Please note: We’re trying to keep this list to films that primarily revolve around werewolves, rather than simply featuring them as part of an ensemble.

You can also check out some of our other big horror lists, such as the 100 best vampire movies of all time, the 50 best zombie movies of all time, and the overall 100 best horror films of all time. Below we present the 25 best werewolf movies of all time, which constitute an 80-plus year journey through everything hairy and lupine. But despite all that, we still love a good werewolf yarn, and there have been some cinematic classics in the genre along the way. They continue to be made, but they’re utterly dwarfed by zombie movies, vampire movies, etc. Which is all to say that in the end, there are a lot fewer werewolf movies out there than there are for the other classic monsters. It’s the Achilles’ heel of pretty much any indie werewolf movie-a refrain of “the suit looks cheap!” Horror fans are fickle, and tough to please. Werewolf movies are inherently more costume-dependent, and they also tend to be scrutinized more harshly for their effects as a result.

Then of course there’s the issue of costuming-it’s a lot more expensive to build full-body werewolf suits than it is to slap a few wounds on an extra, call him a zombie, and call it a day. For whatever reason, the werewolves themselves are rarely seen as vital enough to continue carrying a franchise solo. Even a foundation of the genre, such as George Waggner’s classic 1941 The Wolf Man starring Lon Chaney Jr., never received a direct sequel of its own-rather, the Wolf Man was lumped in alongside other monsters in the future, in films such as Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man and Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein. They’re not nearly as sexualized (and capitalized upon) as vampires. They don’t represent the pop culture zeitgeist so appropriately as zombies. They’re not nearly so ubiquitous as ghosts. Of the classic cinematic monsters, which were essentially canonized in the public consciousness by the Universal monster films of the ’30s and ’40s, werewolves are never quite given the luster or romanticization of the others. There’s a saying (or at least a sentiment) among horror geeks: Werewolves always get short shrift.

True temper rod