Welcome back, ghouls and ghosts, to the third annual installment of SpookyJawn! It’s our horror takeover of MovieJawn, and this year we are wall to wall with monsters!

by M. Lopes da Silva, Staff Writer

In Mark Pirro’s back-to-back “cult classics” Curse of the Queerwolf (1988) and My Mom’s a Werewolf (1989), werewolves are metaphors for cultural anxiety about gender, queerness, sexuality, and the nuclear family’s implicit ownership of AFAB bodies with little to no introspection about what any of that could possibly mean. The films broadcast bigotry but do not examine what they broadcast, using the comedy genre’s relentless energy and forward momentum to protect their intolerance from interrogation like a politician rapidly mumbling nonsense at a press conference.

Curse of the Queerwolf is a Trojan horse of a title: while the cute werewolf pun implies fun and camp, the jokes on offer range from violent trans panic to sexual assault. In the world of Curse, “dickanthropy” is infecting cis het men and temporarily turning them into sexually adventurous trans women every time the moon is full. However, the world around these trans women remains incredibly toxic and treats them with cruelty and violence. Larry (Michael Palazzolo), a cis het man who enjoys cheating on his partner Lois, scores for hookups with his friend Dick. When Larry’s date for the evening Paula, bites him–in the process revealing that she is a trans woman–he threatens to beat her to death. She flees him, only to end up at the hands of a roving torch-bearing mob that kill her with a silver vibrator. The film frames this like it’s supposed to be funny.

When the moon turns full, Larry “transforms” (a drag costume magically manifests on his body in a scene staged to make sure that the audience knows that every step is extremely embarrassing for him) and starts embarking on blackout sexual escapades with male strangers. Larry asks a racist Romani caricature for assistance, learning that only way to cure his curse is to either be killed with a silver vibrator or to wear a giant medallion with a picture of John Wayne on it to temporarily repress his queer transformation. Larry opts for the medallion. When it breaks, a priest is brought in to exorcise Larry’s curse.

Curse is ostensibly trying to be a spoof, and you can see the properties that it’s spoofing (An American Werewolf in London, The Exorcist, etc.) in the bones of its jokes, but the humor that it ultimately relies upon to flesh it out is so sophomoric and bigoted in tone that the films are probably closer to gross-out or frat in execution. The “werewolf-as-gender-transition” metaphor has perhaps never been more literal than the one presented in Curse of the Queerwolf. That is the best I can say for it. To call the portrayal “insensitive” is holding a punch I have every intent to throw: it’s dogshit.  

My Mom's a Werewolf also relies on gender transformation anxiety for a large source of its comedic material, but while Curse focuses on overt anti-transgender anxiety, My Mom’s anti-transgender anxiety is covert: the film polices the titular Mom’s body for any signs of masculinization.

My Mom's a Werewolf’s mother, Leslie (Susan Blakely), feels like she is losing excitement in her romantic relationship with her husband and is frequently left to eat dinners alone. Her daughter Jennifer, inspired in part by a friend that she took to a horror and science fiction convention, is convinced that her mother is having an affair. It turns out that while Leslie is indeed tempted to have an affair, she stops it as soon as her prospective lover bites her toe and infects her with lycanthropy. This transformation is more traditional – Leslie changes into the hairy wolf-human hybrid that films have taught us to know and love – which means that the second half of the film shifts from policing Leslie’s sexuality to policing her gender. New growths of body hair are viewed by Leslie’s family as undesirable and masculine (at one point she’s compared to Grizzly Adams), and she is bullied into removing it. At no point does Leslie resist her family’s emotional abuse nor does her family seem to expect any pushback. Her body is their body: a symbol of their cis heterosexual family. This sexist philosophy dehumanizes Leslie from the inside out, demoting her from a person to mere body caretaker.

Leslie is also reprimanded by her daughter for seeking sexual comfort outside of her monogamous relationship, despite the fact that her husband has no interest in providing that comfort for her. The systemic sexism that Jennifer has internalized and now proselytizes fractures the relationship that Leslie has with her daughter, disempowering both generations by weakening their bond. Instead of being concerned about her mother’s well-being, Jennifer is concerned about protecting her parents’ relationship and primarily cares about what her mother’s sexuality could represent for Jennifer (potential slut-shaming, for example).

If the film was better constructed, the final reveal that Jennifer is a werewolf now could serve as a reprimand for Jennifer’s engagement with systemic queerphobia and sexism; however, it reads as a lazy metaphor for her body about to become equally difficult to police because she’s reaching sexual maturity. “Dads, grab your shotguns” is not a revelation; it’s philosophical regression, a hasty retreat from the reality of human sexuality and all its complexities.

The question “Would you still have accepted your mother if you couldn’t have changed her back?” goes unanswered by My Mom’s, but we’re all pretty sure we understand what the answer would be: no. There is no room for queerness here, and having a nonmonogamous sex life is dangerous (and threatens the nuclear family with lycanthropy as a metaphorical STI). Similarly, if Larry had never had his queerwolf exorcised, it is doubtful that Lois would have accepted him. Even with his exorcism at the end of the film, he is overtly punished for murdering the racist Romani caricature (and implicitly for his sexual experimentation) by being thrown in jail with rapists who threaten to sexually assault him over the credits. He can’t escape his “fate” of being forced to engage in homosexual sex against his will once he’s engaged in it consensually, because if he did that would mean that it’s okay to have gay sex. Pirro would rather show us another rape than a world where gay people are nice to each other.

A double feature of intolerance, Curse of the Queerwolf and My Mom's a Werewolf are excellent reminders that we are currently cursed to live in a world where rape and murder are punchlines and queerness is viewed as monstrosity.