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I Am Legend, Universal's Film The Wolf Man

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Before taking humanities and learning about the other, I had already formed an idea of what the other was without realizing it. I would categorize a group of people that I found strange and unattractive as people I did not want to turn into. I would fear these strange people due to the possibility of becoming like them, what I would later learn as contamination. When I learned about the other in class, I was shocked that I was unknowingly grouping a group of people as the other. I was judging people for being different, for being outside of the norm. My idea of what the other was expanded, and I started to think about it more. As we began to learn more about the other from Richard Matheson’s novella, I Am Legend, Universal’s film The Wolf Man, …show more content…

The main character Larry Talbot, desires to live a normal life but cannot because he is essentially the other. To me, this was a horror movie because it showed that anyone can turn into the other. It doesn’t matter who you are, or what you’ve done, you yourself can become the other. “Even a man who is pure in heart and says his prayers by night may become a wolf when the wolf bane blooms and the autumn moon is bright” (Waggner). I have interpreted this quote to mean that even if you are a good guy, you can still fall to evil because evil lives within each man. Since evil lives within each man you cannot run from it, it is in you. Throughout the movie we see Larry running away from himself, like he is attempting to run from the evil inside of him. This movie made me wonder if there was something that everyone tries to run away from that is within themselves. There was a specific scene in the movie where Larry franticly tries to wipe away the tracks of his werewolf side, like he was trying to erase the bad part of himself. This movie answered the question why is it bad to be the other? As displayed in this movie, it is bad to become the other because you will be treated poorly be society. Even when people in the film did not know that Larry was the werewolf, they spoke of werewolves as evil creatures. By understanding the themes of this movie, I was able to develop a

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