Werewolves cost money – even the bad ones mean overtime for the make-up lady sticking bits of fur on a half-asleep actor at 5 a.m. So with relatively little to choose from, here’s a subjective rundown of the most effective and chilling lycanthropes of the silver screen, with quality awarded not for the films themselves but on gulps per-werewolf…

10. The Wolf Man (1941)
Lon Chaney Jr. starts the whole ball rolling in the myth-making classic that originated the genre and its rules and regulations. Sadly, the transformed Chaney resembles nothing so much as the ‘wolf-boy’ of Mexico and similar victims of hypertrichosis. Destined for a 2008 remake with a well-cast Benicio Del Toro.

9. The Curse of the Werewolf (1961)
Dear old Ollie Reed was destined to relive this film in his personal life ever after, with sixteen pints of bitter standing in for the full moon. The wolf-man here is a Chaney-esque Reed with a few facial prosthetics, but it’s the method-acting that sells it…

8. Wolfen (1981)
Whitley Streiber’s ecologically-sound novel about a blight of urban werewolves is heavy on red-herrings and inference but fairly light on werewolves until the gruesome finale, where we see a AWIL-style quadruped beast finally come out of the makeup effects workshop, if only in quick (and bloody)cuts.

7. Wolf (1994)
Jack Nicholson was the obvious choice to play a lycanthropy victim trying to deal with his new ‘dark side’. Though the transitional effects are straight out of Lon Chaney’s body-of-work, there are some very good makeup effects done on naughty old James Spader as the good-guy that isn’t.

6. Silver Bullet (1985)
Michael McCracken didn’t have a Rob Bottin-size budget for the transformations in this lesser known fang-fest from the pen of Stephen King, and it does seem a bit pointless to ‘wolf out’ and then beat your victim to death with a stick. Nonetheless, the scene where the lead wolf kills a policeman who stumbles across him is a ‘dropped-torch’ spinetingler of horror in the dark.

5. Dog Soldiers (2002)
Like me, Neil Marshall clearly loves the werewolves in The Howling (see below), and I was very excited to see preview pictures of the Bottin-esque beasts plaguing a bunch of squaddies in a Scottish forest. Unfortunately the actual movie-creatures themselves are as inanimate as the aforementioned stills, and read like first-class Halloween masks. As for transformations, forget it – one of them was even done by the actor disappearing under a table and rising up ‘wolfed out’!

4. The Company Of Wolves (1984)
Neil Jordan’s anthological musing on wolfish fairy-tales and folklore features a diversity of hirsute horrors, but the most effective and horrifying transformation depicted (shown right)is the very symbolic emergence of a wolf directly out of a man’s mouth, discarding the human shell like a grisly chrysalis, and it remains a shocking assault on the sensibilities.

3. Underworld Evolution (2006)
With the decline of auteur make-up artists, the full CGI-enhanced ‘wolf-out’ in the opening battle-scene is credited to a whole team of computer nerds; they did a better job than in the original film (and a far better job than the cringeworthy sprites in An American Werewolf In Paris) but ‘reality-lag’ continues to put the ‘Hanna-Barbera’ curse upon CGI werewolves, and advances in technology can’t improve the matter half as much as good story-telling would.

2. An American Werewolf In London (1981)
David Naughton’s hideously painful transformation into the quadruped in Jenny Agutter’s flat is iconic by now, and also revered; legendary make-up artist Rick Baker’s work with air-bladders created a movie icon, adoringly pastiched in 2007’s Black Sheep. The problem I have with the fully-transformed beast is that we rarely see it getting from A to B, except –briefly- in a spine-chilling shot in the ‘London Underground’ sequence.

1. The Howling (1981)
1981 was a damn good year for werewolf movies. If this list were about the quality of the film itself, AWIL would have pride of place, but Howling beats it comfortably for chills. In the film’s chief transformation sequence –pioneered by 20 year old Rick Baker protégé Rob Bottin- we are not dealing with an innocent man becoming a savage -but innocent- beast, but with a sex-offending serial-killer deciding to transform into a malevolent nine-foot anthropomorphic werewolf before tearing his terrified victim's throat out. These are – literally - werewolves to die for.