General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

I Was a Teenage Werewolf

I Was a Teenage Werewolf is a 1957 American black-and-white horror film directed by Gene Fowler Jr. and produced by Herman Cohen for Sunset Productions and American International Pictures (AIP), in which a hot-tempered high school student is regressed into a werewolf by a hypnotherapist running secret experiments on him.¹^•² It starred Michael Landon in his first starring role, four years before he became a television star on Bonanza.¹

Key fact	Detail
Release	June 19, 1957, United States; 76 minutes, black and white¹
Director	Gene Fowler Jr., a film editor making his directorial debut¹
Writer and producer	Herman Cohen produced; the story and screenplay were credited to "Ralph Thornton", a pseudonym for Cohen and Aben Kandel¹
Lead cast	Michael Landon as Tony Rivers, Yvonne Lime as Arlene Logan, Whit Bissell as Dr. Alfred Brandon³
Budget and schedule	A contemporary source put the cost at about $100,000, made in a little over a week; IMDb lists an estimated budget of $82,000¹^•⁴
Genre position	Described by film historian Craig Ian Mann as the first "teen wolf" movie, tied to the 1950s juvenile delinquency moral panic⁵
Follow-ups	Served as the forerunner to the same-year semi-sequel I Was a Frankenstein (1957); Cohen's Blood of Dracula completed the teen-monster cycle²^•¹^•¹⁸

Spoilers

Plot

Tony Rivers (Michael Landon) is a quick-tempered student at Rockdale High School whose fights have repeatedly brought the police to his door. Urged by his girlfriend Arlene (Yvonne Lime) and others, he seeks help from psychotherapist Dr. Alfred Brandon (Whit Bissell). Brandon, however, is not treating him: using hypnosis and drugs, he regresses Tony experimentally to a primal state resembling the legendary werewolf, on the theory that humanity passed through an evolutionary stage in which such a state was normal.²

Tony begins shapeshifting at night, without needing a full moon, and kills a fellow student at a party without remembering it. He later transforms in daylight and kills a gymnast at the high school, in a scene in which he turns while watching a young woman in a leotard work out on a gymnasium apparatus.²^•⁸ Realizing something is wrong, Tony goes to Brandon's office as the police close in; he transforms again, kills Brandon, and is shot dead by the arriving officers.² The Science Fiction Encyclopedia notes that this hypnosis-driven transformation gives the film a thin science fiction basis, making Tony a quasi-scientific werewolf rather than a victim of the traditional curse.²

Production

The film went into production on March 14, 1957, and was shot in 35 mm black and white at a 1.85:1 ratio.³ The American Film Institute catalog records that a contemporary source described the shoot as lasting a little over a week at a cost of approximately $100,000, while IMDb carries an estimated budget of $82,000.¹^•⁴ The crew included cinematographer Joseph La Shelle, editor George Gittens, art director Leslie Thomas, and makeup artist Phillip Scheer, whose werewolf makeup was credited as by Philip Scheer.¹^•² Paul Dunlap composed the music.⁶

The title came first in AIP's production method. Producer Herman Cohen, needing a new film quickly, approached his old friend James Nicholson at AIP with the idea of merging the studio's two reliable earners, the science fiction horror movie and the teenager movie, into a single product.⁷ The film carried the working title Blood of the Werewolf and was released in June 1957 on a double bill with Fred Sears' science fiction spoof Invasion of the Saucer Men.³^•⁷

The juvenile delinquency context

The film is closely tied to the moral panic over juvenile delinquency that dominated American public discussion in the 1950s. Craig Ian Mann, a film historian and author of Phases of the Moon: A Cultural History of the Werewolf Film (2020), opens his account of American werewolf films with the delinquency panic and its influence on the film, which he calls the first "teen wolf" movie.⁵ A dissertation survey of the period groups it with Rebel Without a Cause (1955), Blackboard Jungle (1955), and The Space Children (1958) as films that capitalized on anxieties about youth and assigned blame to bad parenting and the breakdown of the American family.⁹

Cohen said he tailored the film to teenage audiences by portraying the protagonist as a victim of an intolerant and demented adult.¹⁰ Common Sense Media's retrospective summary records his claim that he deliberately tapped into a fear young audiences hold, that surrendering independence to doctors and other adult authority figures can lead to being abused or exploited; he repeated the theme in I Was a Teenage Frankenstein and Blood of Dracula.¹¹ The Italian scholarly literature on teen horror traces the subgenre's origins to this film, crediting its integration of science fiction and juvenile delinquency elements within a horror structure with producing "an image of adolescents as the aliens among us".¹²

Reception and legacy

The film was highly successful with its target audience of dating teenagers, mostly on the US drive-in circuit.² One aggregator lists a production budget of $82,000 against a box office revenue of about $2 million.¹³ Contemporary trade response was mixed but not hostile: Harrison's Reports wrote that "the story is, of course, fantastic, but it has been handled so expertly that it holds the spectator in tense suspense".⁷ On Rotten Tomatoes the film holds a 40% Tomatometer from 10 reviews and a 21% audience score.¹⁴

Its most durable consequence was for its lead actor. The film marked Michael Landon's first starring role, and critics identify it as the launch of a career that later rested on long-running television series, particularly Bonanza and Little House on the Prairie.¹^•¹⁴ Landon affectionately reprised the role and makeup in an episode of his series Highway to Heaven.¹¹

The film also seeded a cycle. Tony's lycanthropic antics were followed by a spate of teenage-oriented horror movies, from the semi-sequel I Was a Teenage Frankenstein through the teen slashers that flourished in the 1980s, and Rotten Tomatoes' retrospective notes that it may have helped popularize teen horror decades before that genre hit its stride.¹⁵^•¹⁴ Later werewolf films that use lycanthropy as a metaphor for puberty and adolescence, such as Teen Wolf (1985) and Ginger Snaps (2000), work the same vein the 1957 film opened.¹⁶ As of late 2026 the film is not available on any streaming service in the United States, though it can be bought on DVD.¹⁷

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026