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Part 3 – I happened to be watching the news while having lunch just before sitting down to write this and according to NBC news there are 54,000,000 Americans who are food insecure as of November 2020. No doubt many of them are people who lost jobs due to the COVUD pandemic, but that is still a staggering number of hungry people, especially in a country that claims to be the “richest” in the world. Rich it may be, but the real question is: who has the money when 54,000,000 of my countrymen are hungry?

Obviously, this is a point The Curse of the Werewolf is making as we see the feast that has been prepared for the Marquis’s wedding. Chef after chef brings in his best dishes accompanied by music and the applause and cheers of the guests. One of the dishes is a roast goose carefully made to appear as if it were alive and in flight. It is quite an achievement and the guests raise a cheer to the smiling chef — but wait — the bride looks uncomfortable.

The beggar is, indeed, a man. He is a poor and hungry man, but a man nonetheless, and so he is free to choose between good and evil….if given that choice. At this point, I should explain that while we never hear his name in the film, the Marquis’s name is the Marquis Di Sinistro in the credits of the film. The Latin adjective sinister/sinistra/sinistrum originally meant “left” but took on meanings of “evil” or “unlucky” in the Classical Latin era, and this double meaning survives in European derivatives of Latin, and in the English word “sinister”. So, the translation of his name into English would be “Lord Evil” or “the Lord of Evil”. This is very clearly a reference to Satan. In other words, the Marquis is a symbol of Satan.

If you recall, it was Satan (disguised as a snake) who tricked Eve into eating the fruit of knowledge so that she and Adam would have the knowledge of good and evil. Recall also that because they disobeyed God, Adam and Eve are forced to leave the Garden of Eden and become mortal (they will die someday). But only their bodies will die. Their human souls will continue. Depending on whether they have been good or evil their souls will either go to heaven or to hell. It is their choice whether to be good or evil because they have the knowledge of good and evil and are free to choose between the two. So, why would anyone choose evil when it means going to hell?

Life outside the Garden of Eden is not easy for humans. They must work for their bread and sometimes they go hungry. Perhaps it would be easier to just steal the bread? Perhaps it would be easier still to just rob people of their money so we can buy bread or anything else we want or need? Maybe it is even easier to kill those we rob in case they can identify us to the police? And so it goes. We find ourselves doing evil because it is easier than being good.

Part 6 – Being imprisoned in the castle dungeon begins a years-long process of “dehumanization” of the beggar who stops speaking and gradually grows dirtier and more animal-like as the years go by. He also starts to become hairier as if living like an animal is making him hairy like an animal. Like Judas who sold himself for silver coins and betrayed his friend Jesus, the beggar has sold himself and later betrays his friend, the servant girl who cannot speak, by raping her. Of course, it is again the marquis who is the ultimate source of this evil.

Part 7 – The Curse of the Werewolf is a reboot of the Wolfman (1941). We know that the word “werewolf” is identical to “wolfman” since the word “were” is simply an older English form of the word “man”. But the film is not titled simply The Werewolf, it is titled The Curse of The Werewolf. What is the significance of the word “curse” in the title? Used as a verb, “to curse” means to utter a blasphemy or to swear, or to use magic to bring misfortune to others. Its noun form refers to the result of such magic. If someone is “cursed” they have an evil spell upon them. In some cultures, it is believed that curses are sometimes passed from one generation to the next in a family. This makes perfect sense when you consider that most physical and mental abnormalities (for example, dwarfism) are genetic conditions that actually are passed from one generation to the next. Before people understood genetics they would have believed such conditions were “family curses”. You also read about the condition known as “hypertrichosis” in which people, especially men, grow excessive amounts of hair all over their bodies and faces. This was also a genetic condition. In the next excerpt, we will see what has been passed on to the next generation.