Whereas most Universal monsters are personifications of outward forces manifesting into antagonists who are meant to be defeated, The Wolf Man blurs the distinction of good and evil via making its villain a transformation of its protagonist to create a more challenging and compelling rendition of familiar narratives. It is a film in which old world magic clashes with new world scientific theory to the detriment of its lead and victim, Larry Talbot, making the clash all the more sympathetic. The audience and Larry are informed early on in the film that the myth of the werewolf is nothing more than a metaphor for identifiable phenomena like schizophrenic identities and an archetype found in countless countries' myths made to explain why people become violent. The anxiety of a world realizing its origin stories and once-believed explanations could be falsehoods sets up a clash of values, best typified in-film through the dichotomy of Larry's father, Sir John Talbot, firm believer in psychological theory versus the Romani fortune teller, Maleva. The Wolf Man himself exists as a grotesque manifestation of how modernity views its past and other past-looking cultures, lashing out in bestial rage against society and its inhabitants. The film adds complexity on-top of this depiction through demonstrating the beast's and its magic's sensitive side, as Maleva can lull Larry back into human form through gentle refrain contrasted with the cold insensitivity of Sir Talbot's 'treatment' for Larry in restraining him in a chair for the night. The film does not exist to say that one side of mysticism or logicism is wholly correct, but that there is power in each disparate perspective and the clash between the two has had and will continue to have profound impacts on people affected by each perspective.
Larry Talbot is a profoundly moving character. Through Lon Chaney Jr's performance, he comes across as an everyman of the time who wishes to keep himself busy and not worry himself with 'big ideas.' He comes from money, and he returns to his family's Welsh estate after several years in the United States in an example of the New World returning to the Old World, setting the stage for a clash of values. Larry is dismissive of the werewolf myth that the woman he seeks after and his father both chide him with after he eyes and purchases a silver wolf cane and of the possibility of magic when he is taken to the fortune tellers, one of whom is a werewolf. In defending his companions for the evening from the werewolf, he clubs the werewolf to death in an apparent triumph of American, New World strength and resource over Old World magic, but there is a catch: he is bitten. What follows in the next act is a series of anxiety-ridden events in-which Larry has to come to terms with the incident as his father attempts to explain it away as hallucination while Larry is wracked with guilt over the murder and his marking as werewolf. Chaney conveys Larry's mental state with excruciatingly sorrowful expressions and undisguised anguish as he tries to have fun at the fair only to freeze up when he sees a wolf target at the shooting gallery or find himself unable to walk into church service as everyone in the village stares at him. His transformation sequence is more sad than horrifying to witness, as he undresses himself sensing a change, at first finds nothing different, then finds hair growing on his feet and sobs to himself in disbelief before his feet are rendered into paws via special effects time-lapse and he enters the woods with trees obscuring his countenance before his big reveal.
His trauma from his run-in with the werewolf and transformation into the werewolf is an abstraction of his society's anxiety moving forward with apparently irreconcilable beliefs, and he is a victim of circumstance caught in the crossfire. Neither fully beast nor man, he roams the night and begins to kill without even being aware of his actions and no-one will believe him when he confesses to the acts the following morning as the world around him has rejected the idea of magic or past wisdom and replaced it with theories that cannot satisfyingly explain such lived-experiences. It is then painful to see Larry meet his apparent demise at the hand of his own father, who beats his son with the same cane Larry used to kill the werewolf that bit him. It takes his son's death and the Romani woman's prayer to realize there was phenomena unbeknownst to even him in this world and that turning a deaf ear on such appeals can lead to disaster. The Wolf Man is a creature of paradox and dichotomy: a representation of evil lurking in the hearts of men and yet also a manifestation of an impassioned cry for help going unheard and twisted into violent expression; a victim of intergenerational conflicts between Old World and New World perspectives that creates more victims as he is unable to fully side with either perspective; and a projection of what both sides of the debate fear could be the result if either prevailed that simultaneously reveals what they have in common and can engender.
As a device, the Wolf Man is effective in personifying and personalizing a larger discussion into a tragic story meant to horrify and move audiences on narrative levels both allegorical and straightforward. It reveals a connection between horror as a sensational medium and a thought-provoking one that can stand on its own for spectacle and also be representative of important discussions. The Wolf Man is an effective film that continues Universal's ongoing ethos with refreshing devices and developments signifying maturation in theme and perspective alongside horror's maturation as a genre.