I Was a Teenage Werewolf (AIP 1957)

Producer Herman Cohen kicked off his hugely successful run of “teenage monster” films for American International Pictures with I Was a Teenage Werewolf, released on the 19th of June, 1957. It is a film whose lurid title has long outlived its reputation – but look past the marketing and you’ll find a tight, surprisingly serious little werewolf picture that helped change the business of horror for ever.

The first of the teenage monsters

The growth of teen culture in the 1950s handed filmmakers a brand-new audience, and AIP grasped the opportunity faster than anyone. Pairing disaffected youth with classic movie monsters was cheap, commercial and irresistible to the drive-in crowd, and I Was a Teenage Werewolf – directed by Gene Fowler Jr from a script by Herman Cohen and Aben Kandel – was the template. Made on a modest budget and sold with a title nobody could forget, it became one of the most successful films AIP ever released.

A romantic publicity still of Michael Landon and Yvonne Lime taken for I Was a Teenage Werewolf (AIP 1957)

Michael Landon, hero and beast

The film’s secret weapon was its young star. A fresh-faced Michael Landon – years before Bonanza and Little House on the Prairie made him a wholesome television institution – plays Tony Rivers as both sympathetic hero and snarling monster, transformed by Whit Bissell’s creepy hypnotist, Dr Alfred Brandon, under the guise of curing his anger. Landon sells the anguish as readily as the menace, and his performance is a large part of why the film takes itself seriously where so many imitators simply played for schlock.

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A monster movie about being young

For all its drive-in trappings, I Was a Teenage Werewolf struck a real nerve. By making its monster a vulnerable, angry teenager rather than a grown man, it tapped straight into 1950s anxieties about disaffected youth, and quietly subverted the comfortable assumption that adults were responsible and trustworthy – it is, after all, the authority figure who turns the boy into a beast. Blending pseudo-scientific regression with full-blooded horror, the film resonated as a metaphor for a generation that felt misunderstood, and audiences responded in their thousands.

Dr Brandon (Whit Bissell) checks Tony Rivers’ (Michael Landon) health out during their first consultation in I Was a Teenage Werewolf (AIP 1957)

The title that launched a thousand imitators

The film was a huge hit, and inevitably the sequels followed – I Was a Teenage Frankenstein (1957), Blood of Dracula (1957) and How to Make a Monster (1958) – though none matched the original. Its real legacy, though, is broader: that unforgettable title became an indelible piece of pop culture, endlessly imitated and parodied, and the “teenage monster” it invented has never really gone away. Today, with the film itself frustratingly hard to see thanks to long-standing rights issues, its place in horror history only looms larger.

Our I Was a Teenage Werewolf 1957 Ultimate Guide Magazine tells the full story of the film across 36 luxurious full-colour pages – production history, cast and crew biographies, and a wealth of beautifully restored stills. Get your copy in the shop →