Why Did They Make Movies About Jacked Werewolves in the Early 2000s?

Probably, cocaine, mostly. But also other reasons!

if you’re looking at this photo & thinking “how needlessly & uncomfortably sexual,” congrats, you just discovered the theme of the early 2000s

One of the few inarguable successes of my life is that I remember almost nothing of the 2000s. Sure, bits and pieces come back to me sometimes, like an acid flashback full of waxed vaginas and “Down with the Sickness.” But due to a robust combination of American Apparel-related personal shame and heavy drinking, it’s mostly a blur. My memories from roughly 9/12 to the night Obama was elected are worn smooth like a river stone.

Except for one thing: I just can’t forget all those totally jacked werewolves.

If you were also a frequent movie-goer in the early 2000s, you remember them, too.

If were not patronizing your local cineplex in the ‘00s (too busy writing erotic fan fiction about Amy Lee, eh?), here’s a refresher. First, this is what werewolves looked like in 1981’s An American Werewolf in London:

A giant angry dog! Fun! Gross! Okay!

In 1997, werewolves looked like this, as seen in the Julie Delpy camp nightmare An American Werewolf in Paris:

Embarrassing primitive CGI aside, that’s a big muscle-y dog-thing. It’s an animal that runs around on all fours and eats you! Fine, we get it!

And yet, by 2004’s Van Helsing, werewolves looked like this:

That is to say, ripped like a personal trainer and lit like a member of the Showbiz Pizza Band.

Plus, is that….a waxed chest? Did this werewolf get waxed so everyone could get a clearer look at his defined pecs? Was this werewolf making out with two girls and putting his head between a cocktail waitress’s breasts at Bed after Sammi left? It would certainly appear so.

We all know that the early ‘00s were the era of roided-out werewolves who were so covered in veins, they looked like the underside of a penis. But no one has ever been able to explain why….until now!

Because We Lived In Distorted Body Image Hell

I mean, I’m 40 and I don’t know that I’d say we ever lived in an era that was good for body image. But the ‘00s felt especially bad.

In the ‘90s, the dominant fucked-up body aesthetic we were all supposed to aspire to was heroin chic skinny. And sure, heroin chic skinniness made you feel bad about your body, but it was also kind of tragic — at any moment, that poor Kate Moss might get swept up in a breeze and blown into a drain pipe, and then everyone in the Viper Room would have to come out and pull on her tiny feet until she was dislodged. Sad!

There was sort of an Edward Gorey, Ghastlycrumb Tinies vibe to ‘90s “ideal” body that, in my experience at least, made it feel like less pressure was being put on me personally to achieve it. I’m never gonna be a lank Victorian waif who wears size -15 pans, so why get totally worked up about it?

Plus, all those Heroin Chic Skinnies do is lie around and look desperate. Sorry, but I have a bunch of errands to run today! I have to return a sweater to Macy’s AND go to the foot doctor! Lying wanly on a couch for hours while my eyeliner runs is simply not gonna work for me!

The ‘00s, however, were a time of Cocaine Skinniness — the Cocaine Skinnies had the same skeletal bodies as Heroin Skinnies, but because Cocaine Skinnies had sweaty eyeballs and spray tans instead of smeared mascara and drool, there wasn’t the same moral panic about it. Instead, due to the prominent cocaine-chiseled abs and cocaine-chiseled energy on display, everyone pretty much pretended that these people were healthy, relatable and aspirational (and not being locked inside a basement by Rachel Zoe with nothing but an 8-ball and a copy of Elle Girl for company).

In fact, we totally ceded control of the culture to the Cocaine Skinnies, and embraced their every deranged Cocaine Idea — vajazzling! a weird skinny little scarf that you just looped around your neck a bunch of times! the Ben Affleck Daredevil! — because society was like, “I don’t know, can someone this thin be wrong?”

These horrific body image standards weren’t just foisted on women — they were shoved down men’s throats, as well.

someone please tell google i was searching “shirtless ashton kutcher 2000s” for a project. FOR A PROJECT!

Doesn’t it stand to reason that these same unrealistic beauty standards also filtered down to wolfmen?

Because Monsters Weren’t Scary Anymore

The last scary monster in a major Hollywood film was The Thing from from 1982’s The Thing. ‘90s movie monsters looked, at best, insect-y and gross (like The Relic from 1997’s Relic); at worst, they looked like whatever this is:

That’s from 1992’s Sleepwalkers, a movie about werecats. Aside from that, the previously mentioned American Werewolf in Paris, and the 1994 Jack Nicholson werewolf erotic thriller (???) Wolf, the ‘90s didn’t really dip too deep into the werewolf well, and when it did, it did so without much success.

Also, just because I know you’re curious, here’s Jack Nicholson as a sexy (???) werewolf:

The failure of An American Werewolf in Paris — an unwatchable film that I watch every single year — showed that perhaps a new generation was too numbed out by Faces of Death VHS tapes and the Something Awful forums to really be scared by those classic Rick Baker special effects.

And when the new decade arrived, reality kind of became its own horror movie — 9/11, “the War on Terror,” the invasion of Iraq, Abu Ghraib, all back-to-back…who had the energy to care about a guy in a rubber mask pretending to be a big, angry dog?

So horror and werewolves split. Horror began to skew more more towards “torture porn,” the ultra-violent genre that kicked off with films like 2002’s Cabin Fever and 2003’s House of 1000 Corpses, and hit the mainstream with 2004’s Saw. According to this very insightful essay, torture porn is political protest, but to me, it’s just a lady getting a hook put through her head and I don’t really like it, sorry. To each their own head hooks!

Werewolves, however, became part of action-horror, a genre that became a mainstream thing with 1998’s Blade, and really took off after 2002’s Resident Evil. In the first Underworld movie, which arrived a year later, werewolves weren’t weird, brooding beasts who stalked the moors; they were some muscle guy you had to fight your way through to get to the end boss. Tough? Maybe. Scary? Absofuckinglutely not. Werewolves stayed action-y but got pretty silly in 2004’s Van Helsing, and became a very goofy punchline in an alternate ending to the same year’s Blade: Trinity.

Because the 2000s Were A Fucking Stupid Mess

I don’t know how to describe the overall vibe of the early 2000s besides “fucking stupid” or “stupid as hell” or “stupid, but also really dumb at the same time.” I’m sure that’s why the decade is so popular as nostalgia right now — people en masse over the past decade have acted idiotically, cruelly, violently, moronically, vengefully and angrily, but my god, we’ve really been running low on stupid. Like, Dude, Where’s My Car?-level stupid. Like, Shallow Hal, Not Another Teen Movie, The Hot Chick, The Girl Next Door, the Ben Affleck Daredevil, 50 First Dates, Stuck On You, Scooby Doo * and *  Scooby Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed-level stupid.

In the actual early 2000s, a lot of people (including me) thought the Big Stupid was just part of the slow decline of, well, everything. But I can see now that that early 2000s stupidity was just an early reaction to the fragmentation the internet created.

Today, we’ve figured out how to serve TV, film, music and everything else to a fragmented culture — people who want something really dumb can watch Jake Paul drop a barbell on his dick on YouTube, and people who want something really smart can watch Chernobyl or one of those other prestige TV shows that make me want to stick my head in the oven.

But in, say, 2002, you had people still working with the old system, which was to create mass culture for a public who were presumed to be mostly on the same page. But the internet revealed that we were wrong in assuming that people were ever on the same page; the internet revealed that your friends and neighbors were whacked out on uppers and writing erotic X-Files fan fiction and making the men of Jackass international stars because they were cute and willing to staple their balls to a piece of plywood! WHO KNOWS WHAT ANYBODY WANTS IN THEIR DARK DISGUSTING LITTLE HEARTS!!

Which is why, I think, mainstream films got stripped down to their most basic parts in this era. The violent movies are the MOST violent, the dumb comedies are the DUMBEST, the Sofia Coppola movies are the MOST “no thoughts, only vibes.” It was a time for extremity, which can communicate effectively across major fragmentation. We all speak the language of “axe to the head,” we all speak the language of “dude running around getting his entire body covered in mousetraps.”

And as much as we may wish it weren’t true, we all speak the language of werewolves with abs.