Wolf Blood

Considered the first werewolf film ever made, this silent horror film stars George Chesebro as Dick Bannister, the new field boss of a Canadian logging company locked in a bitter feud with a rival firm. After being attacked and left for dead, Dick suffers such severe blood loss that no human donor can be found—so the surgeon performs a transfusion using wolf blood. Soon, Dick begins experiencing visions of running with phantom wolves, and when his rivals are found killed by what appears to be a wolf, the lumberjacks become convinced that Dick has become a werewolf. Co-directed by Chesebro and Bruce Mitchell for Ryan Bros. Productions, the film is a fascinating artifact of early horror cinema, blending logging-camp melodrama with proto-werewolf mythology decades before Universal's The Wolf Man (1941). The film is in the public domain.