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Spain has delivered many of the most successful horror films of the last decade, from Gothic tale The Others (2001) to Blair Witched zombie apocalypse [•REC] (2007). This might seem unusual for a country where horror had long been a genre swimming against the tide. While Spanish horror fans have many reasons to rejoice these days, they are also mourning the loss of their original and iconic king of horror, Paul Naschy, who passed away aged 75 in December 2009.

Throughout his long career, Naschy dedicated all his efforts to dignifying the horror genre in his country of birth. He was always more successful abroad than in Spain, but during the last years of his life his compatriots began to recognise his talents. He went from being the object of a discrete cult following to achieving wide recognition when he received Spain’s Gold Medal in Fine Arts in 2001.

He was often referred to as the Spanish Lon Chaney: Chaney Jr was the only actor who played all four of the major Universal monsters (the son of Dracula, Frankenstein’s monster, the Wolf Man and the Mummy). But Naschy beat this score by portraying Dracula himself, Frankenstein’s monster, the Mummy, Fu Manchu, the Devil, Mr Hyde, Quasimodo, the Phantom of the Opera and, above all, the Wolf Man. Naschy played a werewolf on more occasions than any other actor – 16, doubling Chaney’s count – mostly in the recurrent role of the dark and tortured lycanthrope of his own creation, Waldemar Daninsky.

Born in Madrid in 1934 as Jacinto Molina Álvarez, Naschy grew up in the post-Civil War era under Franco’s dictator­ship. Comics and film sagas provided some escapism and shaped his taste for the fantastic. Later in life, he would recall that his first true horror experience came from the flickering frames of Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarves (1938). The evil stepmother terrified young Jacinto so much that he literally wet himself. On a different occasion, he managed to sneak into a screening of Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman (Roy William Neil, 1943), the film that he often cited as his favourite and the one that made the deepest impact on him. The performance of Chaney Jr would be the catalyst for what would become his life’s passion, and the ‘monster mash’ of the title remained one of his eternal obsessions, a concept that he would reproduce many times throughout his career.

Naschy was multi-talented, hardworking and restless. An architect, a writer of pulp novels (he flirted with the Western genre under the pseudonym of Jack Mills), and a keen sportsman (his extraordinary physique was shaped through professional weightlifting), his first contact with the film industry came as an extra in classics like Nicholas Ray’s 1961 King of Kings. He gained experience as a supporting actor, assistant producer and assistant dir­ector in various Spanish films, and in the late 1960s wrote his first script, signed with his real name, Jacinto Molina. It was called La Marca del Hombre Lobo. The horror genre was an oddity within the parameters of Spanish cinema – rare examples were the Express­ionist-inspired classic La Torre de los Siete Jorobados (Edgar Neville, 1943) and Jess Franco’s early Dr Orloff films – and had never featured a classic monster on film. Naschy’s script was rejected by several producers, but finally captured the interest of a German company looking for a project worthy of using 3D and stereophonic sound. The successful final product, La Marca del Hombre Lobo, was directed by Enrique López Eguiluz, shot on location in Madrid and released in 1968 as a Spanish and West German co-production.

The development of the film was beset with unforeseen circumstances. The part of the werewolf was initially going to be offered to Chaney Jr, but the star was over 60, which made him unsuitable for such a physically demanding role. After testing several actors, the producers suggested Molina. He knew the story well, he had some acting experience and his muscular physique could make him look daunting on screen. His name, though, wasn’t judged to be commercial enough, so, at the request of the German producers, he decided to borrow the surname of a weightlifting champion and became Paul Naschy. It would be the name by which he was most often referred to, even in the country of his birth.

This wasn’t the only name that had to be changed. The werewolf of Naschy’s script was initially called Luis Huidobro, a native of Asturias, the mountainous region in the north of Spain. Franco’s censors, who had previously described Hammer’s Dracula as a product “aimed at the mentally deficient”, considered that a monster couldn’t have Spanish nationality. Thus Huidobro became Polish and changed his name to Waldemar Daninsky. The character would feature in 13 films and would be resuscitated time after time to reappear in different locations – France, Hungary, even Tibet.

So, Daninsky became Polish by accident. Curiously enough, Hammer’s The Curse of the Werewolf (Terence Fisher, 1961), had featured Oliver Reed as a wolfman who was Spanish – also accidentally. Although the film’s story was inspired by Endore’s The Werewolf of Paris, the location was altered to make use of some sets left over from an abandoned project about the Inquisit­ion. Needless to say, the film was never released in Franco’s Spain.

The initial choice of Asturias as the place of origin for Naschy’s creature was, though, a logical one. The region, where the actor’s mother came from, is rich in werewolf folklore. The transformation of men into the most feared beasts of their geographical context is common to most mythological systems (as Rev. Sabine Baring-Gould pointed out in his 1865 Book of Were-Wolves), and the wolf is a natural presence in the forests of Asturias. Many of the lycanthrope legends in the area are associated with a Christian curse aimed at an individual who transgressed a religious taboo, particularly by eating meat during Lent. Any film from the Franco era that combined national taboos, sexuality and the beast within was practically asking to be censored.

Naschy was clearly fascinated by Gothic horror, and his main influences were the Universal monster pictures. He always recognised the power of Universal’s Wolfman, Lawrence Talbot, the character first portrayed by Lon Chaney Jr, but he was also proud of having given the monster a strong charge of sexuality, and a brutal, less naïve nature. His performances as a werewolf are extraordinarily physical, and his creature remains uniquely raw, contrasting with the stoicism exuded by Daninsky when in human form.

His re-interpretations of Universal monsters always include a mixture of violence and eroticism, like those of the Hammer productions of the era. Naschy, who described himself as a true romantic, always felt fascinated by the element of tragedy in the dual quality of the Wolfman, and by the relationships of the man-monster with the opposite sex – a theme that’s powerfully evident in Daninsky’s 1977 comeback, Curse of the Devil.

The success of the formula in Europe and America gave more impetus to the horror film industry in Spain. Beside Naschy’s films, the most popular were Armando Ossorio’s Blind Dead series, with its iconic and terrifying zombie Knights Templar.

But the socio-political context was changing. After Franco’s death in 1975 came the transition to democracy, and the end of censorship saw the consolidation of two tendencies in Spanish cinema: the political and the erotic. There no longer seemed to be any place for the fantastic. At the same time, Gothic horror formulæ were becoming exhausted in Europe. Naschy had to re-invent himself: he accepted roles in different film genres, but also started directing his own scripts to be able to stay with his passion.

Naschy’s take on the lycanthrope hasn’t been repeated in any other Spanish production, although the myth was adapted in a more realistic way in El Bosque del Lobo (Pedro Olea, 1971). Based on the true story of Manuel Blanco Romasanta, a self-confessed werewolf from the region of Galicia in the northwest of Spain (FT126:40–44), the film left aside the fantastic elements to present the character as a psychopath, featuring a chilling interpretation by the also recently deceased José Luis López Vázquez. In 2004, Paco Plaza directed an adapt­ation of the same story in Romasanta (The Werewolf Manhunt), with Julian Sands as the psychopathic wolfman. Naschy had said that no current Spanish actor would be qualified to play the werewolf, except perhaps Javier Bardem. Certainly, Bardem would have been a much better choice than Sands, whose cold Romasanta lacks charisma and the energy of Daninsky.

It seems that, after the comeback of vampires and zombies, the time is now ripe for the Wolfman to rise again. In an interview shortly before his passing, Naschy revealed his excitement about the upcoming remake by Universal, and revealed that he was going to appear in it as the werewolf who bites Lawrence Talbot (Benicio del Toro). Sadly, his filming commitments made it impossible.

After four decades, Waldemar Daninsky remains Naschy’s most famous creation and is still in good shape, as is proved by the re-release of the original films and the launch of a new comic series based upon them. Naschy was busy until the end. His last work as an actor was in the Lovecraft-inspired Gothic horror La Herencia Valdemar, released in Spain in January 2010. He left some projects unfinished, including the filming of his script Mi perro Aquiles, in which Christopher Lee (who wrote the prologue for Naschy’s biography) was due to play the Spanish icon por excelencia, Don Quixote.

Whereas Naschy’s films will inevit­ably continue to divide opinions his efforts to give the genre a true voice and respectability in his country have begun to be acknowledged, while his passion and tenacity helped pave the way for other Spanish horror films.

What attracted him to the werewolf was the idea that evil can lurk in any of our hearts: a clerk, a priest, a banker – the beast lives deep inside each of them. Naschy lived a life dedicated to horror because he recognised its importance: “Horror is immortal. While death remains the unknown frontier, horror films will still be relevant.”


Suggested browsing
www.naschy.com
www. waldemardaninsky.com
'Fallece a los 75 años el actor Paul Naschy, icono del terror', El Pais, 1 Dec 2009
www.lonchaney.com