Daninsky Werewolf Collection

Jacinto Molina wasn't a filmmaker trying his hand at acting — he was an eight-time Spanish national weightlifting champion, first winning the title in 1958, who wrote a werewolf screenplay at 34 specifically to get himself into movies. Nobody in the Spanish industry wanted it. He got it financed anyway, cast himself as the lead, and The Mark of the Wolfman became the first of what turned into an entire career built around one character: Count Waldemar Daninsky.

The name on the poster isn't his either. German distributors told him "Jacinto Molina" sounded too Spanish to sell the film internationally, so he invented one on the spot — "Paul" after Pope Paul VI, and "Naschy" as a Germanic-sounding version of Imre Nagy, one of his own weightlifting idols. A Catholic pope and a Hungarian Olympic weightlifter, combined into the name that would become synonymous with Spanish horror. International distributors then did their own damage to the films' identities: this same first film was released in the US as Frankenstein's Bloody Terror, a title that has essentially nothing to do with what's actually in it.

What that one film started ran to twelve official Daninsky entries across the rest of Naschy's career, of which this collection covers five, made in a five-year stretch in the early-to-mid 1970s — continuity between installments was loose at best, each one largely standing on its own. Naschy wrote most of them himself, often under his real name, and directed several outright. What's genuinely distinctive about his approach, compared to the Universal and Hammer monsters he was openly drawing from, is that he played Daninsky less as a creature to fear and more as a tragic, sympathetic figure cursed against his will — turning Spain's answer to the Wolf Man into something closer to a doomed romantic lead than a monster, and in the process more or less inventing Spanish horror cinema as its own going concern.