The Werewolf

Abstract

The figure of the vampire—and King’s variations on it—is largely one of externally defined monstrosity, including fangs and the potential for violently penetrating the boundary between the Self and the Other. But what happens when the boundary being crossed is internalized, between the Self and the Other that resides within? This is the psychological duality engaged by werewolves, people who hide a monster within themselves. That intimate relationship with the Self, the inescapable familiarity, is what makes the werewolf particularly terrifying. As King argues of the werewolf in Danse Macabre, “Here is the beast caught in the act of pulling down its weak and unsuspecting prey, acting not with cunning and intelligence but only with stupid, nihilistic violence. Can anything be worse? Yes, apparently one thing: his face is not so terribly different from the face you and I see in the bathroom mirror each morning” (75). Therein lies the particular fascination of the werewolf figure: the vampire, the “Thing Without a Name,” and even the ghost are clearly Other, not us; while they may have once been human, they are no longer. We are alive, while they are dead; we are human, while they are monsters. But the werewolf is the darker part of the human psyche, the part kept hidden from the world but which, in the form of the werewolf, breaks out to run amok, leaving violence and destruction in its wake. The werewolf is human, but one with a monster inside: often undetectable, uncontrollable, and for its host, inescapable, except through death.