A wolfman, an iconic horror star, and a movie that vanished off the face of the Earth – let’s talk about Las Noches Del Hombre Lobo, and whether Paul Naschy’s legendary Hombre Lobo series is really missing a piece of the puzzle.
Paul Naschy was born Jacinto Molina Álvarez in 1934 in Madrid, and began his career as an actor in the late fifties and early sixties, landing some small parts in TV productions like I Spy and bit roles in epics such as King of Kings (1961). But he wouldn’t rise to his full star power until the sixties, with his Hombre Lobo series.
Dubbed the Spanish Lon Chaney, Paul Naschy initially wrote the Hombre Lobo (Wolf Man) series with Chaney in mind for the leading role. But with Chaney already in his sixties and too ill to travel, Naschy took on the role of his soon-to-be iconic leading lycanthrope, Count Waldemar Daninsky, and starred in the first of twelve Hombre Lobo series, The Mark of the Wolfman, in 1968.
The twelve Hombre Lobo movies are more episodic than one long-form story, each following Naschy’s Daninsky, a Polish man afflicted with lycanthropy after being chomped by a yeti, in various creative scenarios – from alien invasion to mind control from a sexy scientist, Naschy took the series to some weird but generally entertaining places. He wrote all of the movies himself, and earned his reputation through his iconic turn as the unfortunate Count as Spain’s premier movie monster actor.
The second movie in this series, Las Noches del Hombre Lobo (The Nights of the Wolfman), follows a university professor who discovers that one of his students is capable of transforming into a werewolf; upon finding out, he makes nefarious use of soundwaves to control the student and uses him as a weapon for his own ends. Directed by Rene Govar, the movie was shot in Paris over the course of five weeks in 1968, a matter of months after the release of the first of the Hombre Lobo movies in Europe. Naschy claimed to have been approached by French television director Rene Govar to star in a sequel to his first Hombre Lobo movie, and, once the two had worked on the script together, it was shot in Paris with co-stars Monique Brainville and Peter Beaumont.
Just one problem: there’s no proof that Govar, Brainville, Beaumont, or even the movie itself ever existed. In fact, no trace of it exists at all.
But Paul Naschy maintained that this was the second part of his iconic Hombre Lobo series. According to Naschy, even he didn’t seen a cut of the film, claiming that the director was killed in a car accident shortly after filming completed, and that, as a result, the lab processing the negatives were never paid in full for their work, holding on to and later misplacing or destroying the remaining evidence of the movie’s existence.
But Govar himself has no recorded work in French television or film, or anywhere else, for that matter, nor is a death under that name listed around the time of the film’s alleged completion. Monique Brainville and Peter Beaumont, along with the other co-stars Naschy claimed were working on the picture with him, were unable to be located, with no other film work on their resumes. No members of the crew could be contacted, despite Naschy’s comments that the film was relatively complex for the time, featuring sequences of his character, cloaked in fog, moving across the Parisian rooftops. At the time, the Centre National du Cinema (the French film registry) required any production to register the details of the shoot, cast, and crew, and none of these details for a film of this title – or even fitting this description at the time – could be located.
So what the hell is going on with Las Noches del Hombre Lobo? With absolutely no evidence supporting Naschy’s claim that it was made at all, the majority opinion – and the one that I hold, too – is that this was a hoax. There’s nothing but Naschy’s word in the “pro” column for this particular mystery, and the complete dearth of evidence backing up his claims speaks for itself, in my eyes.
But the question is: why? There are a few possibilities here, and plenty of speculation – some people argue that Naschy was attempting to bolster his reputation by claiming to have worked on an international production at the time, an impressive addition to any actor’s resume in that era and especially for a Spanish-speaking horror actor, remarking in an interview on the subject in 1994 with VIDEOOOZE that it was the “impressive success” of the first movie that drew Govar’s attention to him.
I couldn’t help but notice in my research into this movie that Naschy’s most often-quoted comments on the subject, and most in-depth discussion of this apparently lost film, came in that 1994 interview – shortly before his 1996 comeback Hombre Lobo flick, Licantropo. He wrote the script for this movie in 1992, after a major heart attack, and was in the midst of a significant career downturn during this time, with the last Hombre Lobo movie released nearly a decade before, in 1993. It’s a long shot, but I could imagine Naschy inviting speculation on this lost movie as a way to get his Hombre Lobo series back into the broader cultural conversation, and perhaps lay the groundwork for his next entry in the series which would begin production not long after the interview where he discussed Las Noches del Hombre Lobo in great detail.
Paul Naschy claimed until his death in 2009 that Los Noche del Hombre Lobo existed, but no evidence seems to support this claim – some people believe make-up tests for the movie prove it at least entered production, but these are most likely stills from another entry into the Hombre Lobo canon. Whether or not it’s real, it’s still a fascinating part of Naschy’s storied career – and I would love to see some part of it emerge from the archives somewhen down the line.
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By Lou MacGregor
(header image via New York Times)
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