5. Lon Chaney Jr. brought the Wolf Man to film in 1941
The Wolf Man was the second motion picture based on eastern European legends of werewolves, the first being Werewolf of London in 1935, which had been successful. The film presented a poem about werewolves as if it were an old European legend, though in fact it was written for the film. In the film, the Wolf Man appears not as a result of a full moon but from the blooming of wolfbane. In the sequels, in which the poem invariably appears, the conversion of the stricken Talbot into the Wolf Man is directly linked to the appearance of the full moon.
The Wolf Man has the singular distinction of being the only one of the classic Universal Monsters to be portrayed by the same actor in all of its official sequels, Lon Chaney Jr. In each of the sequels the Wolf Man portrayed by Chaney interacted with one of the other Universal Monsters. For example, in Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1943) the Frankenstein monster appears, though it was portrayed by Bela Lugosi rather than Boris Karloff. Chaney’s Wolf Man returned in House of Dracula (1945) in which Dracula was portrayed by John Carradine. The Frankenstein monster appeared in that film as well, played by Glenn Strange.