What if...

[AriesWolf]

I just thought of this, and I'm not entirely sure where I'm going with it, so bear with me.

I was thinking about how the most well-known aspects of the werewolf mythos: the vulnerability to silver, the pentagram on the hand (which I'd never heard of before), and the transforming at the full moon, have no basis in history; they were all manufactured by Hollywood. Why? I don't know. My first thought was that they did it because the idea of a man that turns into a beast just wasn't dramatic enough as-is. But then I started thinking, 'what if'? What if the real reason for such a huge distortion was that werewolves had long since thoroughly infiltrated all levels (or almost all levels) of human society, and they were using Hollywood as part of a massive disinformation campaign? What do you guys think?

I know this might seem like a weird idea, but I seem to be good at coming up with those lately. Last week I was pondering why a law abiding civilian living in the united states would insist they needed an assault weapon, and suddenly it came to me: werewolves. Some poor shmoe living in a rural area accidentally blunders onto the fact that he's living 'surrounded' by werewolves of unknown numbers and intentions, I can see why he'd start eyeballing the gun rack.

Sometimes my mind scares me.

[Sevena]

a conspiracy or human ignorance? human ignorance gets my vote, BUT you never know!

[Terastas]

On silver:
This has been covered at length, and the consensus is that silver is, at the very least, as toxic to werewolves as it is to humans. A lot of people tend to forget that all the things attributed to be effective against werewolves could also put a normal person in the hospital too.

On the pentagram:
This one we haven't covered as much, but I always thought of "the sign of the pentagram" as being a mark on the werewolf's palms left behind from his transformation, specifically after the pads of his former forepaws revert back. You can sort of see it here (and in many other paw print images): Two lines off in either direction and one going straight up between the pads.

On the full moon:
It's the lunar effect. Human beings have always been fascinated by the full moon for one reason or another. Even if the lunar effect has no basis in science, there is still the power of suggestion.

[Wingman]

In the vast majority of stuff I write or work on, at least one supernatural character will be working in the movie/entertainment industry in one capacity or another. It's the perfect position for them to be in, if someone posts a picture or video, two days later the internet will be flooded with similar/identical promotional content for some movie/game/whatever that they invented as a cover story.

My take on the pentagram-hand thing is that it arose in the old days when werewolves were still the Devil's Hounds, evil things. And, lacking the SFX technology, the movie makers needed some way to let the audience identify a werewolf, or possible werewolf, to build tension. Just as Hitchcock would include a shot of the bomb under the table, the makers of the werewolf movies needed a similar counterpart to build tension and suspense. I wouldn't be surprised if there are a few instances of the director letting the audience see someone with a pentagram-scar on their palm in a werewolf movie, and then it turns out it's just a childhood injury and the real werewolf is someone else.


The idea that the world is controlled by some shadow conspiracy isn't a new one, there are as many theories as there are things to have theories for, werewolves, vampires, aliens, espers, Nazis, etc. Occasionally it even makes for a good story.

[RedEye]

Hmmm... Have you been reading "Wulfen Blood"? That's part of the "Hide-in-plain-sight" strategy my Werewolves use; carefully placed people who sidetrack things or purposely distort others so their People can continue to intermingle with Smoothskinned humanity.

Dis-information carefully done is one of the most effective tools for shaping public opinion, and public awareness.

And the silver business is a specifc weakness that they have against a decidedly toxic metal. Silver kills their repair and immunity cells on contact; making a silver bullet deadly to them since they can't even heal as well as a normal Smooth would. Add in the infection from dead bodily cells, and you have a plausible reason for their weakness to Silver.
And even a steel bullet in the head will kill a Werewolf...you can't ignore simple trauma as a cause of death in anything.

[Terastas]

There's three reasons why I don't particularly buy into any stories that involve a Hollywood conspiracy.

1) The amount of effort it would take to actually stay in Hollywood and make sure those misconceptions stick over the years. Especially because, if you haven't noticed already, the great majority of all werewolf movies suck, both with the critics and at the box office.

So what would they do when people like, oh, I dunno, WE, THE PACK come along and start picking through all the deliberate misconceptions they've injected into the werewolf legend and move to reject them? If we or some other independent filmmaker end up inspiring a modern mythos and the industry rejects the classic Hollywood werewolf, all that time and effort they put into creating a misconceived werewolf just went out the window.

2) Hollywood culture. Ever seen the movie Paparazzi? Hollywood is a completely different world in of itself, especially when it comes to the law. With millions of sleazy photographers peeping through every window and every judge in the county dreaming of being the next Judge Judy, there is no way in Hell anyone could have hidden something as fantastic as lycanthropy in Hollywood for so long.

3) The misconceptions themselves are pretty poorly conceived. I could believe such a conspiracy about vampires because they have both some pretty unusual weaknesses and some pretty unusual tells. The vampire myths tell, for example, that vampires cannot see their reflections in the mirror, that they compulsively collect and count things that are dropped, that they cannot cross running water, etc., etc., etc. They make no sense, but if you learn to associate them with the vampire image, it'll make it that much easier for a real vampire to prove that he isn't one.

To take it even further, vampires are attributed to be weak against garlic and sunlight, two things that are, to a normal human being, completely harmless except in the greatest of quantities. If these were encouraged by such a conspiracy, a vampire can stare his supposed weaknesses in the face and prove that he is not a vampire by the sheer virtue of the fact that he's still alive.

So, if werewolves were doing this too. . . Couldn't they have come up with some other telltale signs they could disregard, or at least something a little more original than "the sign of the pentagram?" And the weaknesses especially; why is it that the only classical weaknesses of werewolves are things that would kill anything else as well? It would kill a normal human being if you shot him in the heart with a silver bullet too -- why wouldn't they have attached something to the werewolf image that they could use to prove their humanity?

There's little to no room in the classic Hollywood werewolf lore for someone to say: "Well if I was a werewolf, could I do this?!" If werewolves ever were in Hollywood, they weren't very smart about it, because I would think that would be the first element of a werewolf misconception campaign they would try to implement.

Just playing a little devil's advocate here. Sorry guys.

[Wingman]

Well, T, imagine if the 'real' werewolves don't actually physically transform, instead they have a variety of ethereal/astral powers that are invisible to normal sight. That in and of itself would throw a wrench in the plans of just about everyone out to expose werewolves. You can sit there with a camera all night, waiting for him to pop some fur, and you'll never see when he does because it would take an old-style camera that uses silver, or a silver mirror, to catch a glimpse of it.

[Scott Gardener]

Oh, yeah, they can only be killed by silver bullets--blessed by, uh, the Pope. Yeah. Let me know how your trip to Vatican City goes, and be sure to stop by Milan or Venice.... I'll just keep my eye out for your... werewolf. Because, being a guy without a pentagram on his hand, and it being a waning crescent, I can't possibly be your creature in question.

[RedEye]

Actually, the pentagram on the palm was Lon Chaney Jr's idea, largely because the creases of his palm made one already.

[alphanubilus]

ACTUALLY, as is explained in the "Wolf Man" classic's collection DVD entitled, "Monster by Moonlight"... The pentigram on the palm was a story device concieved by Curt Siodmack a German Jew who escaped Germany, evading the Halocaust. The "star" was a metaphor. If you remember, Nazis made Jews were the Star David as a marker, this to a Jew meant death. In fact there are a lot of Nazi metaphors in the Wolf Man. This could also be attributed to the fact that Hitler himself was obsessed with wolves, hince many of his strongholds being given wolf related names. The movie Frankenstein vs. the Wolf Man was also nicknamed "Fur & Steal", of which was another WWII metaphor. Another interesting factoid is that a full moon was never shown in the original Wolf Man.

As for silver killing a werewolf... Part of this comes from actual mythology that had to do more with silver's use in alchemey and witchcraft. Silver is the metal of the moon, per say. The only story where silver was actually used in mythology, is in the account of the Beast of Le Gevaudan, where a hunter had his crucifix melted down into a silver bullet of which was blessed by (you got it) a priest.

As for the full moon... Again this ties to old legends involving witchcraft, the devil's hour, and the whole lot. How did it become applicable to werewolves... possibly during various pagan ceremonies of which were performed during a full moon night. A key factoid you have to remember is that during a lot of this time, much of the known world was living in a dark age, due to religious oppression by a rather less than true "Christian" church. In short, if you disagreed with the church at the time, or pleaded to have the Bible translated so everybody could read it, you were labeled a heretic, found guilty of some false crime, made out to be a witch or a werewolf (Peter Stubb's case) and then tortured until you admited to whatever crime. You were then thusly executed.

[Moonraiser]

I don't believe that could or ever will happen.

[Sharfan]

There are pretty good explanations for the weaknesses of werewolves, stemming from, what other than the church.

Silver: Silver has been used as a weakness in many different creatures, all of them being something that the church deemed evil, such as vampires, demons, etc. I believe the explanation is that the church chose silver because of the silver (don't remember the exact amount) that was payed to that one guy (not a huge fan of the bible, or the church) that betrayed Jesus.

Pentagram: Long used by the church as a sign of evil, it actually was used as such as sign from their rivalry against the Pagan religions. Pentagrams are used in pagan religions, such as wicca, to represent the five elements: fire, water, air, earth, and spirit. It has many other representations, none are as evil as some are led to believe, that I don't wish to list, as I am growing quite tired.

The Full Moon: There is no exact reason for this, but I have an idea that links it back to the church's rivalry agains paganism. In pagan religions, the fool moon is a time of fertility and fullfillment (SP?), and a very celebrated time of the month. Peaceful rituals, that never involved any kind of sacrifice, be it blood or life (because such a thing would go agains some of the main rules of the religion itself. Ex. the wiccan rede: "And harm ye none, then do as ye will," and the law of three), also took place during this time. My opinion that this was originally part of their campaign, but was not brought into the media until recently.

All of this could be complete BS, because I'm not certain that I'm thinking straight, as of now. For some reason, I have become very tired. If anyone has a plausable objection, not just to criticize me for my views, then I would gladly like to have a good conversation with them some time. I have no problem with the christian religion, I just don't think that the church acted rather rashly during the Salem Witch Trials. The worst part was that most of the people executed had never had anything to do with paganism. But, I digress. I hope this helped out the conversation in some way.

[RedEye]

Remember, all these weaknesses were there to give the hero something to work with.
As to the Sodimak-German connection, that is indeed possible; but I got the pentagram thing from Lon Chaney Jr's biography, so maybe both stories are true.

For all we know, Werewolves (if they existed) might not be affected by any of those things...instead, they might be allergic to peanuts. or gluten. or lactose. or chicken products.
Somehow, though, a Werewolf with those sorts of weaknesses would lose most of their mystique even if they became a bit more believable in the process.

[NightWolf6]

As far as I know from my researches weres are not allergic to silver, they would actually be more ''allergic'' to gold. If you really want to know if the person before you isa a werewolf then just shove a Bible in his/her hands. Somehow they can't touch it.

Werewolves have better hearing, eyesight, smelling and healing. The full moon just boosts all of this about 5 to 10 times.

All these things that we see in movies or read in books are exaggerated. They are there so the movies and books would sell better.