If you’ve been paying attention to your movie monsters this past decade, you will have noticed that zombies won *big* in the last ten years while vampires took a hard nose dive. Why did zombies get the gold? Max Brooks argues that they returned to fashion because of national anxiety of two wars and terrorism. I respectfully disagree. I think the last ten years brought torture porn to the table with movies like Hostel and the like. I can’t really answer that question about the undead other than I like zombies and apocalyptic scenarios.

So what about the werewolf genre? By all accounts it has been dead for years. We’ve seen twitches from the Underworld series, but I’d argue those movies were really about vampires with a couple of hairy dudes thrown in for kicks. I think we as culture must have done a double take with the release of Teen Wolf, and made an unspoken decision to take the genre to the vet and put it down for good, but as we know like zombies, once you think a werewolf is dead, it will just come right on back and eat your face off.

Hollywood appears to have rediscovered the our favorite morphing fleabags. Next month, we will see the remake of The Wolfman. Right now, the Howling is undergoing a reboot and filmmakers are currently planning to do a reboot to An American Werewolf in London. Reelz Channel has a timeline with plenty of information. Who knows … maybe this will be another foot twitch or maybe we’re seeing the rebirth of a forgotten genre.

Speaking for just myself, werewolves just don’t do it for me. The upcoming wolfman movie is an attractive movie to me not because of the monster, but because I enjoy historical horror movies. What do you think? Are you happy to hear the cries at the moon once again? Is this an itch that needs to be scratched? Or would just rather our lycanthrope friends to stay asleep for another ten years?

Werewolf Movie Timeline – The Highs and Lows Before New Moon (reelzchannel.com <- new window)