Werewolves of the 80s: Wolfen, Teen Wolf and Other Things Ronald Reagan Ignored

The menagerie of well-known financial scams and Ponzi schemes in the past 40 years is too many to list. It’s got some big names on it, too. Lou Pearlman, the producer behind The Backstreet Boys (and alleged pedophile) managed to swindle investors and banks out of $300 million using fictitious companies. Pearlman was convicted in 2008 and later died in prison.

Jordan Belfort, later to be portrayed by Leonardo DiCaprio in Martin Scorcese’s The Wolf of Wall Street, managed to make off with over $200 million. He served his time and, despite calling Bitcoin a “mass delusion”, is very heavily invested in NFTs.

Then there’s the most famous flimflam artist of the 2008 crash - Bernie Madoff, whose investors came calling to reclaim their over $7 billion in investments only to learn an awful truth.

There are so many criminals on Wall Street. It’s understandable if you missed Mark Malik.

Malik, to his investors, was the hotshot manager of a hedgefund worth over $100 billion. In reality, he was a former traffic cop and waiter. It didn’t matter, even the Bloomberg Group bought his story. By the end of his run, he’d blown $850,000 of their money on online dating, dinner out and trips to the Statue of Liberty. 

Malik took a slightly different approach to his defense than most brokers would. In what can only be presumed to be an attempt to cop an insanity plea, he sent a slew of emails to investors when they demanded their returns. First, he tried to fake his death. When that failed, the emails grew deranged.

”YEAH PUT IN ME JAIL GOOD!” read one of his emails. Another, more curious response was simply, “I’m going deer hunting.” 

The last email came with a YouTube link included. He sent a “clip of a werewolf movie” to an investor he believed had reported him with the words: “THIS IS WHAT I AM NOW.”

No media outlet named from what film the clip was taken, but it’s not hard to take a guess. The two most popular results that come from “werewolf movie” on youtube are Joe Johnston’s The Wolfman and John Landis’ An American Werewolf in London.

If it was the latter, it’s almost too fitting, as werewolves and stockbrokers had a very special relationship in the 1980s. It helps to realize that they were everywhere, then.

It was hard to escape them; werewolves were rampant. Stephen King wrote a little loved novella in 1983 entitled “The Cycle of The Werewolf”, later adapted into the 1985 film Silver Bullet with Gary Busey. The werewolf craze got playwright and filmmaker John Sayles to write a satirical horror script about a colony of self-help werewolves called The Howling, directed by Joe Dante. Outside of London, John Landis turned Michael Jackson into a lycanthropic beast during  Thriller's 15-minute long music video. Even Martin Scorcese, long before The Wolf of Wall Street, re-popularized Warren Zevon's “Werewolves of London” as a pool hall anthem for The Colour of Money. The song’s title would also be reused as the name of a Commodore 64 game in 1987. 

Though one wonders if it wasn’t London, which film Malik fixated on; which work best spoke to a predatory con man. He might have chosen 1981’s Wolfen, director Michael Wadleigh’s only narrative work of fiction. If he did, he’d be the prey. 

Wolfen opens with the demolition of a slum in the South Bronx, followed by the brutal slaying of the Trumpian construction magnate responsible for it. Though environmental terrorists are the likeliest suspects, the bite wounds on the victims are not human, and the string of killings continues. Detective Dewey Wilson (Albert Finney) is paired with a criminal psychologist (Diane Venora) and a medical examiner (Gregory Hines) to solve the crime.  It's probably a good time to note that Finney plays the role with all the reckless abandon of a hungover stepdad on the weekend. It's pitch-perfect for the material, hard and cynical, extremely divorced and there's good reason a Tom Waits cameo was cut. Forget Ron Pearlman, the Tom Waits biopic should have been made right then and there. 

A procedural/horror hybrid, Wolfen is not the most traditional werewolf movie - some would even argue that it’s not even of that subgenre. It’s a film rich with social commentary still quite relevant, as crises such as housing shortages worsen. It, like many werewolf allegories of the 80s, fit in well with SDGs 10 and 11.

As implied, Wolfen features none of the traditional werewolf staples - no transformation scenes, no curses. Instead, Wolfen’s procedural elements lead Wilson to a crew of Native American construction workers. Their leader, Eddie Holt (Edward James Olmos), has no problem admitting he’s a shapeshifter. 

Shapeshifters, in the film’s lore, can exchange spirits with those of animals - eagles, horses, and wolves. In real mythology, it has roots in Greek Literature but is most commonly associated in North America with the indigenous mythos.  

Native shapeshifters play both positive and negative roles in folklore. In Navajo culture, an evil witch or shaman can transform into an animal to cause destruction. This is known as skinwalking. 

There’s no question who’s responsible for the murders in Wolfen, as Eddie explains to Wilson in a bar after a frightening encounter.

“The smartest ones, they went underground. Into the new wilderness - your cities. Into the great slum areas, the graveyard of your f—--g species,” he explains.  Now, the wolves’ hunting ground has been invaded by high-rise apartment condos full of coke-addled socialites.

Wolfen directly points to the regentrification of New York City in the late 70s and early 80s as the cause for the slayings, but the Natives in the film are already marginalized enough. The reason Wilson is even aware of Holt and his crew is due to their past criminality, and they are only suitable for dangerous labour - construction at nausea-inducing heights.

Wadleigh, in his only film not about Woodstock, was one of the first to employ thermographic video techniques for the POV of the monster, made famous later in films like Predator.  It’s stunning here, as wolves stalk Finney through crumbled churches and tenements. The South Bronx of Wolfen is barren, depopulated. The churches and tenement buildings look positively war-torn. In 1980 New York, there was no shortage of rubble to film. 

In the 70s, New York lost 825,000 people. All in all, 600,000 impoverished were displaced. During this time, the South Bronx saw 80 percent of its housing units and population decimated.

Gretchen Hildebrand and Vivian Vazquez’ 2018 PBS documentary Decade on Fire offers the most concise and rage-inspiring picture of exactly what happened. It was a lot of little things. Since the ’50s, the neighbourhood was famous for its eclectic racial make-up of Puerto Ricans and blacks. By the end of the decade, they comprised two-thirds of the population there. When the rest of the country was segregated, it was an impossibility just below East 138th street. The racial makeup made the area a target for redlining, the discriminatory practice of declaring areas largely populated by nonwhites as in decline. When a neighbourhood was in decline, that meant that loans would not be given out there, fire insurance would be denied. The buildings were left to fall apart and burn.

Meanwhile in Manhattan, urban renewal, or as James Baldwin called it, “Negro removal” was implemented. Thousands were displaced to the South Bronx, further crowding the neglected buildings. 

The first fire burned in 1968, a tenement building, then another. Buildings mysteriously started to catch fire throughout the South Bronx. When the fires began, the FDNY chief had a simple explanation: you get a lot of immigrants together in unfamiliar surroundings, fires are bound to break out. 

In reality, the landlords didn’t care. They didn’t even turn the boilers on during the freezing New York winters. Neglected buildings meant neglected wiring. Fires were, indeed, bound to break out. It got so bad the fire department stopped filing reports.

If the fires were set by residents, they were usually caught and confessed that they were paid to set the building alight. Contemporary news stories didn’t bother to mention who might have paid them, but it’s not hard to guess looking at some of the insurance payouts to landlords.

As New York slid toward bankruptcy, Mayor John Lindsay called on the RAND Corporation for help. Without getting too technical, RAND’s computers, already known for helping decimate life in Vietnam, advised that Lindsay close some firehouses to save money. Over the course of the 70s, 12 firehouses were closed in the area. All of this was occurring at the same time a counselor to President Nixon, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, was pushing the policy of “benign neglect.”

President Carter pledged to help, but was voted out of office before anything was put in motion, replaced by a former actor who told the neighbourhood, “No politician can wave a magic wand!” In the end, it was the residents who helped save the South Bronx. Not only did they lobby against the exploitation films that came out of that decade such as The Warriors and Fort Apache, The Bronx, their own culture thrived. Moreover, the People’s Development Corporation was founded and began renovating buildings. A group of carpenters trained residents to work on their own homes. The group soon inspired offshoots. 

Wadleigh was always disappointed Wolfen was taken as a horror film and not a serious political work. It’s a shame it wasn’t taken more seriously, as it works incredibly well in both contexts.  Finney’s investigation is helped by a RAND-like corporation, that employs high-tech lie-detectors well outside the NYPD budget. And of course, the corporation’s first suspects are angry activists. At no point is any of this addressed directly in the film, the RAND-like agents are simply present - like they always should have been a part of the investigation.

It’s happening now, likely where you live. History is certainly repeating in the South Bronx, as residents are fighting to resist gentrification. Decade of Fire climaxes with the same residents who rebuilt the South Bronx aligning to battle a corporate takeover. In Canada, algorithms like the ones RAND used to determine the necessity of firehouses are now making racist decisions. New ad-blocking technologies mean houses, when they are available, aren’t even marketed to minorities.

We’ve seen the protections granted to landlords run rampant during the pandemic, with New York almost never prosecuting one for a DIY eviction.

In Toronto, low-cost apartment complexes are facing demolition all over the city in favour of condominiums. Forget benign neglect, the response from politicians is out and out brutality, raiding encampments of the displaced. 

Or perhaps Malik longed for his glory days of high school (he never did have a college degree) when he realized the law was cracking down and thought of 1985’s Teen Wolf.  He may have identified with Scott Howard (Michael J. Fox), the teen basketball player whose greatest hurdle in life is that he’s only average. At first, Howard has none of the problems that the poor Natives of Wolfen experienced. He lives in suburban bliss. He has no financial issues, he already has an attractive girl interested in him at the start of the film and his only real aim is to win the big game.

The problem is that he’s a gypsy, or that’s what the film alleges without saying aloud. Though the spinoff MTV series from 2011 does go into further detail on the matter, the film only suggests it.

At no point is it suggested anyone in the family was bitten by a werewolf.  Like Vampirism, Werewolf lore includes countless ways of being turned into one without being bitten, one of the most commonly used in the U.S. after The Wolfman in 1941 was a gypsy bloodline.  The word is never said in the film, and it’s unlikely it ever came up in production.

The Howards are, however, still outsiders. Scott is not particularly popular, he’s a child of either divorce or widowhood (it’s never clear) and both he and his father are the subjects of bullying. 

The curse has also provided the family some unwanted town notoriety; a long-standing feud between Scott’s father and the principal about his werewolfism provides a small roadblock later, and he regularly talks about how he feels socially inadequate.

Yet, despite this, Scott hangs around Stiles - who wears shirts that say: “Obnoxious” and “What Are You Lookin’ at, Dicknose?”

Stiles plays a key role in Teen Wolf as Scott’s confidant. After learning of his curse, he breaks the news to his best friend. This results in what at the time would have been hilarious, or at least commonplace, results:

“I’ve gotta talk to you about something because it’s making me nuts.”

“Are you gonna tell me you’re a f_?” Because if you’re going to tell me you’re a f_, I don’t think I can handle it.”

“We made a joke, and it was just meant to be a joke,” said screenwriter Jeph Loeb. “ It wasn’t a commentary; it wasn’t about coming out. We were just two young guys, and we were making jokes.”

The captioning really
doesn't do it justice. 

At the time, Vincent Canby of The New York Times called Teen Wolf “aggressively boring.” And it would be today if it weren’t so fascinatingly offensive. The fat kids are called fat and the girls are sex objects. For his part, Howard is completely unsympathetic, blaming his father’s meager town position as a hardware store owner for the reason the prettiest blonde ignores him.

It’s especially vexing given the likely origin of Scott’s condition. Gypsies, along with homosexuals, were among those put in concentration camps by real-life SS Nazi troops. Some were known as Werewolves. It’s even further irritating - grating - when body horror transformations in the genre were being used to explore a very real crisis in the 80s. 

Rock Hudson died the year Teen Wolf was released. A friend of the Reagan family, the actor had been diagnosed with AIDS a year earlier, becoming one of the first actors to come out and disclose his diagnosis. Though this led to Reagan’s first public acknowledgment of the disease, it’s since come to light that his wife Nancy refused to help Hudson get treatment. 

Scott’s werewolfism is not much of a hindrance, he’s even aided by it, winning the big game and impressing on the dance floor. He doesn’t get the pretty blonde, but only because he doesn’t want her, opting for his brunette friend instead. He’s a werewolf, but he’s white.

We never got a Werewolf AIDS movie, not one that specifically made the connection, but it’s evident in any body horror. The condition of a werewolf pre-transformation is often more horrifying when it starts from a normal human body. In Dante’s The Howling, however, serial killer and werewolf Eddie Quist (Robert Picardo) looks like he’s infected by something else prior to transforming, covered in sweat and matted hair. While he’s taken a bullet to the head, it wasn’t silver. He looks sickly.

What, one wonders, might a stockbroker or any power player in the financial game identify with from werewolf lore?  It can’t possibly be the outsider status that films like Landis’ London explore, where an American Jewish tourist is ostracized. Wall Street brokers are notorious for their clan-like activity. Outsiders aren’t welcome. They don’t take kindly to homosexuals, either

The only attraction evident comes from wolf behavior; the party pack of elite hunters that prey on the nightlife like the irritatingly oft-quoted “wolf pack” of The Hangover franchise. Indeed, a controversial and popular practice exists amongst hedgefund managers known as “Wolf Pack Activism”, in which one investor will seize on a company or property aggressively, attracting the others. This is done to seize control over the company without the need of reporting your holdings to the SEC.  Bonding with nature and the deeper spiritual connection that Eddie Holt describes is lost on them until it rips out their jugular.  


An alternate, abridged version of this piece ran on artshelp on June 4, 2022.