Curt Siodmak: The Wolf Man's Author at the End of the Canyon

The screenwriter who invented the modern werewolf mythology spent the last decades of his life on a ranch near Three Rivers. Curt Siodmak was born in Dresden, Germany, in nineteen oh two and grew up to become a writer of science fiction and film scripts in the Weimar Republic. When the Nazis came to power he fled, making his way through Britain and eventually to Hollywood, where he was hired by Universal Pictures.

In nineteen forty one, Siodmak wrote the screenplay for The Wolf Man, the film that established nearly everything the modern world believes about werewolves: that the condition is caused by a bite, that the victim transforms under a full moon, that silver is lethal to the creature, and that the werewolf retains a tragic awareness of its own condition. Several of these ideas, notably the silver weakness, did not come from older folklore. Siodmak invented several of them, drawing partly on his own experience as a man pursued across Europe for what he was rather than what he had done.

He also wrote the novel Donovan's Brain in nineteen forty two, a science fiction story about a scientist who keeps a dead man's brain alive and finds his own mind gradually overrun by it. The book became a classic of its genre and was adapted for film three times. Siodmak moved to Three Rivers and lived at his ranch in the Kaweah canyon until his death in two thousand.

He once described his unlikely California life with characteristic dark humor: that without the Nazis he would still be in Berlin instead of Three Rivers.