Like Paul Landres’ similarly bluntly titled The Vampire (1957), Fred F. Sears’ The Werewolf tries to bring 50s science fiction to the Gothic, offering up a lycanthrope entirely divorced from the shapeshifters of European and native American tradition, a product instead of mad science. The Werewolf and The Vampire are otherwise unrelated but they make for an interesting double bill.

The Werewolf gets off to a cracking start with a terrific scene in which an amnesiac man (Steven Ritch) wanders late at night into a small-town high street while a narrator fills us in on werewolf legends. The man briefly stumbles into a bar, and is followed by a local thug, Joe Mitchell (Charles Horvath) who the man then attacks and kills in an alleyway. Sheriff Jack Haines (Don Megowan) has the body examined by Dr Jonas Gilchrist (Ken Christy) and his nurse Amy Standish (Joyce Holden) who note that Mitchell seems to have been the victim of an animal attack. Deputy Ben Clovey (Harry Lauter) is later attacked by some sort of animal in the woods and Haines suspects that he was the victim of a werewolf. The amnesiac turns up at Gilchrist’s office with a tale of having been treated by a pair of doctors following a car crash and admits to killing Mitchell. Those doctors Morgan Chambers (George Lynn) and Emery Forrest (S. John Launer), have in fact exposed the man, identified as Duncan Marsh by his wife Helen (Eleanor Tanin) and young son Chris (Kim Charney), to “irradiated wolf serum”, which causes him to periodically transform into a wolf man. The doctors, the sheriff and the townspeople all take to the hills in search of Marsh before he can kill again.

In a sense, The Werewolf is the link between the Gothic horrors of the 1940s and the mad science thrillers of the 50s – and indeed between the science fiction films and the resurgence of Gothic in the wake of Hammer’s The Curse of Frankenstein the following year, itself a mix of horror and SF ideas. Being a “scientific” werewolf, Marsh walks about in broad daylight and it’s never really established how or why he transforms into a wolf man. The times we see him do it, he’s under great stress, frightened or angry, so perhaps he’s a forerunner of the Marvel comics character The Hulk who would change from Dr Bruce banner under similar circumstances. Whatever the trigger, The Werewolf make-up, designed by an uncredited Clay Campbell, are rather well done (it’s a development of the make-up he first created for The Return of the Vampire (1943)), though the transformation itself is done via the tried, tested and not always convincing lap dissolve technique.

The locations around Big Bear Lake in California are certainly photogenic and director of photography Edward Linden (he’d also photographed King Kong (1933) and Son of Kong (1933)) makes great use of the unusual and effective snowy settings. He captures some lovely vistas but isn’t afraid to push in for a claustrophobic close-up should the need arise. It’s a good-looking film, far better than one might expect from a film of its meagre resources. It’s also, as Denis Gifford noted in his 1969 book Movie Monsters, “the first horror film to break away from the tradition of studio sets and take its monster into the streets among real people.”

Performances are strong, with Ritch turning in a good showing as the paranoid amnesiac lycanthrope, and Don Megowan, a veteran of many a western, great as the non-nonsense sheriff, bringing some of that square-jawed pioneer spirit with him from his horse operas. Lynn is the archetypal 50s unhinged boffin, making his first appearance in full mad scientist mode complete with lab coat, dark goggles and banks of arcane equipment that make a very similar noise (if look nothing like) the Kenneth Strickfaden gizmos of old as he casually experiments on dogs, his villainous credentials fully established in a matter of seconds.

Former western and crime thriller actor Sears managed to cram an awful lot of films into a career cut ludicrously short by a heart attack that killed him at the age of just 45, many of his films made with producer Sam Katzman at Columbia. He was never a director of any particular flair or style but was considered a safe pair of hands and turned in a number of box office hits and fan favourites, among them the Bill Haley musicals Rock Around the Clock (1956) and Don’t Knock the Rock (1956), and genre films Earth vs. the Flying Saucers (1956) (with which The Werewolf formed a double bill), The Giant Claw (1957) and The Night the World Exploded (1957). Like most of his films, The Werewolf is the work of a proficient journeyman though he gives us one particularly effective scene, where Ritchie says a tearful farewell to his traumatised wife and child, knowing that it’s the last time he’ll ever see them.

The Werewolf is a modest and unassuming film but it’s not without considerable charm (it certainly knows its audience – Haines’ posse turns into a Universal-style torch-wielding mob at the climax). It was much mocked by the critics when it opened in the States in July 1956, but is rather better thought of today. It was certainly an influence on film-maker Alexis Ramirez, whose short film Wolf Mother: Hunted (2015) is said to have been inspired by Sears’ film.