Six Classic Monster Images Hollywood Gets Dead Wrong, Part One

I'm out of town this week, so I thought I'd queue up a series for your reading pleasure in lieu of posting nothing. As always, thanks for reading, check out this week's hilarious series, and look for more movie reviews next week.

Six Classic Monster Images Hollywood Gets Dead Wrong

We like to think that our modern monsters are the collective, historical monsters of myth from thousands of years ago, but often our modern conception of monsters is about as accurate to history as the movie Troy is to the Trojan War. Hollywood has sold us our nightmares, and often because it was the best that special effects of the time could come up with.

1. Werewolves

With origins as far back as ancient Greece and largely in Europe thereafter, there's very little about the mythology of werewolves that's made it into contemporary conventional wisdom. Like many monsters, we can look to film for our current erroneous assumptions about these lovable lycanthropes.

First, the whole silver bullet thing is fairly new and perhaps as recent as film, since this "only one way to kill a werewolf" according to the portly Horace from The Monster Squad would have been rather inconvenient before the invention of gunpowder. Silver in general is harmful to them, but so is belladonna. But you never heard much about belladonna suppositories as a weapon.

Likely, silver just makes for better weapons, though according to ballistic theory, it would make a pretty crappy bullet because the soft metal would tumble, so you'd be better off with the suppositories.

Where legend has them hunting much like a wolf and not killing humans, in modern interpretations they'd pass up a deer any day for some fresh teenager.

The only cannibalistic tendencies lore has them committing is devouring the recent dead, which is a pretty good bargain if you'd ever have to pay for a funeral. Super-senses, superhuman strength, and a tendency to wig out at the full moon are in-line with some werewolf legends, but transmittal of the werewolf curse via a bite is less frequent than it being a hereditary condition or a laid-on curse.