Werewolf in a Girls' Dormitory (1961, a.k.a. Lycanthropus)

Werewolf in a Girl's Dormitory (1961)

Primary Genre Murder Mystery

Other Genres 

Edgar Wallace inspired mystery, modernist gothic horror, mad science fiction

Plot

At a privately owned girl’s reform school with a corrupt administration and some off-screen hanky-panky, a humanoid beast mauls a student.  Complicated murder mystery follows.

Good Stuff

Jazzy rock & roll song (“There was a ghoul in the School") in the opening credits.  (Seriously, that silly song might be the most entertaining part of this.)

Bad Stuff

There are too many uninteresting red herrings, resulting in a talkative two hour story that could have been told in ninety minutes or less.

Story is told mostly from the POV of the school's administration, not its students, yet this dub was packaged for a teen/young adult audience.

Who Cares Stuff

Werewolf in a Girls' Dormitory is a 1963 English language dub of a 1961 Italian movie (Lycanthropus). This English language dub went to the drive-ins as a “nobody is really going to be watching this after it starts” movie and to broadcast TV markets as 2 AM filler.

Although this is primarily a murder mystery, it is usually categorized as a horror movie.

(“Horror or mystery” have been cardinal directions in ongoing movie genre debates for generations, especially when older movies are involved.  Sometimes people will say “suspense”.   Sometimes people try to compromise and say mysterious horror or horrifying mystery.   Sometimes people will broadly categorize while using a classy sounding foreign word (like “giallo” or “crimi”).  See also Se7en, Psycho, and Silence of the Lambs, Hound of the Baskervilles...   We digress; it’s a debate for another day -- along with melodrama vs film noir.)

 

This movie appears to have been inspired by various contemporaneous West German movies based on Edgar Wallace detective stories. (Note: Several of Wallace’s grisly murder mystery stories were made into movies and labeled “Horror”.)

See also Blood of Dracula (1957), which has a similar plot setup, tells its story in about half the time, tells it from the students’ point of view, and plays it more like horror.

Bottom Line

Talkative, overlong, European murder mystery with some pituitary gland mad science and modernist gothic horror thrown into the mix.

Bonus Takeaway

Just as Werewolf of London is a talkative 1920s English play of manners with a werewolf thrown in (and that's making it sound way more entertaining than it really is), Werewolf in a Girls' Dormitory is more like an European murder mystery w/werewolf than it is a horror movie.