‘Teenage Werewolf’: the cult 1957 horror movie that inspired a Cramps classic
The worlds of music and film have always been intertwined, going right back to the silent era and its orchestral accompaniments. It was multiple centuries later, though, that the age of punk rock united abrasive rock and roll with the ever-expanding pool of low-budget horror B-movies, and The Cramps were at the very forefront of that charge.
While the vast majority of their contemporaries were taking their cues from the glue-sniffing, spikey-haired barre chords of punk’s cultural homeland – New York’s CBGB club – The Cramps tended to cast a much broader net when it came to their influences.
Rather than rooting themselves in the here and now of the 1970s, Lux Interior and Poison Ivy drew from their adoration of kitsch cinema, low-budget horror, and their expansive collections of records from the rockabilly and garage age of the 1950s. Inevitably, that unique combination of cultural touchstones gave The Cramps a sound like nobody else; a sound which soon became known as psychobilly.
Cover songs are pretty common within the band’s extensive discography, rendering a plethora of plodding rockabilly obscurities as high-energy, down and dirty punk anthems. Along the way, though, the band did pen a lot of their own material, too, and the inspiration for those tracks often came from the silver screen rather than the airwaves of the punk revolution.
Mainstream horror certainly has its place, but The Cramps’ cinema tastes tended to be far more off the beaten track. A list of Lux and Ivy’s all-time favourite horror flicks reads like the watchlist of somebody who tries far too hard to look interesting on Letterboxd, but you don’t have to search too hard to find the impact of those films on their musical output: The Creature from the Black Lagoon forming the basis for ‘The Creature from the Black Leather Lagoon’ and 1958’s The Fly having a lot to answer for when it comes to their defining track ‘Human Fly’.
Another such example of that cinematic inspiration came from the cult horror B-movie I Was a Teenage Werewolf, which formed the basis of The Cramps’ song of the same name, a particular stand-out from Songs the Lord Taught Us.
Although that 1957 flick, directed by Gene Fowler Jr., could hardly be considered a blockbuster smash, its cultural impact certainly outweighed its box office takings, in no small part thanks to The Cramps. Beloved by B-movie obsessives across the land, the film’s title does a lot of the heavy lifting when it comes to explaining its plot, with the central character of Tony Rivers wreaking havoc on his high school after transforming into a wolfman.
It might not have been a revolutionary piece of writing, but its core theme of teenage alienation fit into the spirit and ethos of punk rock as though it were tailor-made for it. Unsurprisingly, then, The Cramps’ track, while not overly reliant on the source material, became one of their definitive anthems upon its release, some 20 years after the film first hit screens.
Not only did ‘I Was A Teenage Werewolf’ form a highlight of the band’s output, but it also served to separate The Cramps from the wider realm of punk rock, singling them out as a unique outfit drawing from a much wider, and far more kitsch pool of influences than the countless other bands taking to the sticky stage of CBGBs.
