The following was published in UChicago News on October 29, 2024.

By Tori Lee

Editor’s Note: This is part of a series called UChicago Class Visits, spotlighting transformative classroom experiences and unique learning opportunities offered at UChicago.

A full moon rises. A howl pierces the air. At the University of Chicago, a new course explores how scary stories of wolfish transformations can spring from our deepest anxieties about being human. 

In “The Werewolf in Literature and Film,” a new College course offered by the Department of Comparative Literature, students explore the fuzzy boundaries between animal and human across time and media. The class is taught by seventh-year doctoral candidate David Delbar, a self-described “amateur lycanthropologist.” 

“Werewolves often end up being a metaphor for how humans relate to their own concept in the world,” said Delbar, who’s been fascinated with the mythical creatures since childhood. “What does it mean to be human and not an animal? Or can we make that distinction? The werewolf often challenges that.”

Delbar’s course focuses specifically on film and literature from the late 20th century onward. Each week, students trace the trope across cultures to understand how different eras and circumstances create different werewolf narratives. Some stories emphasize sexual desire and gender norms, others on living on the outskirts of society. Many grapple with identity and our capacity for violence.

“There are astonishing differences and astonishing similarities throughout time of humans going about, doing their human thing,” Delbar said. “That's the exciting part about being able to read literature across a huge wide swath.”

Transformative stories

As long as humans have told stories, there have been ones about turning into animals. In addition to navigating humanity’s relationship to the natural world, these stories can illuminate our more primal desires (or our fears about having such desires) and embedded social hierarchies.

“What a lot of werewolf authors have done is said: Hey, we have this pack dynamic and these mythical creatures. Why don't we use that as a storytelling vehicle, as a sort of displaced society, so that we can sort of negotiate these issues a bit better?” Delbar said.

Each week, students examined a film or piece of literature, often using Freudian analysis, film theory or historical context to dissect the work’s themes.

For example, students read Mongrels (2016) by Blackfeet author Stephen Graham Jones, a coming-of-age story about a Native American boy growing up in a family of shapeshifters fighting to survive on the outskirts of society. The novel mixes elements of traditional oral storytelling with werewolf lore to explore Native identity, mixed heritage and survival in a hostile world. 

Another course reading, Wolf’s Bride (1928) by Finnish-Estonian author Aino Kallas, tells the story of a woman who flees her husband to run free in the forest and become a werewolf in an act of sexual liberation. Part court case, part folk tale, the innovative work mirrors national events. In 1918, Estonia declared independence from Russia and Germany and, according to Delbar, the piece was “an attempt to consciously create a modern, Estonian national identity through the werewolf story.”

Monster movies

The monstrous makeup worn by Lon Chaney Jr. in Universal Picture’s The Wolf Man (1941) helped cement our modern conception of the werewolf, which went on to take the film industry by storm. In the course, students analyzed everything from grisly slashers to campy satires, often through the lens of gender and sexuality.

The film The Howling (1981), follows a TV newscaster to a secluded retreat after a traumatic experience with a serial killer…but the residents of “The Colony” turn out to be more than they first appear.

In class, the group discussed the film’s relationship to what Delbar calls the “crisis of masculinity.” In the 1980s, men left manufacturing jobs for office work and women entered the workforce en masse, achieving a new level of independence.

“We talked about how those anxieties around masculinity ended up turning into this sexual predator werewolf movie,” said Delbar, whose research interests outside of werewolves focus on masculinity in Homer. “You have this sort of modern man who's more sensitive and a vegetarian, but then gets bitten by a werewolf and suddenly craves meat.”

In the cult classic Ginger Snaps (2000), two death-obsessed teen sisters are attacked by creatures one night when one sister, Ginger, starts her period. Ginger soon begins to transform.

“That one is sort of a metaphor for women going through this transformation, coming into sexuality, and dealing with body hair,” Delbar said. “It's this combination of what is traditionally considered very feminine and very unfeminine.”

Ultimately, Delbar says werewolf stories—and horror stories in general—are a way to talk out, or even heighten, our fears within a relatively safe space.

Likewise, Delbar is using the relative safety of a university classroom to encourage his students to physically and emotionally embody themes from werewolf stories in attempts to jar them out of expected ways of seeing the world. In addition to traditional papers, students wrote bi-weekly “experience reports,” selecting from a list of wolf-y activities such as crawling on all fours or examining their own hair and documenting their experiences.

“We've been telling werewolf stories for thousands of years. People like Freud, Goethe, Derrida—these quite serious thinkers and philosophers are going to the werewolf in their stories and analysis,” Delbar said. “So it's this part of human history and human experience that is usually not studied, but I think it is valid and it's a lot of fun.”