Original subtitles

NARRATOR: 1572 In the dark forests of eastern France,

around the village of Dole, children have gone missing

and they never come back.

DARREN: Stories start to spread.

People begin to understand there's something out there.

NARRATOR: The situation takes an even darker turn.

It appears that some of the children may have been murdered.

EMILY: There was a discovery of a young girl whose body

had been found mutilated in the woods.

NARRATOR: By September 1573,

local authorities are so alarmed they issue an edict

calling for a hunt for werewolves.

People in neighboring villages claim to have seen a werewolf.

Some even claim to have fought one off.

DARREN: And the longer this goes on, the more witnesses

begin to embellish the story.

NARRATOR: Why did the town of Dole suspect a werewolf

was involved?

How had that monster seized their imagination?

This is the truth behind the werewolf myth,

and how it's evolved over the centuries.

In November 1573, the nightmare of the missing

and murdered children takes a disturbing turn.

A group of villagers hear screams in the forest.

They see what looks like a wolf attacking a young girl.

They scare the beast away.

Not all the villagers say it was a wolf.

Some say it was a man attacking the girl, a man they recognize.

A hermit living in a hovel in the forest, Gilles Garnier.

MICHAEL: He lived in real poverty.

He was a real marginal character and probably

not well liked by the rest of the community.

NARRATOR: Garnier is about to become the central figure

in one of the very first documented criminal cases

involving murder and a werewolf.

To modern ears, this sounds like something from a fairytale.

Why would the people of Dole believe werewolves are real?

The fear of this monster goes back centuries.

TOK: The figure that haunts western European imagination.

EMILY: We have the human monstrosity and then we have

the animal monstrosity coming together in one central figure

that's been adapted throughout the centuries.

DARREN: Murder, cannibalism, a lust for blood, all of those

are the types of things that terrify us about the werewolf.

MICHAEL: I had always thought that I was afraid

that the werewolf was going to eat me.

When I became an adult, I realized that what I was

afraid of was that I would become the werewolf.

NARRATOR: In 1573, this historic monster seems to threaten

the people of Dole.

Some claim the hermit Gilles Garnier had been seen

in the forest in the form of a wolf.

He is brought into custody.

He is accused of being a werewolf

and practicing witchcraft.

MICHAEL: And a werewolf in those days was considered

to be a type of a witch.

You would become a werewolf through the act of magic,

usually involving rubbing grease all over yourself

or wearing a belt made out of wolf skin or a coat

made out of wolf skin.

Witchcraft in the 1500s in Germany and France was

what was known as a crimen exceptum,

which means that the normal laws of medieval jurisprudence

that protected accused criminals were suspended.

The Medievals actually had quite a robust system

of protecting the rights of the accused.

But if you were accused of being a witch or a werewolf,

that all went out the window.

DARREN: To understand the belief in something like werewolves,

you have to understand the role of the Church

in people's imaginations and in their daily life.

Because God wasn't an abstract in the Medieval Period

or the early Modern Period.

He was real. His will was real.

And what He did, what He thought, what He wanted,

manifested itself on earth.

And at the same time, the Devil, demons, all that stuff,

that's also just as real.

And we human beings, our ancestors, existed in a world

where they're caught between these two planes.

And between these two warring factions is what creates

this incredibly fertile environment in which

these types of myths could animate themselves.

NARRATOR: In 16th century France, geography and economics

also play a role in shaping the myth of the werewolf.

DARREN: Werewolf stories tend to emerge in regions of Europe

which have large wolf problems.

Whereas in countries like, for example, England at that time

where there are no wolves, you're not really getting

many werewolf stories.

Instead, you're hearing about them from other countries

like France.

DAN: As humans build their cities and they build

their farms, we take away those natural habitats

where the wolves normally would exist,

and we also move up closer to them.

And so, you end up with wolf populations

that are more compressed and that are closer

to where the humans live.

NARRATOR: In the competition for resources,

people struggling for their own survival

have demonized the wolf.

DARREN: The wolf is the symbol of the line

between civilization and wildness.

Between goodness and between savagery. Why?

Because the wolf is the non-domesticated

form of the dog.

The dog is man's best friend whereas the wolf is wild.

The wolf is the symbol of that thin line between

to be Christian or non-Christian, to be good,

to be bad, to be civilized, or to be savage.

NARRATOR: The villagers of Dole have caught someone

they believe has crossed that line into evil.

To obtain a confession from Garnier, the authorities

resort to brutal measures.

MICHAEL: This is, to be perfectly honest,

the hardest part of my job as a historian is learning

about these techniques that people have invented

for extracting information from one another through pain.

It is a horrifying, horrifying history.

EMILY: When Gilles Garnier was put on trial, he confessed

to murdering four children in the form of a wolf.

He said that he felt compelled with a form of hunger

to not only kill them but consume their flesh.

MICHAEL: He also told them that one day while he was looking

for food to feed his family, he encountered a spectre

in the woods.

And the spectre taught him the secret of transforming himself

into a wolf.

NARRATOR: Garnier makes his confession under torture.

His accusers take his words as proof.

This practice wouldn't stand up in a modern court of law.

It remains possible that Garnier killed one, or some,

or none of the children.

MICHAEL: It is very difficult to know what actually happened

in these cases.

We just have this court transcript, it's very detailed,

in which he did confess to murdering these children.

But, of course, he would have confessed to anything.

NARRATOR: Gilles Garnier is found guilty

and burned at the stake.

The story opens a window on the evolving image of the werewolf.

EMILY: We have to remember that our modern conception

of the werewolf, of this sort of human wolf shapeshifter,

is actually very different than how they would've

conceptualized it at the time.

So, with Garnier, for instance, he said he literally turned

into a complete wolf.

He was fully in wolf form when he said he committed

these crimes.

DAN: At the time of this trial, the idea that humans can pass

into animality is a huge part of folklore around the world.

MICHAEL: In Africa, you have accounts of were-lions.

In South America, you have accounts of folks

who can turn into jaguars and back again.

In China and Japan, you have were-foxes.

So, it really is very specific to the different locales

and the kinds of predators that existed sharing space

with humans.

NARRATOR: The wolf is a recurring presence

in the Western imagination going back to ancient Greece.

In Arcadia, secret rituals were said to be held

on Mount Lykaion, or Wolf Mountain.

Members of the cult were said to eat a mixture of human

and animal flesh and then turn into wolves for nine years.

TOK: It's also been suggested by some scholars that this

actually might represent a period of time when young men

were expected to go out into the forest away from

the community, form sort of wolf bands or wolf packs

of young men, and in the meantime serve valuable

functions as semi-wild, you know, protectors of the realm.

Wolves and men, this idea that it's a man thing to be a wolf

for a while.

[howling]

NARRATOR: In Greek myth, Arcadia was once ruled

by the notorious King Lycaon.

DARREN: King Lycaon served up the entrails of one

of his children to Zeus in an attempt to trick the god

into eating human flesh.

And what does Zeus do? He turns him into a wolf.

Why a wolf? Because it summarizes who the king was.

He was a cannibal.

He tried to feed his own children's entrails to a god.

And the result, he gets turned into an animal that represents

that level of savagery, that level of bestial wildness.

NARRATOR: The king's name would be used for a rare

medical condition.

DAN: The name Lycaon in King Lycaon comes from the Greek

lykos, which means wolf.

Later on, we get lykánthropos, which means wolf human

or wolf man.

That later becomes the word lycanthropy which is the idea

or belief that a human can become a wolf.

NARRATOR: In the 4th century, Byzantine doctors used

the term to describe pale, sick-looking patients

who prowled at night.

EMILY: This symptom of lycanthropy was walking around

graveyards at night, maybe digging up bones,

and generally sort of being in spaces that were considered

traditional or sacred, connected to corpses.

DAN: Today, lycanthropy is understood as a rare

psychiatric disorder where the victim truly believes

that they are half human and half wolf.

NARRATOR: The word werewolf is thought to appear in English

for the first time in the 11th century.

The Ecclesiastical Ordinances of King Cnut was a code

of laws promoting Christianity.

It combined two words: wer which meant adult male,

with the old spelling for wolf.

The term refers to heretics who threaten Christians

and their faith.

It does not mean today's cultural understanding

of shapeshifting werewolves.

TOK: So, werewolf means man-wolf.

So, this is a very specific cultural package that we have

in Europe.

It's not woman-wolf.

NARRATOR: Over time, folk cultures build on this

male-centric image of violence and depravity.

TOK: There's a few motifs that keep showing up across time.

It's usually a temporary condition.

Like, you're not usually changing into a wolf forever.

These wolves are not out eating lambs and sheep.

They're going after people.

This is attacking one's own, cannibalism.

NARRATOR: Fear of werewolves led to the torture and death

by fire of the French hermit, Gilles Garnier.

16 years later, those same fears would swirl around

a wealthy farmer in Germany.

And end in a public execution.

1589, Bedburg, in what is now Germany.

In the 16th century, this is the Holy Roman Empire.

A jumble of regional rulers and territories, cut through

by the Catholic-Protestant schism.

DARREN: We're now in the era of the Reformation,

and it is the single largest religious and therefore

spiritual upheaval that Western Europe had ever seen.

In Catholic parts of Germany, there were hunts for heretics

and those hunts would result in torture, inquisition, death.

There was a very real sense that every individual had a direct

connection to both God and the Devil himself.

NARRATOR: In 1589, it feels to some like an agent of the Devil

is stalking the land.

The inhabitants of Bedburg are being terrorized

by a mysterious killer.

A pamphlet from the time records that: for oftentimes

the inhabitants found the arms and legs of dead men, women,

and children, scattered up and down the fields

to their great grief and vexation of heart.

MICHAEL: The fear of this area of Germany became so palpable

that people were afraid to leave their homes.

And they would not travel from one town to another,

except in the company of armed men.

And this was a time of great fear in this part of the world

of witches and werewolves.

So, it was perfectly natural for them to start looking

for some kind of monster that would explain the horrible

deaths that occurred.

NARRATOR: Hunting parties around Bedburg are sent out

to try and find who or what is causing these deaths.

EMILY: One such hunting party was in active pursuit

of a large wolf leaping through the woods.

And in the exact same place they thought that they had

just seen the wolf, there was suddenly a man.

NARRATOR: The hunters know this man.

He lives in Bedburg. He is a neighbor, a farmer.

MICHAEL: And this man was named Peter Stumpp.

Now, Peter was a well-known, and it seems, well-liked

member of his community.

He was a wealthy farmer.

NARRATOR: Now Stumpp stands accused of the heinous crime

of killing and eating more than a dozen people.

MICHAEL: Now the reason why Peter Stumpp is called

Peter Stumpp is because in some of the versions of this story,

a hunter finds a wolf

and chops off his paw.

And then later when Peter Stumpp is captured,

it turns out that he's missing his hand.

DARREN: After the hunting party captured him, he was brought

before a magistrate and accused of being a werewolf.

And what that meant was that he was in league

with the Devil himself.

He's also accused of cannibalism,

just like King Lycaon.

He's also accused of incest with his own daughter.

NARRATOR: There would also be accusations Stumpp was having

relationships with various women.

DARREN: Once Stumpp is captured, he's tortured and it's under

torture that he confesses.

He finally tells the world, "I'm a werewolf.

That's the reason I did these things."

MICHAEL: Peter Stumpp confessed to killing 14 children

and two pregnant women.

He said that for many years, he had studied the art

of becoming a werewolf that he learned from the Devil.

DARREN: He was given a magical belt or a girdle,

which he would put on, and that would allow him

to transform into a wolf.

Then he'd go and hunt down people,

he would kill them and eat them.

MICHAEL: Anybody subjected to these practices of torture

would sooner or later say whatever they thought

the torturer wanted them to say.

NARRATOR: Peter Stumpp's ordeal is part of a large historical

wave of fear and intolerance.

MICHAEL: So, there was an explosion of witch trials

in this period, which of course, everyone knows that

there were tens of thousands of accused witches in France

and Germany who were burned at the stake, and England as well.

But what is not well known is that about 300 of those

were werewolf trials in Germany.

DARREN: Witch trials were a way of pointing the finger at women.

Werewolf trials were a way of pointing the finger at men.

In witch trials, women are accused very often

of fornicating, having sexual relationships, with the Devil

or with other demons.

In werewolf trials, men are accused of engaging

in very, very violent acts.

NARRATOR: After being judged guilty of murder, Peter Stumpp

is put to death in grisly fashion.

DARREN: He's tied to a wheel.

He has all of his arms, his legs broken with the blunt

side of an axe.

He has parts of his flesh ripped off.

And then he is finally beheaded,

in a symbolic ritualistic display, that tells

not just the community but anyone that hears that story,

if you work with the Devil, if you indulge in these

magical abilities that are not sanctioned by God or the bible,

we are going to come for you and we are going to make

your death as gruesome and as gnarly as possible.

NARRATOR: October 31, 1589, in the town Bedburg, Germany,

people gather to see servants of the Devil punished

for their sins.

Stumpp's headless corpse is tied to a stake next

to his daughter and the woman said to be his lover.

The two women are burnt at the stake.

Stumpp's story is sensationalized

in a German pamphlet which is translated into English.

His name becomes Stubbe.

This pamphlet remains the prime source of the story.

MICHAEL: The popularity of the Peter Stumpp pamphlet

spread like wildfire over Europe.

Some of the pamphlets depicted a creature that was neither

a simple wolf, like an animal, nor a man, but in fact,

some sort of weird hybrid of the two.

NARRATOR: The kind of werewolf pictured in the Peter Stumpp

pamphlet will keep shifting, even becoming part of

a morality tale for young women and girls.

In 17th century France,

societal concern about the questionable behavior

of powerful men impacts the werewolf myth,

in part inspiring one of the most well-known stories

featuring a wolf: Little Red Riding Hood, an old folktale

recorded by Charles Perrault, a former advisor

in the French government.

MICHAEL: And it is really, in my view, the most terrifying

of all the fairytales that are out there.

And the wolf in the story of Little Red Riding Hood

has many characteristics that would place him in the broad

category of werewolf.

He can speak, he can open doors, and he can even disguise

himself in order to get closer to his prey.

NARRATOR: In this retelling, the sexual dimension

of the werewolf myth is clear.

The first printed edition of Little Red Riding Hood

is published in France in 1697.

It tells the tale of a young girl travelling alone

through a forest to visit her grandmother.

She encounters a wolf who eats the grandmother

and then Little Red Hiding Hood.

MICHAEL: In Perrault's version of the story, the wolf seduces

Little Red Riding Hood in no uncertain terms.

First, he talks to her, flatters her, cajoles her,

and then eventually gets her to climb into bed with him

where he can then devour her.

EMILY: What's interesting about Perrault's story

is that there's a very clear moral actually written out

and according to his words,

Little Red Riding Hood is all about little girls,

particularly those of higher social standing

or who are religiously inclined or morally upright,

to avoid strange men.

He blatantly states that the wolf is meant to be

a stand-in for lecherous men.

He even goes as far as to saying that a wolf or a man

can take many forms, and the most dangerous one

is the one that appears most generous.

NARRATOR: In Little Red Riding Hood, a walking talking wolf

has become a cautionary fairytale

for young French women.

Seventy years later, a more bloody, brutal version

of the werewolf reemerges in southern France, in a part

of the country that used to be known as Gevaudan.

DARREN: This is the last decades before the French Revolution.

This is the era of Louis XV where the French court

is spending huge amounts of money not on its own people,

but on its own indulgences.

MICHAEL: Gevaudan was a very isolated community, very harsh,

difficult to make a living.

NARRATOR: June 1764.

14-year-old Jeanne Boulet is watching over a flock of sheep.

She never comes home.

Her corpse is found horribly mutilated.

EMILY: At first, her death was attributed to a wolf attack,

but more livestock and more human victims were found.

The intensity of the attacks seemed to increase as well.

There were some victims who were found with their throats

entirely torn out, some with their faces ripped off,

and some even with their heads separated from their bodies.

NARRATOR: Like the killings at Dole and Bedburg,

the community in and around Gevaudan assumes this is

the Devil's hand at work.

MICHAEL: The local communities began to believe

that this could not possibly be just an ordinary wolf,

but in fact, must be some sort of horrifying creature.

They came to refer to this creature as le Bete du Gevaudan,

the Beast of the Gevaudan.

Priests of the region put up death notices for the peasants

who had been horribly killed and wrote to other priests

in the region and around France.

And so the news of the Beast of the Gevaudan

spread very quickly.

NARRATOR: This fear spread by the beast is an opportunity

for the Catholic Church to blame the Protestant minority.

MICHAEL: A local Catholic bishop gathered the community and,

many of whom were Protestant, and excoriated them

from the pulpit saying that the Beast of the Gevaudan

was a werewolf who had been sent specifically by God

to punish them for straying from the Catholic faith.

NARRATOR: In the earlier century, this incredible story

may have just remained a regional folktale.

But a new mass medium has emerged that spreads it

far and wide.

MICHAEL: We had the first newspapers in France

at this time, and the newspapers really took up

the story of le Bete du Gevaudan

and began to propagate these descriptions of the Beast

as being the size of a lion or maybe larger, having reptilian

scales and claws, and crazy different features

of different animals.

One local paper published 98 stories about the Beast

of the Gevaudan in 13 months, accompanied by woodcuts

depicting the beast in all of these very sensational forms.

NARRATOR: Despite the media frenzy, not everyone

in 18th century France is convinced supernatural

wolves exist.

DARREN: The late 18th century was a period of transition

in Western Europe.

The Enlightenment has really kicked in, and people are

no longer looking to old dogmas or ways of thinking

to explain the universe.

EMILY: So when we first see the newspaper reports

of the Beast of Gevaudan, we see a lot of, sort of,

naysayers coming from the broader nation that claim

that this was just the backwards beliefs

of a people they believed to be of less intelligence.

NARRATOR: The Beast of Gevaudan appears to have roamed

over about 700 square miles.

DARREN: And in so doing over this maybe four, five-year

period, it kills, we think in the region of 113 people.

These people are almost all poor, deeply devout Catholics.

They're praying for their salvation, they're praying

for this beast to be dealt with, and they're asking

the Royal Court for help.

NARRATOR: King Louis XV sends out hunters to find

and kill the beast.

But they fail.

Their failure becomes the king's failure.

DARREN: And it became an embarrassment for the French

court because the Beast of Gevaudan wasn't just a local

story, it wasn't even just a French story.

It became a story that travelled all across Western Europe.

It symbolized not just the power of nature or what life

in rural France was like, it also symbolized the weakness

of the French state itself.

MICHAEL: So the people of the Gevaudan began to realize

that the King was not able to protect them,

and that they were going to have to organize

their own hunting parties.

NARRATOR: In June of 1767, a local hunter, Jean Chastel,

tracks an animal through the forest and manages

to shoot and kill it.

EMILY: But this was not the terrifying beast the press

had reported, this was simply a regular wolf.

Which begs the question of why couldn't the King

and the clergy have taken care of this problem much sooner?

And the King was actually lambasted even further

in the press and mocked for being unable to kill

such a simple animal.

What's additionally significant is that after

that wolf was killed, the rest of the attacks

completely stopped. There were no more accounts

of the Beast of Gevaudan.

NARRATOR: The beast is gone but its name lives on.

MICHAEL: There's a wonderful statue of a woman fighting

the beast which is sort of a wolf-crocodile sort of affair.

NARRATOR: The hunter Jean Chastel has also been honored

with a memorial.

His story will add a key element to the werewolf myth.

MICHAEL: A hundred years after Chastel bagged this wolf,

another newspaper reported that he had been using bullets

that had been cast from silver icons of the Virgin Mary.

And this is where we get the notion that silver bullets

can kill a werewolf.

NARRATOR: To this day, who or what killed more than

100 people in Gevaudan remains a mystery.

EMILY: I think that the Beast of Gevaudan attacks were likely

not the result of just one animal or one explanation.

I think it's undeniable that people and livestock

were dying, and I think that needs to be recognized.

This is not something that's purely fiction.

But I do think that it's unlikely that one single wolf

could have committed these crimes.

NARRATOR: If a person had committed some of the gruesome

deaths, perhaps there's a plausible explanation: rabies.

The people of Gevaudan would not have understood

the science of rabies.

But they would have been familiar with the symptoms.

Maybe this disease served in part to inspire

the werewolf myth.

DAN: It's passed by animals biting each other

and it changes your behavior to make you more aggressive.

And it is a horrible disease.

Once you get bitten by an animal that has rabies,

that virus gets into your nerve cells and then it slowly,

over the course of weeks,

makes its way up towards your brain.

So you can imagine a scenario where a dog or a coyote

or a wolf bites a human and the dog is clearly sick.

And then over time the human starts to get sick

in the same way, they start foaming in the mouth,

they start to act really differently

and really aggressively.

I mean, it's going to seem like they're becoming a werewolf.

NARRATOR: The Beast of Gevaudan is a transitional episode,

part of a historical hinge point between the forces

of science and superstition.

And as Europe moves ever deeper into the Age of Enlightenment,

the werewolf legend undergoes another monstrous change.

It takes a journey into the darkest recesses

of the human mind.

Nearly a century after France is terrorized by the Beast

of Gevaudan, the werewolf legend resurfaces.

This time in northwest Spain.

Once a wealthy imperial power, 19th century Spain

is struggling to modernize its economy.

MICHAEL: It was a time of great economic uncertainty

and a lot of poverty.

NARRATOR: People are desperate, forced to make treacherous

journeys across the country looking for work.

One of these economic migrants is Manuel Blanco Romasanta,

a sometime cook, farmhand, and weaver.

DARREN: Like many people in rural Spain, Manuel Blanco

Romasanta lived pretty much hand to mouth.

He was a travelling salesman, travelling from town to town,

door to door, selling soaps and things of that nature.

NARRATOR: An experienced traveler, able to read

and write, Romasanta also offers his services as a guide.

MICHAEL: Many of the migrants in this period were women,

single women or women with young children, who had to make

these really arduous journeys through forests

and other inhospitable regions, and it was extremely dangerous.

So men like Romasanta could offer their services

as guides and protectors.

NARRATOR: But the traveling salesman and helpful guide

is hiding a secret.

He is a murderer, stalking the women and children

he takes through the woods.

MICHAEL: One of the things that made Manuel Romasanta

stand out was that he was literate, and this was very

rare in this area, so he must have had an education.

But this probably increased the trust that people put

in him when he offered himself as a guide.

NARRATOR: For roughly 6 years, Romasanta is able to cover

his tracks, moving from victim to victim

without getting caught.

MICHAEL: He would forge letters from some of the people

that he had guided and murdered.

He forged letters back to their families saying

that they had landed in a new community,

that they were doing well, that they were making money.

They found remains of his victims in very disparate

parts of the country.

NARRATOR: Romasanta strips clothing from his victims

and sells the items.

This will help prove his undoing.

MICHAEL: And when he would go back into the communities

where those folks were from, those articles of clothing

would be recognized.

And this was one of the ways that the authorities were able

to close in on Romasanta and finally arrest him.

NARRATOR: September 1852, Romasanta is arrested.

He's transported to the city of Allariz to stand trial

the following year.

Romasanta confesses to 9 murders.

He offers up an astonishing line of defense.

EMILY: Romasanta said that he encountered two other wolves

in the woods, and that they looked at each other

and he suddenly suffered from violent convulsions

and then turned into a wolf himself.

And according to him, he went around with these other two

wolves, the trio of them, killing some of his victims.

DARREN: Unlike many other people who were put on trial for being

a werewolf, Romasanta admitted to it without being tortured.

That was his excuse.

NARRATOR: Breaking from earlier werewolf trials,

the court turns to science to determine the facts.

MICHAEL: The Romasanta case is one instance in a shift

that really began probably a hundred years earlier

in France where werewolfism stopped being considered

a form of witchcraft and started being considered

a form of mental illness.

EMILY: What's really interesting about this case is that it's

considered broadly the first trial of clinical lycanthropy.

MICHAEL: He was assessed by a court physician to see if

he was crazy or not, and they decided that he wasn't crazy,

that he did know right from wrong,

and that he knew what he was doing.

DARREN: No longer is this story about a man-beast wandering

the land and killing people. This is instead a story

about a person who believes

they're a wolf in a world which is very skeptical

about such things.

NARRATOR: April 6th, 1853, the court rejects Romasanta's

defense, describing him as a perverse and accomplished

criminal capable of anything.

He is found guilty of premeditated murder

and is sentenced to death.

But Romasanta's story doesn't end here.

In a remarkable twist of fate, the most powerful person

in the land comes to his rescue.

Convicted of murder, Manuel Blanco Romasanta faces

the death penalty.

Then the Queen of Spain herself intervenes.

EMILY: Queen Isabella II granted a request to give him clemency

and commute his sentence so that he could be studied

while in prison to try to understand his mental state

at the time of his crimes.

DARREN: So he spends the rest of his life,

about the next 11 years, in prison.

We think he might have just died of natural causes,

but there's also rumors that he was shot by a prison guard

who wanted to see him transform into a werewolf.

In the 1850s, they wouldn't have called Romasanta

a serial killer. That's a modern way of framing this.

But now, looking back, it's pretty clear that

that's almost certainly what he was.

MICHAEL: It's very interesting to think that

the Romasanta story actually parallels the story

of Little Red Riding Hood in some interesting ways.

First of all, the wolf is able to gain the trust of the little

girl before allowing her to travel through the forest,

where he eventually will catch up to her and devour her.

NARRATOR: By the time of Romasanta's trial, the tale

of Little Red Riding Hood had evolved in a significant way.

In 1812, the German Brothers Grimm, Jacob and Wilhelm,

had introduced a new character to their version, the Huntsman,

who arrives to save the young girl.

MICHAEL: It sort of changes the responsibility

of Little Red Riding Hood from a sense in the Perrault version

that she is responsible for her own actions

and that she is the one who needs to be careful as compared

to this version in Brothers Grimm,

where it's clear that she can't protect herself

and she needs a man to come in and provide that order

and provide that safety and security for her.

NARRATOR: Fairytales, oral traditions, pamphlets,

and newspapers, have all played a role in sustaining

and revising the werewolf myth.

Some forty years after Romasanta's trial,

a new mass medium is introduced to the world.

And the werewolf is once again remade.

DARREN: In the early Modern Period, the werewolf was

an idea, it was a primal fear.

In the Modern Period, the werewolf became

a canonized monster.

They could be deconstructed and reconstructed

over and over again.

NARRATOR: The 1925 silent film, Wolf Blood: A Tale

of the Forest, is the oldest surviving movie to invoke

the werewolf myth.

Set in a Canadian lumber camp, the hero is badly injured

and needs a blood transfusion.

He gets it from a wolf.

He has strange dreams of running with a wolf pack

and is terrified he is now half wolf.

He even thinks he may have killed someone in the camp.

But he is innocent and remains fully human.

DARREN: Cinema transforms the werewolf into the creature

we know today.

The process of creating film standardizes the mythology

of the werewolf, and an idea in one movie is likely,

if it's successful, to jump to another movie.

NARRATOR: The 1935 Werewolf of London is a landmark,

the first feature film to show a full human transformation

into a werewolf.

And it introduces one of the key tropes audiences today

take for granted.

MICHAEL: And this is the cultural artefact

that cements once and for all the relationship

between werewolves and moonlight.

EMILY: The main character who becomes a werewolf

is searching for a very particular flower in Tibet

that only blooms under the full moon.

And then we learn later on in the movie that

this is associated with like, sort of, the werewolf curse.

MICHAEL: It's definitely the light of the moon that causes

the transformation and that's pretty new.

We think of it as a part and parcel of werewolf lore

but it's actually very modern.

NARRATOR: Werewolf of London is followed by the 1941 classic,

The Wolfman.

The trailer uses the same kind of sensationalist language

found in the Peter Stumpp pamphlets from centuries before.

This film introduces another essential element

in the evolving myth.

EMILY: This movie also has the wolf man being bitten

by another werewolf and becoming a wolf himself.

MALEVA: Whoever is bitten by a werewolf and lives becomes

a werewolf himself.

EMILY: The main character is told that since he's been

bitten, he too will suffer from being forced to transform

at the full moon.

LARRY: I killed Richardson.

If I stay here any longer, you can't tell who'll be next!

NARRATOR: After bringing in moonlight and wolf bites,

Hollywood continues to rework and sustain the werewolf legend.

Medieval belief in werewolves has disappeared.

But the werewolf remains a strong presence

in popular culture.

The 1980s saw a whole slew of werewolf movies.

MICHAEL: My personal favorites include The Howling,

one of the scariest werewolf movies of all time.

And where you really see the transformation of a different

type of werewolf, the kind of werewolf that showed up

in some of the Peter Stumpp pamphlets of a werewolf

that walks like a man on two legs but has the head

and claws of a wolf, the jaws and claws of a wolf,

and the tail of a wolf, as opposed to just a human being

with a wolfy kind of makeup.

NARRATOR: As movies move from the 20th into the 21st century,

another major innovation occurs:

the girl in the forest, once tricked and eaten

by the big bad wolf, becomes the wolf herself.

EMILY: Ginger Snaps, the Canadian movie from 2000

is absolutely foundational to werewolf studies

and to werewolf cinema as a whole.

NARRATOR: The main character, Ginger, is bitten by a wild

animal beneath a full moon on the night she has

her first period.

EMILY: There's lots of comments, again, about her growing hair

in strange places.

NARRATOR: Ginger experiences a nightmare version of puberty.

BRIGITTE: Whoa! GINGER: "Whoa?" That's it?

"Whoa?" I can't have a hairy chest B, that's (Bleep).

NARRATOR: Becoming a werewolf will turn Ginger

into a sexual predator.

EMILY: What's really interesting too in the movie

is that she becomes much more sexually active.

But what she really had was an appetite for violence,

which harkens back to some of the older werewolf traditions.

She says the only thing that can satisfy her is literally

tearing apart, like, the bodies of other living things.

NARRATOR: Ginger Snaps introduces another very modern

twist to becoming a werewolf.

EMILY: It's the first time that we see werewolfism

being transferable through sexual contact, and Ginger

is able to transform one of her partners into a werewolf

when they have unprotected sex.

NARRATOR: Over the millennia, through shapeshifting symbolism,

the wolf and the werewolf have remained a powerful

collective nightmare.

TOK: The story is still there. The character is still there.

We still know what werewolves are, and we still use them

in our everyday conversations, in our literature.

We talk about men acting badly or like, "Oh, he was a wolf,"

or a band of young men acting badly.

"They were like a pack of wolves."

NARRATOR: Popular culture will continue to rework

and reimagine werewolves, probably for as long as humans

continue to commit bestial crimes.

DAN: Mythology like a werewolf helps us cope with the biggest

question that humans face which is are we fundamentally good

or are we fundamentally evil?

And the idea that the evil could be explained by something else.

"Oh no, they were a wolf when that happened," lets us believe

that we're good and that evil is something outside of humanity.

EMILY: It's, you know, that age old question, you know.

What makes someone human?

Is it part of their brain? Is it part of their soul?

Is it part of their heart? Is it nature? Is it nurture?

And I think the werewolf is a really interesting way

to engage with that discussion.

DARREN: We all have thoughts that we wouldn't necessarily

act on. We all have invasive ideas.

We all have revenge fantasies.

And it's those aspects of us that manifest into myths

like werewolves.

Let me put it another way.

Every one of us has an aspect that wants to howl at the moon.

MICHAEL: The reason why werewolves are terrifying

is because they represent the dissolution of what we think

of as our civilized selves, our compassion, and our reason,

and our intellectual ability, that all dissolves

and we become what we really are and really have been all along,

which is just animals.

NARRATOR: As we continue to build a deeper understanding

of the werewolf myth, perhaps this will also allow

a more realistic view of the animal that embodies that myth.

DAN: Wolves are majestic. They're amazing.

They're some of the most fabulous creatures

you could possibly imagine.

And yet humans have had it out for them since the dawn of time.

We've hated them through history.

Because we've demonized them, I mean, maybe in part because

of these werewolf stories, we almost wiped wolves

off the face of the earth.

By the turn of the 20th century, wolves were almost gone

from Western Europe.

And if you look at North America, there are only

a few places left where wolves still live in the wild.

So who's the real monster?