I think that, if we’re all being honest, when we think of the term “werewolf movie,” our minds immediately conjure up a sweaty man, usually dramatically mid-change and screaming in a forest while his trousers are disintegrating. And yes, by-and-large, those werewolf movies rock.
But for every An American Werewolf in London, there’s a whole magnificent pack of women doing that whole lunar-curse thing with a lot more elegance, menace, and (before the transformation, anyway) better hair.
She-wolves in horror are a seriously underappreciated sub-genre. They’re complex and dangerous, furious, and usually funnier than a lot of people give them credit for. In most cases, they’re the most interesting character in whatever movie they find themselves in.
So, this list is a tribute to eight of the absolute best she-wolves. I’ve ranked them not just by scariness alone, but by their overall iconic energy, staying power, and just that general sense of if you met them on a dark country road at midnight, you’d absolutely deserve what happened next.
Sit back, bolt the door, and don’t make eye contact with anything outside that window. Let’s rip into it…
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8. Zoe –Lost Boys: The Thirst (2010)
Number 8 on the list but arriving with real energy is Zoe, starring in the last entry of the long-running (and increasingly direct-to-video) Lost Boys franchise.
It’s the Lost Boys universe, so that means we’re on the Pacific Coast, someone is wearing way too much leather, and the mythology has expanded to include werewolves because… why not? The vampire rules of the original were famously flexible.
Zoe, played by Casey B. Dolan, is a vampire hunter who’s also a werewolf. Specifically, she’s a professional hunter, which is just the sort of career specialization that raises a whole host of follow-up questions about the employment market. She’s efficient and funny, and much more competent than the humans around her.
Now, I get it, Lost Boys: The Thirst isn’t exactly high cinema. Even the movie itself knows that. It leans into being a cheery, knowing horror action movie with Corey Feldman doing his thing. Zoe provides a refreshing counterpoint as someone with a real plan, and she executes it without any endless dithering. This movie could have been a real slog to get through, but Zoe is THE reason to keep watching.
Where Lost Boys: The Thirst is streaming now:
Lost Boys: The Thirst | Rated R | Runtime 1h 31m | Released October 12, 2010
7. Vivian – Blood and Chocolate (2007)
Blood and Chocolate is a movie that took a beloved young adult werewolf novel by Annette Curtis Klause, moved it from Maryland to Bucharest (as Bucharest, Romania is beautiful and affordable), and then created something which divided fans of the source material pretty comprehensively, as the adaptation made some…choices.
At the center of it is Vivian, played by Agnes Bruckner, who’s a young woman born into a pack of Romanian werewolves called loups-garoux, and we follow them as they navigate the usual tensions between assimilation and traditions.
The werewolves in the movie are interesting as their transformations are a special effect shot which involves the actor leaping and a wolf running into the same shot. That may sound a little like a cop-out, but its execution is actually pretty elegant.
Vivian is conflicted and romantic, caught between a world she was born into and a future which she can choose. Okay, that’s quite standard paranormal romance territory, but Agnes Bruckner plays it with enough sincerity that she makes it work. And the Bucharest setting really IS gorgeous. Plot-wise, the blood in the movie is real, but the chocolate is largely metaphorical.
When Blood and Chocolate ends, you probably won’t want a werewolf partner or a Transylvanian pastry, but I think you’ll be pleasantly entertained anyway.
Where Blood and Chocolate is streaming now:
Blood and Chocolate | Rated PG-13 | Runtime 1h 38m | Released January 26, 2007
6. Phyllis Allenby – She-Wolf of London (1946)
The original, and Grande Dame. The she-wolf who started it all, at least in the Universal Monsters extended cinematic universe of Slightly Foggy Gardens and Unfortunate Curses.
Phyllis Allenby is played by June Lockhart (yes, who later starred in Lassie, proving cinema really does contain multitudes) and is a young heiress gradually coming to believe she’s inherited the Allenby Curse and is changing into a werewolf before going out murdering people in London’s Regent Park.
There’s a twist and I offer no apologies for the spoiler as this movie is 80 years old: she isn’t actually a werewolf. The murders are being committed by her evil old aunt, who’s gaslighting Phyllis into believing she’s a vicious monster in order to stop her from marrying and inheriting her own fortune, which would cause Aunt Martha to leave the mansion they were living in.
And that means that this 1946 Universal horror movie is secretly about a woman being psychologically manipulated by a devious family member, and the real monster was inheritance law and capitalism all along. Pretty prescient for 1946.
Phyllis earns her spot on my list for being horror’s most iconic incorrectly suspected she-wolf, and that’s a pretty remarkable achievement on its own.
Where She-Wolf of London is streaming now:
She-Wolf of London | Not Rated | Runtime 1h 1m | Released April 5, 1946
5. Sérafine – An American Werewolf in Paris (1997)
Alright, it’s time to deal with the movie that had the nerve to be an awful sequel to one of the greatest horror movies ever made: An American Werewolf in Paris. Despite everything wrong with the film, it still manages to have a genuinely excellent she-wolf at its center.
Sérafine is played by Julie Delpy, and she’s doing honestly committed work in a movie which doesn’t always deserve it. Sérafine is the daughter of Alex Price, the tragic heroine of An American Werewolf in London, and it’s heavily implied her father is David Kessler, meaning she came by her lycanthropy legitimately and has some strong opinions about it.
She’s introduced trying to commit suicide by jumping off the Eiffel Tower and being caught by a bungee jumper. Yes, really. There were 12 writers on this movie, and it really shows. Sérafine complicated and melancholic, torn between her nature and her desire to be free of it all, and that puts her firmly in the long and noble tradition of the tortured movie werewolf. The movie around her is very 1997 in all the ways that implies. The CGI has aged like warm milk, for example, but Julie Delpy brings a real beauty and sadness to the role that elevates the whole movie.
The movie is pretty bad, it must be said, but has developed a cult following over the years, and if you look hard enough, you can see what the movie could have been. Sérafine deserved a MUCH better movie, but she’s delightful anyway.
Where An American Werewolf in Paris is streaming now:
An American Werewolf in Paris | Rated R | Runtime 1h 42m | Released October 31, 1997 (UK)
4. Marsha Quist – The Howling (1981)
Joe Dante’s The Howling is a masterpiece of creeping dread and practical effects, and Marsha Quist is played by Elisabeth Brooks with incredible and barely contained magnetism, and is easily the most memorable character in the movie.
She arrives in an isolated coastal colony called The Colony (subtlety may have been in the shop that week) and straight away radiates a type of animal confidence which makes everyone in her vicinity either deeply attracted to her or deeply unsettled. Usually both simultaneously.
Marsha is openly, happily, and enthusiastically a werewolf. She’s not conflicted about it, or tortured in any way about it. She finds the whole thing rather fun, actually, and the memorable scene with her and Christopher Stone’s Bill Neill in front of a campfire is still one of the sexiest and creepiest things in 1980’s horror; and that’s a seriously competitive category.
We also get Rob Bottin’s transformation effects, changing the genre forever. But most of all, we get Marsha, who remains the gold standard for lycanthropes who have just decided to stop apologizing for being exactly what they are.
Zero identity crisis and maximum fur, she is an inspiration to she-wolves everywhere.
Where The Howling is streaming now:
The Howling | Rated R | Runtime 1h 31m | Released March 13, 1981
3. Rosaleen – The Company of Wolves (1984)
This 1984 dream-within-a-dream fever vision from Neil Jordan isn’t so much a horror movie as it’s a beautiful, unsettling fairy tale which decided, at some point, to go completely feral.
Rosaleen, played by the young Sarah Patterson, spends The Company of Wolves in a dreamscape of dark forests and Granny’s warnings, trying to navigate a world where men who are hairy on the inside are the ones to fear.
Angely Lansbury plays Granny. Angela. Lansbury. Watching this movie is watching something operate on a different plane of existence entirely.
Rosaleen isn’t a passive figure, she’s brave, curious, and in the end is seduced not by romance, but more by the wildness that the movie keeps gesturing at. And so, by the movie’s end, instead of being consumed by the beast she chooses to become one. In the rich symbolic language of the movie, it feels like a liberation instead of a tragedy.
She’s every teenage girl who looked at the rules of the world and decided the wolf-filled forest sounded much more honest. The Company of Wolves is a movie that is strange, ethereal, and absolutely unforgettable. A werewolf movie that reads like a poem. Only slightly terrifying, but hauntingly beautiful.
Where The Company of Wolves is streaming now:
The Company of Wolves | Rated R | Runtime | Released September 21, 1984 (UK)
2. Laurie – Trick ‘r Treat (2007)
This horror anthology gem from Michael Dougherty is built on brilliant misdirection, and nobody benefits more from it than Laurie, played by Anna Paquin.
For most of her segment, she’s the slightly hapless and shy one. Her friends are all flirtatious and confident, dressed as princesses and heading to a party in the woods. Laurie trails behind, wearing a little red riding hood costume and looking deeply hesitant about the whole situation. We feel sorry for her; we really shouldn’t.
The reveal that Laurie and her entire crew are werewolves – and that the smug, predatory man who has been following her through the woods is about to experience some instant and profound regret – is one of the best horror-comedy pivots of the early 2000s. And the twist works because the movie plays it totally straight right up until the moment it spectacularly doesn’t. The transformation scene is so joyful in the most gleefully monstrous way there is. The Red Riding Hood costume comes off, and the wolf comes out.
The hunter has become very much the hunted. It’s a masterclass in subverting the “innocent girl in the woods” trope so hard that it becomes its own celebration.
Where Trick ‘r Treat is streaming now:
Trick ‘r Treat | Rated R | Runtime 1h 22m | Released October 6, 2009
1. Ginger Fitzgerald – Ginger Snaps (2000)
If there’s a patron saint of she-wolves, then she lives in the suburbs of Ontario and her name is Ginger Fiztgerald. Played by the simply brilliant Katharine Isabelle in John Fawcett’s 2000 masterpiece Ginger Snaps.
Ginger starts the movie as a death-obsessed and hilariously sarcastic teenager who photographs elaborate suicide tableaux for a school project. All perfectly normal and completely relatable! She then gets bitten by a werewolf on the same night she gets her first period, and Ginger Snaps becomes the most efficient horror-as-puberty metaphor in cinema.
I put Ginger Fitzgerald as the number one she-wolf for not just the transformation, but her whole attitude. As she changes, she becomes confident, a lot more dangerous, and just absolutely done with high school’s social order. She weaponizes her frightening new nature in ways that feels truly earned. Her relationship with Brigitte, her sister, is the movie’s emotional core, and the final act is genuinely devastating. Ginger is tragic and frightening. And she’s iconic. All the other she-wolves are competing for silver.
“I get this ache…and I thought it was for sex, but it’s to tear everything to pieces.” Now THAT’S good cinema!
Where Ginger Snaps is streaming now:
Ginger Snaps | Not Rated | Runtime 1h 48m | Released August 1, 2000
Who are YOUR favorite horror movie She-Wolves…?
So, there you have it; eight she-wolves spanning eighty years of cinema. Going from Universal fog to direct-to-video mayhem on the Pacific Coast; all united by claws, a full moon, and a total refusal to be anyone’s victim.
What strikes me, looking at my list as a whole, is how consistently the she-wolf works as a figure of transformation which is about something else. Rosaleen and desire. Ginger and puberty. Laurie and the predator as prey. Phyllis and the act of being gaslit about your own monstrousness. Even more straightforward action-based entries like Sérafine and Zoe feature a woman trying to navigate a world that decided what she is before she gets to decide it for herself.
Horror has always been the genre that lets women be dangerous. She-wolves are perhaps the purest form of that permission. And long may the pack run!
Now excuse me. As I write this, the moon is up and looking a little full. It may be best to cancel some plans…
*** This article was written by Adam Page. Learn more about him in his author bio below***
Images for this article were purchased via MovieStillsDB except for the second Trick ‘r Treat photo which is a capture from Lauren’s DVD of the film.
