The Wolf Man: Benicio Del Toro Follows in the Paw-prints of Lon Chaney, Jr

If the movie trailer is any indication of its power, the new Wolf Man movie with Benicio Del Toro ought to curdle your blood and send cold shivers down your spine. Look at Benicio Del Toro! The man has bushy, black eyebrows that don't stop and a kind of wildness in his face that gives him the look a feral animal. This is before the makeup.

What's really amazing is how Benicio Del Toro bears such an uncanny resemblance to the most famous Wolf Man of them all, Lon Chaney, Jr.

Lon Chaney,Jr. who starred in five Wolf Man films, made viewers believe that he really was possessed by a vicious animal spirit that he could not control. If Chaney's character, Lawrence Talbot, gazed upon the heavens when the moon was full, he was transformed into the monstrous Wolf Man. Talbot had suvived an attack by a werewolf but bore the bite of the damned. In the new film, Benicio Del Toro is bitten and, then, he bites, too.

What made Lon Chaney, Jr. so perfect for his role was that he could show anguish and contort his face into a pitiful expression just before he fell to the floor and rose up as a hairy snarling transformation, the Wolf Man.

It was painful to watch him struggle against the change. Movie goers felt sorrow for him and then horror as he shape-shifted into a werewolf. Apparently, Benicio Del Toro has the same ability to make us feel his suffering. One movie trailer shows Del Toro standing alone outside after a night as the Wolf Man, completely bewildered as to why his clothes hang on him in dirty shreds.

Both Chaney and Del Toro's characterization of the Wolf Man rely on this sympathy factor to draw you in to the story. That is what makes a a good horror film so scary. Watch it! You could be attacked next.

In the original Wolf Man, as Lon Chaney, Jr.'s character looked up at a full moon, he would try to shield his eyes from the moonlight but it was always too late. Thrashing around, bumping into walls and finally falling comatose to the floor, Chaney would slowly morph into Wolf Man. He would then wake up as Wolf Man and burst out of the house and onto the streets looking for a victim. Some poor soul walking alone at night would suddenly feel a hot, animal weight leap upon him as his throat was ripped open.

If Benicio Del Toro can make us believe that he is really a sensitive guy, cursed by fate, he will have achieved what no one since Lon Chaney Jr. has been able to do, including Taylor Lautner in the "Twilight Saga: New Moon." Lautner becomes a werewolf who runs on four legs and looks like a wolf, not a man.

Del Toro, like Chaney before him does not become a wolf but a wolf man. He keeps his man-clothes on and he runs upright for the most part. Both natures are portrayed by Del Toro just as the playwright Curt Siodmark intended. Siodmark wrote these words for the screenplay: "Even a man who is pure of heart and says his prayers by night may become a wolf when the wolf bane blooms and the autumn moon is bright."

The new film with Benicio Del Toro as the wolf man is scheduled for release on Feb. 12, 2010, just in time for Valentine's Day.