Daniel A. Olivas
I was no older than five or six when my parents first allowed me to watch the 1941 classic Universal Pictures horror movie, The Wolf Man, starring Lon Chaney Jr., as the titular shapeshifting monster as designed by makeup artist Jack Pierce of Frankenstein fame. This was a different time—the mid-1960s—before Blockbuster Video, cable television, and streaming. So for families that lived on a tight budget, Los Angeles’s local television stations offered unending reruns of old movies from horror to noir, science fiction to westerns, and comedies to musicals. Horror, not surprisingly, sat the top of my favorites.
Unlike Universal’s Frankenstein of ten years earlier, The Wolf Man (1941)—directed by George Waggner—was not inspired by a literary classic but sprung from the creative mind of science fiction writer, Curt Siodmak, who decided to leave Germany for England in 1933 after hearing an anti-Semitic tirade by Joseph Goebbels. He established himself as a screenwriter in his adopted country and eventually made his way to the United States in 1937. Siodmak’s big break in Hollywood came in the form of his screenplay for the 1940 Universal’s film, Invisible Man Returns. His horror chops thus established, Universal tapped him to pen The Wolf Man.
Decades later in an interview, Siodmak said: “I am the Wolf Man.” He explained, “I was forced into a fate I didn’t want: to be a Jew in Germany. I would not have chosen that as my fate.”
Similarly, Chaney as the tortured Larry Talbot didn’t choose his fate when a werewolf—a metamorphosed Romani fortuneteller gamely played by Bela Lugosi—bites him, thus sealing his fate of suffering from horrifying transformations, persecution, and eventual death. In a Jewish Journal essay titled “Should Jews save the werewolf from extinction?” Jeremy Wexler argued that the werewolf had a long Hollywood history of serving as a metaphor for Jewish life among non-Jews going back to Siodmak’s Wolf Man screenplay, including John Landis’s An American Werewolf in London, and the character of Oz played by Seth Green in the television series, Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
I can speak from family experience that this alienation and fear of being caught run deep. Just before my maternal grandmother passed away in the early 1980s, she shared a secret with my mother: our family line included Sephardic Jews. My mother was shocked and repeatedly asked her mother if she knew what she was saying. My grandmother was adamant. After she passed, my mother visited Mexico to deal with a small piece of property in the state of Jalisco that had been in her mother’s name. While there, she questioned our relatives about what she had learned. They, at first, denied it vehemently. But after insistent questioning from my mother, they admitted the secret: the family had fled Spain in the early 1800s when the Inquisition was still on the books and settled in Mexico. They maintained many Jewish customs—from dietary restrictions to certain religious rituals—but lived as Catholics to the outside world. “But we don’t talk about this outside the home!” they admonished my mother.
Perhaps ironically, I fell in love with my law school sweetheart, Susan Formaker, who is the granddaughter of Russian-Jewish immigrants who fled the anti-Semitism of Czarist Russia. We eventually married in a Jewish ceremony, and I formally converted within the Reform tradition two years later. In many ways, I had come home.
As I said, alienation and fear of being caught run deep. And Chaney’s expressively tortured face perfectly captured the concomitant anguish that inspired Siodmak’s screenplay even though Chaney was not Jewish. Based on what we know of his life, that anguish likely had its foundation in personal travails going back to his turbulent childhood. Born Creighton Tull Chaney in 1906 to stage performers Lon Chaney and Frances Cleveland Creighton, the young Chaney witnessed his parents’ troubled marriage which ended in divorce seven years later, after his mother’s very public suicide attempt in Los Angeles. He bounced around various boarding schools and homes for several years until his father remarried, thus offering Chaney a more stable home.
Shockingly, Chaney was led to believe that his mother had, in fact, taken her life, but after his father’s death in 1930, he learned that she was still alive. This incident left a deep mark on his psyche and added to Chaney’s public acknowledgment that he had had a tough childhood.
Chaney’s father, of course, moved from the stage to silent films eventually utilizing his makeup artistry to create some of the most famous horror characters of all time in such films as The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923) and The Phantom of the Opera (1925). Known as the Man of a Thousand Faces, the elder Chaney discouraged his son from going into show business. Avoiding his famous father’s shadow led Chaney to business college and successful jobs with an appliance corporation and eventually a plumbing company; he married Dorothy Hinckley and had two sons in a traditional life far from that of Hollywood stars.
It was only after his father’s death that Chaney entered the film industry and eventually took on the name of Lon Chaney Jr., something the studios preferred due to his late father’s enduring fame. Chaney’s film career would last forty years, from 1931 to 1971, which would include along the way two divorces and continued alcohol abuse. Indeed, the actor Robert Stack claimed in an autobiography that on the Universal Pictures lot, Chaney and his drinking companion, the portly, gruff actor Broderick Crawford, were known as “the monsters” due to drunken behavior that allegedly resulted in regular bloody brawls.
Despite acting in scores of films unrelated to horror themes, Chaney became forever connected to his role in The Wolf Man, suffering a similar artistic fate to one of his co-stars, Lugosi, who could never escape Dracula. Chaney’s Larry Talbot—in a plot point that coincidentally mirrored Chaney’s own fraught relationship with his late father—returns to his ancestral home in Wales ostensibly for the funeral of his recently deceased brother but with the goal of reconciling with his estranged father, Sir John Talbot, played by Claude Rains.
Larry falls in love with a local woman, Gwen, who runs an antique shop where Larry buys a walking stick decorated with a silver wolf’s head. It is then that he learns of the werewolf legend about a man who can change into a wolf “at certain times of the year.” The villagers believe that the werewolf is responsible for otherwise unexplained and gruesome deaths, and some recite this short poem whenever werewolves are mentioned: “Even a man who is pure in heart and says his prayers by night / can become a wolf when the wolfsbane blooms and the Autumn moon is bright.”
Gwen firmly refuses Larry’s obsessive and—truth be told—rather boorish proposals for a date, but they end up meeting that evening and are joined by Gwen’s friend, Jenny, to have their fortunes told at the nearby Romani encampment. The fortuneteller, Bela, sees a pentagram when he reads Jenny’s palm which—according to legend—is a sign that she will be the werewolf’s next victim. Larry and Gwen take a walk where Gwen breaks the news that she is engaged thus explaining her constant rebuffing of Larry’s advances. Their conversation is interrupted by Jenny’s screams. Larry valiantly runs to save Jenny who is being attacked by a vicious wolf. Larry attacks the animal with his new silver-headed walking stick but is bitten on the chest before he can kill the beast. Sadly, his efforts are too late: Jenny’s throat is torn out. The dead wolf transforms back into the form of Bela, the fortuneteller. A badly wounded Larry flees the scene, but his walking stick becomes evidence that links him to the fortuneteller’s death.
The village authorities focus on Larry, and suspicion grows when he cannot verify his story of fighting a wolf because his wound miraculously heals overnight. Horrified to learn from the fortuneteller’s mother that he is now cursed to transform into a murderous werewolf, Larry plans to leave town. But he transforms again and attacks Gwen. His father—not recognizing his own son—bludgeons him to death with Larry’s silver-headed cane and watches in terror as the dead werewolf transforms into Larry’s human corpse. Thus, the film’s father-son relationship theme turns as dreadful as it possibly could.
Daniel A. Olivas, Chicano Frankenstein
As I rewatched Chaney in his iconic role and researched the making of The Wolf Man, a protagonist in the form of a hard-drinking, noir-obsessed, young attorney named Nadia Campos slowly took form in my imagination, where she has made a home ever since. She would become the center of what would be my follow-up novel to Chicano Frankenstein as I explored the theme of transformation in its many forms. But Chaney’s personal battle with alcohol also fanned to life another theme, specifically that of addiction.
The transformation theme, of course, sits at the center of Chicana Werewolf, as it does with any werewolf narrative. However, unlike so many of those horror stories and films, the supernatural would not be the driving force behind my characters’ transformation from human to wolf. Rather, I wanted to introduce the concept of genetic manipulation through medical experiments on a U.S. population that had its roots in Mexico. Our country’s experimentation on people of color is not the stuff of dystopian science fiction but firmly based on history. Take, for example, the Tuskegee Syphilis Study. As my character, Barney Waggner—an African American attorney—observes late in Chicana Werewolf:
Between 1932 and 1972, our government conducted a so-called ‘study’ on a group of nearly four hundred Black men with syphilis. Why? To observe the effects of that horrible disease when untreated. During the study, efficacious medical advancements had been made in treating this disease. But these Black men were not informed of the nature of the experiment, they were denied treatment, and more than a quarter of them died as a result. And let me tell you, death by syphilis is horrific.
As I noted, the theme of addiction came to me as I learned of Chaney’s well-documented alcoholism. To my mind, that struggle imbued his tortured performance as Larry Talbot with an authenticity seldom seen in the multitude of werewolf films throughout the decades. In a twist, I decided to have my non-werewolf protagonist, Nadia, struggle with alcohol addiction as she uncovers the secret of a group of Chicanas who—against their collective will—are genetically engineered werewolves. In this way, Nadia’s slow but steady acknowledgment of her unhealthy desire for alcohol mirrored the Chicana werewolves’ plight.
The creative writing process is a delightful mystery that I care not to solve. I have no idea why some things inspire me and others do not. In the end, all I truly care about is telling compelling stories and creating characters who ring true. If readers get something deeper from my writing, that’s gravy, as far as I’m concerned. In the end, I sincerely hope that I have fulfilled all of my storytelling goals with Chicana Werewolf.
The next step is to place my manuscript with a publisher so that it may enter the world. I will keep you posted. In the mean time, you can find Chicano Frankenstein at Forest Avenue Press.
Daniel A. Olivas is a fiction writer, poet, playwright, book critic, and attorney. He is the author of 13 books and editor of two anthologies. Olivas’s books include Waiting for Godínez: A Tragicomedy in Two Acts (University of New Mexico Press, 2025), My Chicano Heart: New and Collected Stories of Love and Other Transgressions (University of Nevada Press, 2024), and Chicano Frankenstein: A Novel (Forest Avenue Press, 2024). He has written on literature and culture for Literary Hub, The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Review of Books, Alta Journal, and Latino Book Review. Olivas earned his degree in English literature from Stanford University, and law degree from UCLA. He is a senior attorney with the California Department of Justice’s Public Rights Division in Los Angeles.
