Werewolf: "Nightmare at the Braine Hotel"

Werewolf is easily one of the best of the forgotten, unsung, and too-soon-canceled horror shows from the 1980s, and I’ve written about it in the past—at least the pilot episode. But all 29 episodes of Werewolf are incredible. The dark, brooding atmosphere helped set the stage for such 1990s megahits as The X-Files and Millenium.

Be that as it may, Werewolf (which was written by the aptly named Frank Lupo) suffered from a formulaic redundancy factor that helped kill it off, much like The Incredible Hulk, with which it shares thematic similarities. Eric Cord (John J. York), a handsome, soap opera-ready TV heartthrob, wanders the dusty highways and byways of Reagan-era America (one is reminded of actor Page Fletcher in The Hitchhiker, the great Canadian horror anthology series of the era), breezing into dangerous situations with a variety of tough hombres. Each episode features an obligatory werewolf transformation—an impressively scary moment usually played in slow motion with a heavy synth horror score and some nice growling sound effects. Then, he’s on the road again, his backpack slung over his shoulder, searching for Skorzeny (Chuck Connors), the eyepatch-wearing, tall, dark, and ugly sailor whose bite made him a werewolf. (As I recall, in the pilot, it was Cord’s roommate who bit him, but Skorzeny must have bitten the roommate first. It's like a chain of people infected by an STD.)

All the while, he is being chased by bounty hunter "Alamo Joe," played by lean, rawboned TV cowboy, the late Lance LeGault.

You can only sustain a formula like this for so long before viewers start to lose interest, no matter how good the creature design and special makeup effects were (in an era before computers and AI could do it all). Along the way, though, Werewolf had a terrific run. (With the wolves, perhaps, har-har.)

"Nightmare at the Braine Hotel," Season 1, Episode 16, is an episode that plays with the "dream within a dream" format popularized by the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise. It co-stars Richard Lynch, who appeared in the Nightmare knock-off Bad Dreams, as "Servan" (I think that’s how it’s spelled), a weird, black-clad dude with a fedora and shades, who carries a crooked knife and has an octopus tattoo on his scalp. The tentacles of his thoughts "reach" through the world of dreams. The great, dark, suffocating confines of Hotel Braine are presided over, like the empty skull, by a haggard, cackling, obnoxious old tart named Marta (Ellen Crawford), who looks as though she has grease smeared under her eyes.

Eric comes to life on a bus station park bench, woken up by a janitor (Howard Mungo) who informs him that he doesn’t let hunky vagrants sleep it off there. Eric opens a paper and reads a story about "The Slasher" claiming his seventh victim. He makes his rain-soaked way to the Braine Hotel, a place aptly named because "It’s bad to dream of werewolves." Or so The Slasher tells him later when Eric is ensconced in a dismal room. The whole thing is just weird.

Across the hall, a blonde woman (Jane Modean) has a dying old man she claims is her father, who is infected with werewolfism, whom she eventually shoots. I could go ahead and give away spoilers aplenty, but you’ll want to sit down and watch the episode for yourself because it is a lost classic of the era.

At the end of our rainy, noir little television excursion, Eric wakes up once again on the same train station bench, after confronting grotesque werewolves transforming while cackling madly in dark, 80s television-set hotel rooms with stained-glass pentagram windows. It’s all monstrous fun.

"I skulk, I hide, I lock myself away like a fugitive from myself [...] I must from time to time dip in blood." — Servan

The secret of the werewolf bloodline is hidden in the confines of the Braine Hotel, lurking like a subconscious thought, until, like every nightmare, it uncoils suddenly to reveal itself—like a snake. Or like the tentacles of an octopus. In the end, the reveal that the hotel has seemingly "burned to the ground" is the erasure of the nightmare’s mini-world. Servan is the killer of darkness, whose tentacled brow moves through the pitch, killing off the evil exemplified by werewolfism—the "Beast Within"—as represented by the cackling Marta. Eric gets to see himself reflected in Servan, Marta, the old man, and various stages of his cursed being. An attempt to kill Servan is pointless because, as he has previously exited by a window and escaped, his influence is implacable, and that fractured form of Eric Cord can never be erased. Am I making sense? No? Good.

It’s a crazy, mixed-up dream episode where there is little resolution. Was it all a dream? The name of the hotel is a dead giveaway. Dead being the optimal word here.

So, after having seen it, ask yourself: Who’s afraid of the Big Bad Wolf? You?

Werewolf 1x16 Nightmare at the Braine Hotel

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