The 18th-century French media stoked a werewolf panic | Hacker News Reader

The 18th-century French media stoked a werewolf panic

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85 pointsPaulHoule27 comments

Fun French flick on a fictionalized version of this panic is a film called "Le Pacte des loups" or "Brotherhood of the Wolf".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brotherhood_of_the_Wolf

Worth watching for some of that cultural milieu.

Pretty Amazing movie and story.

Worth watching for the craziest match cut ever. Monica Bellucci into a mountain range.

Sweet Lord that is one of my favorite movies! The fight scenes are amazing, and the story is absolutely phenomenal.

Brotherhood of the Wolf is rad.

What about the other film, The Beast of the Gévaudan, is it good? I thought it was more famous. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0352224/

I remember watching that as a kid and freaking out. Those were the good days.

I love this movie, but I wonder what happened to the director [1]. This movie was his one-hit. Apparently, he has a Silent Hill movie in production since 2020. Not a good sign ... :-/

Fun trivia: Mark Dacascos who played "Mani" starred in John Wick 3 as the main antagonist :-) [2].

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christophe_Gans

2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Wick:_Chapter_3_%E2%80%93...

according to IMDB the movie is done, just no release date

With filmographies like these, I'm really curious about how the person makes a living. It's been ten years since his last film. How is he paying the rent?

Maybe his movies made a good amount of money, he personally got a big paycheck from those, and then just invested it and lived off that in a frugal manner.

For a lot of people, if you put $1M in their bank account, they could live off that comfortably for quite a long time, as long as they don't succumb to lifestyle inflation.

Of course. Gans did not produce the film, but it's possible he got points off the gross, of course; not sure how common that is in the French film industry.

I'm also thinking about other directors who have long periods of silence. I assume that often these gaps are filled with script doctor work, canceled projects (which nevertheless provide some paid work), commercials, and other side gigs. Todd Field had a 15-year gap between Little Children and Tár, and he clearly was busy with other things. But many directors have big gaps in their filmographies without any such obvious activity.

Yes, most people here are probably salaried workers with little or no exposure to the film industry, so we have little understanding how it works, but you're right, these kind of people probably have a lot of other paying work they do that isn't as obvious as directing a full-length movie.

He had an interesting non-Disney Beauty and the Beast movie from 2014 that is worth watching if you liked Brotherhood of the Wolf. International reviews were more critical of it, but it was well received in France, at least.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beauty_and_the_Beast_(2014_fil...

The media (or more accurately, the local public due to real fear caused by numerous killings) may have further exaggerated on what was happening in former province of Gévaudan, but there was definitely something unusual (i'm not saying paranormal, just unusual, as in outside of average) going on there, just from the number of recorded deaths by supposed animal attacks. We'll probably never know what happened exactly or how much was public hysteria, and how many extra deaths were either by some atypical animal behavior, or a human killer taking advantage of superstition to kill other human beings, essentially, as a serial killer.

Could have easily been some kind of maneater. The human-predation behavior of the Tsavo lions or the Sankebetsu/Tomamae brown bear are not at all common, but are know. The tsavo lions were also not taken seriously at first, because lions being motivated to make constant audacious attacks on humans is so wildly out of the norm.

Amazingly effective game, apparently even turned into a movie not once but twice (Cry_Wolf and one Austrian adaption, according to de.wikipedia). That connection to an 18th century media hype adds an interesting new angle to the success of that game, in particular given how France is not exactly known as a big exporter of modern games except for that one.

(whereas in pre-modern games, there seems to be be a huge amount of frenchess everywhere. I guess that's still a consequence of the idleness enforced at Versailles and Europe's near-universal scramble to replicate?)

Can you comment more on what you mean by pre-modern games and their Frenchness?

For example the suits of playing cards [0]: here in Germany we have our own suits, but those decks are really only used for some very specific games. For all other games, we use the same cards as the English speaking world and we call those French. For diamonds and spades even the French names remain, in heavily adapted spelling: Karo from carreau and Pik from pique.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Playing_card_suit

What's funny is those Skat decks that are clearly the "normal" (French I guess hahah) suits, except with still only Skat number of cards and nonstandard colors. So it's 32 cards, and green/etc colors, but it replaces the bells and acorns.

That's like 90%+ of the skat decks I ever used, but it didn't occur to me that it was like halfway between original German deck and French deck

This French company exports a few modern games…

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubisoft

I know it’s not exactly what you meant.

Wait is The Werewolves of Millers Hollow the modern game with the app One Night Ultimate Werewolf? My family loves that game! Never knew it was a modern take on such an old game and this story.

It's more like Mafia from what I understand, with multiple day/night cycles.

The question isn't answered, except for one sentence that says illustrators had a field day depicting a large beast.

Also, nowhere is it said people believed the beast to be a werewolf.

A reminder that headlines that start with an interrogative pronoun usually have little substance.

French here, never heard of any connection with werewolves. Only that it was either an immense wolf or possibly a hyena brought who-knows-how from Africa.

Note from a dive in the rabbit hole of the French Wikipedia page: it seems it was truly a wolf which was - according to its autopsy - 1m long "from the base of its tail to the top of its head" and weighed more than 50kg.

From my understanding, a panic was the result of more than a hundred people being violently killed by an animal. Not by “the media”.

There is not one mention of werewolf in how it describes the happenings of the time, only when talking about the game.

Very clickbaity title trying to get the attention of those that like to blame “the media” for everything

"Stoked" implies there was already a fire - indeed, an animal was attacking and killing villagers - it doesn't mean 'created entirely out of nothingness' ...

You stoke a fire to get it going, and you can do that with old or new fires, alike.

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