On a full moon night, a long deep and eerie, almost painful howl, the beast inside comes out unchained; it is fiercely beyond control.

Scary yet awesome enough to capture human imagination for centuries, it is the ‘werewolf’, half-man half-wolf, but much more powerful and cunning creature than one could guess. As it combines the intelligence, imagination and strategy of a human and a predator, this beast has been depicted in literature and horror films as man’s most feared mythological creature.

Sometimes a victim of a curse and sometimes voluntarily making a pact with the forces of darkness, the werewolf is blatant and cruel in its killing  spree and devouring human and animal flesh when in its animal form, it is spine-chilling.

Werewolf legends go back many centuries and were the main subject in many Gothic era literary works. But the most famous is The Werewolf of Paris, written in 1933 by the American author Guy Endore, which has also been recognised as a classic. It was in 1935 that cinema audiences were first introduced to the werewolf on the silver screen in a feature film named Werewolf in London. The beast is not only restricted to the male gender. The female version is no less deadly, if not deadlier.

In cultures across Europe, the ways a human being turns into a werewolf are different from region to region. In some places, drinking water from the footprint of a werewolf might turn a person into one.

According to some theories, rubbing salve (an especial kind of ointment) on the night of a full moon on a person’s body and chanting some spells, etc., might do it. While some say that people who are cursed by saints are also doomed to lead their lives as beasts. One highly accepted belief is that it is the bite of a werewolf that surely turns one into this half-man half-wolf creature, whether he or she likes it or not.

In the past, people who walked with a swinging stride, had very thin long fingers with curved nails and lots of reddish hair, and some under the tongue, and joined eyebrows and longer, lower ears were considered to be werewolves. Also, it was believed that people with these attributes had super-human strengths either in human or in animal form.

To kill a werewolf, the only way was to use a weapon made of silver, and according to recent theories in horror fiction, a silver bullet is sure to put the beast out of its misery. Some suggest mistletoe and mountain ash as prevention from the dreaded predator.

But the question is: do werewolf exist? Coming to the logical side of the topic, and yes, there is one, a disorder called clinical Lycanthropy, is a kind of mental condition in which a person believes that he or she possesses the attributes of being a werewolf. In this disease, the patient only shows the signs that are in his/her mind regarding the  werewolf that s/he has either read or saw in the movies or heard stories of. This particular disorder was the main reason, and also the symptoms connected with rabies that people in the past associated with sick individuals as being werewolves.

In another condition, ‘hypertrichosis’, the whole body of an individual is covered with thick hair and yet another rare disorder is ‘porphyria’ in which a person may have reddish teeth, pale skin and get blisters on the skin when exposed to bright sunlight and later these blisters are replaced with hair. These are a few medical conditions, which were unknown in the past to medical practitioners, and thus such individuals were thought to be werewolves.

Interestingly, there has been an incident on October 31st, 1999, in which Dorestine Gipson, in Wisconsin, USA, in the area of Delavan, was driving when her car rode over a hurdle, which she later turned to see, was a hairy, wolf-like creature racing towards her. Similar stories of the kind of such sightings were reported from the area of a creature that was six feet tall, had grey hair and a kind of muzzle but walked on its hind legs.

And this mysterious creature gained further fame when Michael Jackson portrayed himself as a werewolf in the music video of Thriller, undoubtedly his greatest hit.