’s House Of Dracula, which turned out to be the actual film that followed House Of Frankenstein. As mentioned, that earlier film ended with Talbot “dead” from a silver bullet. He’s alive again with no explanation in House Of Dracula. Almost makes one wonder if someone goofed and thought Talbot had been reborn as in Schubert’s script. But that doesn’t pan out, for as mentioned Talbot meets the same end in The Wolf Man vs Dracula as he did in House Of Frankenstein.