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Woody Allen once said, “Life doesn't imitate art, it imitates bad television.” Now I’m not necessarily a fan of the man, but the Halloween season does seem to grant him credence.

In the next few days, I anticipate crowds of superheroes and Disney characters and Freddy Kruegers. Now that happens whenever I watch NFL football, but not as often as on the eve of All Saints’ Day. Neighborhoods will be inundated with ghouls and good guys, and the disguises will be worn in shopping centers throughout November. Fortunately, we are all accustomed to hordes of storm troopers, clowns, and Waldo’s.

In 1975 I may have imitated “bad television” myself. I dove into a tub of green dye, ripped jeans and a t-shirt, and headed to school as the Hulk. A borrowed wig completed the makeover and enabled me to drove home with the first-place prize, a Linda Ronstadt album, to a house with no record player.

The crowd I grew up with was a scary bunch. During this season they transformed themselves into monsters. Frankensteins and Count Draculas and wicked witches were everywhere. My formative years were truly the age of “life imitates art.” It was definitely an era of less stress. Black-and-white TV did not add as many color requirements. People could choose their own colors. That simplified creating monsters.

Memories of Halloween costumes and sugar overdoses do not haunt me, but the movies do. I didn’t need to record a film or to buy a DVD. Once viewed, the scenes replayed time and time again in my head. The blood oozing under the locked door in 1942’s Cat People still sends chills through me. If Oscars were determined by increasing heart beats, Vincent Price would have a dark, dank castle full of them.

The pinnacle of terror, however, was "The Wolf Man" (1941). Lon Chaney, Jr. and Bela Lugosi. A silver bullet was added to the lore. A man returns home to Wales for his brother’s funeral. In that dark moment and in the darkness of night, he kills a vicious wolf with a silver cane, and its gypsy mama explains the curse. It’s tag-you’re-it time. Larry Talbot, by no choice of his own, goes through an excruciating transformation when a full moon shines. He is the wolf man.

The lycanthropy episodes that followed and An American Werewolf in London continued the documentary, but I had grown accustomed to the horror by then. Antennas, cable tv, and theaters allowed us to channel the air waves of fear pretty easily. Hopefully we haven’t grown too calloused.

The screen play for "The Wolf Man" was written by Curt Siodmak. He was born in 1902 in Leipzig, Germany, to Jewish parents. In the 1930’s he left for England after hearing a Joseph Goebbel’s anti-Semitic speech. (Curt Siodmark, Wikipedia)

On Nov. 19, 2000, the New York Times published an article: 'Curt Siodmak Dies at 98; Created Modern & Wolf Man.’  Douglas Martin writes:

"I am the Wolf Man," he (Curt Siodmak) said in an interview last year in Written By, the magazine of the Writers Guild of America, west. "I was forced into a fate I didn't want: to be a Jew in Germany. I would not have chosen that as my fate. The swastika represents the moon. When the moon comes up, the man doesn't want to murder, but he knows he cannot escape it, the Wolf Man destiny."

Curt Siodmak created and produced "The Wolf Man". “The tale was a metaphor for his own flight from the horrors of Nazi Germany,” said Mr. Martin.

I don’t think the screenwriter was too calloused. The story behind the story haunted him. Maybe it should haunt us that sometimes “Art imitates life.” History has its nightmares. Sometimes we create monsters. Sometimes monsters create us.