For Fans of Werewolves

John Fawcett's 2000 Canadian horror film arrived with almost no fanfare and has spent the decades since being quietly correct about everything. It uses lycanthropy as a merciless metaphor for female adolescence: first period, first infection, body changing without consent, the world's response shifting from indifference to fear. The transformation is ugly and funny and genuinely sad. Emily Perkins and Katharine Isabelle are extraordinary. No film before or since has made the werewolf feel this personal.

John Landis gave Rick Baker a canvas and Baker painted something that still holds up forty years later. The slow, painful, bone-cracking transformation in the living room is the benchmark against which every subsequent practical-effects werewolf sequence is judged. The film also understood that horror and black comedy are not opposites: it is simultaneously funny, frightening, and genuinely melancholy. The scene where David's dead friend keeps visiting to beg him to end it is funnier and sadder each time.

Bloodborne does not call it lycanthropy but the experience maps precisely: a protagonist infected with old blood who transforms under the moon, hunted and hunter simultaneously, sliding toward besthood while trying to hold onto reason. FromSoftware's Victorian-gothic nightmare is the definitive games treatment of the werewolf's core anxiety: the corruption is the power, and using the power accelerates the corruption. It also has the most atmospheric score in the action-RPG canon.