Curt Siodmak; Writer Created the ‘Wolf Man’

Curt Siodmak, the writer who created a classic monster in the 1941 movie “The Wolf Man” and helped to shape the horror and science fiction genre through his films and novels in the 1940s and ‘50s, died Sept. 2 at his home in the Central California town of Three Rivers. He was 98.

The oldest working member of the Writers Guild, the German-born Siodmak wrote or co-wrote more than 70 produced screenplays between 1928 and 1979. In his 90s, he began working on a sequel to “Metropolis,” the futuristic 1926 Fritz Lang classic in which he had appeared as an extra.

He also was known as a science fiction author. His works included “Donovan’s Brain,” a highly praised 1943 novel, still in print, that was produced on radio by Orson Welles and was the basis of three movies. The story--about a disembodied brain with malicious intentions--was widely mimicked, as were other Siodmak creations.

Many of his American productions became cult favorites, including “The Wolf Man,” “I Walked With a Zombie,” “The Beast With Five Fingers,” “Son of Dracula” and two sequels to “The Invisible Man.”

“The Wolf Man” was the first in a series of films with Lon Chaney Jr. as Lawrence Talbot, the cursed but sympathetic man who, after being bitten by a werewolf (Bela Lugosi), became a werewolf himself every full moon. It spawned several sequels, including one written by Siodmak, “Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man.” Another sequel, “House of Frankenstein,” was based on a story by Siodmak.

His Wolf Man was honored by the U.S. Postal Service in its “Movie Monster” commemorative stamp series three years ago. The release created a run on Wolf Man stamps at the Three Rivers post office, which offered a special cancellation on Oct. 31, 1997, that read “The Wolf Man Station: Home of Curt Siodmak, Creator of the Wolf Man.”

Siodmak was honored in 1998 at the Berlin Film Festival, more than half a century after his works were banned in Germany by Nazi authorities.

He once said that his experiences as a Jew in Nazi Germany influenced the story line of his best-known film.

The moon that induced Chaney’s chilling on-screen transformation from man to hairy beast symbolized the swastika in Siodmak’s personal universe. Turning into a murderous werewolf was his expression of the fear of being sent to a concentration camp, a fate he escaped when he fled Germany in 1933. He lived in France and England before immigrating to the United States in 1937.

“I am the Wolf Man,” Siodmak told an interviewer for the Writers Guild magazine last year. “I was forced into a fate I didn’t want: to be a Jew in Germany. I would not have chosen that as my fate.”

He said many of his stories were based on the concept of harmatia, the Greek idea that humans have to endure the whims of the gods. The Wolf Man, he noted in the 1991 publication of the script for that movie, was the personification of harmatia, which he defined as “suffering without having been guilty.”

Siodmak was born in Dresden and attended the University of Zurich, Switzerland, earning a doctorate in mathematics. He wrote on the side and became a journalist. While working as a reporter, he was hired as an extra on “Metropolis,” becoming the only journalist to see the closed set of that classic silent-film fantasy.

He began his film career a few years later with the 1929 German silent film “People on Sunday,” which used amateur actors to tell the story of a day in the life of two couples. Considered a landmark in the development of the docudrama, it was a collaboration between Siodmak, his brother Robert and directors Fred Zinnemann and Billy Wilder, all of whom left Germany for the United States shortly after finishing the film.

Siodmak made 129 movies with his brother, whose best-known directorial achievements include “The Suspect” with Charles Laughton, “The Spiral Staircase” with Ethel Barrymore and “The Crimson Pirate” with Burt Lancaster. Robert Siodmak died in 1973.

In America, Curt Siodmak became known as a master of B-movie horror. He wrote “I Walked With a Zombie,” a 1943 horror film based on reports of zombie-like activity in Haiti. He also wrote “The Beast With Five Fingers,” a 1946 release featuring Peter Lorre about the evil doings of the severed hand of an insane pianist.

He wrote eight novels in English, the most influential being “Donovan’s Brain,” the story of a doctor who steals the brain of a dead millionaire, communicates telepathically with it and eventually is possessed by it. One of the book’s best-known fans, novelist Stephen King, praised the “flow of his speculative ideas” and compared the author to Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke, other icons of the sci-fi genre.

Kevin Mace, writing in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, said Siodmak’s horror films, with their emphasis on story and character, “have done a great deal to make the horror film an important genre with its own style and characteristics. . . . Siodmak has proven that the most effective thrills are the ones which are quiet and unseen.”

Since 1958, Siodmak had lived on a 50-acre ranch in Three Rivers. He is survived by his wife of 75 years, Henrietta; a son, Geoffrey; and two granddaughters.