If this entertaining Universal monster movie lacks the artfulness and wicked humor of Frankenstein and the iconic quality of Dracula, it makes up for all of that with a well-told story and one of the great, sympathetic movie monsters. This film popularized the idea of the werewolf as a tragic character, an innocent soul who turns into an uncontrollable beast through no fault of his own.
It’s the prototypical werewolf tale: We meet a likable guy (Lon Chaney Jr.) who moves to a new town—a European village where the fog is so thick at night that you could catch it in a bottle—and, after mingling with the locals for an evening, ends up attacked by a wolf who takes a nasty bite out of his torso. A few days later, he starts sprouting fur and fangs when the sun goes down and then waking up groggy the next morning to news of bloody murders that occured overnight.
In his script, the great sci-fi/horror screenwriter Curt Siodmak cherrypicks elements from centuries-old lycanthrope folklore, but he is largely credited with inventing for this film the wolf’s vulnerability to silver that just about every werewolf movie since has incorporated.