Project Terror: The WEREWOLF (1956)

As a kid growing up in San Antonio, TX in the 1970s and 1980s, I loved trying to stay up late on Friday Nights and watch our local broadcast on KENS 5 TV for Project Terror....They would show old horror movies and I loved it. Tonight, for your viewing pleasure is a recreation of Project Terror showing The Werewolf from 1956.
The Werewolf is a 1956 American horror science fiction film directed by Fred F. Sears and starring Don Megowan and Joyce Holden.
Set in contemporary times (i.e. the 1950s), the storyline follows an amnesiac man who, after being injected with "irradiated wolf serum" by unscrupulous doctors, transforms into a werewolf when under emotional stress. The film "marks precisely the point in which horror, which had been a dormant genre in the early '50s, began to take over from science fiction", and is the first of only three werewolf films made in the US during that decade, preceding Daughter of Dr. Jekyll and I Was a Teenage Werewolf (both 1957). The Werewolf was released theatrically in the US as the bottom half of a double feature with Earth vs. the Flying Saucers (1956).
The film was shot on location in the San Bernardino National Forest in California. Although most modern sources agree that Mountaincrest is actually the town of Big Bear Lake, located on Big Bear Lake itself, film historian John Johnson places the location as Fawnskin, also on Big Bear Lake.
Viewing the film reveals that the film was shot in many locations around the lake. There are numerous scenes shot on the south shore with Bertha Peak in the background. All of the "town" locations are in Big Bear Village, and most notably those at the old Chad’s, which was a bar on Village Drive in the location of today’s Whiskey Dave’s, though it was much smaller in 1955 than today’s establishment. The old Bear Valley Reality office and the Rexall Drug store are clearly visible in the town scenes. The scenes around the dam (Eastwood Dam) include the road (since removed) over the dam, the dam itself and the original granite dam (Brown Dam) that today is usually underwater. Many of the roadblock scenes were shot on today’s Highway 38 on the north shore between the damn and West Boat Launch, with the large home in the background of some shots, still standing.
According to the American Film Institute, filming took place between December 10 and 20, 1955. Although the on-screen credits read "introducing Steven Ritch", according to AFI, he had appeared in "several films" before The Werewolf.
In the US, The Werewolf premiered in Los Angeles on June 13, 1956 and went into general release in July as the second feature on a double bill with Earth vs the Flying Saucers. It was the first feature on a UK double bill with Creature with the Atom Brain. The film was given an X-certificate by the British Board of Film Censors, clearing it for distribution in the UK but prohibiting it from being exhibited to persons under age 16. After opening in UK theaters in August 1956, it was released in the Netherlands in 1957 and Argentina in 1958, then at unspecified dates in France, Brazil, Mexico, Australia, Finland, the Soviet Union, Spain, Portugal and Italy. Columbia Pictures distributed the film theatrically in the US, UK and the Netherlands