The evolution of the supernatural teen in pop culture: Beauty in the beast

MANILA, Philippines - In 1985, a fantasy-comedy film about Scott Howard, a high school student who discovers that he turns big, brown, and bushy whenever he gets angry, exploded on the box office. The star was Michael J. Fox, and the movie was Teen Wolf.

Today’s Teen Wolf is a completely different animal. With the fit and fab Tyler Posey (of Lincoln Heights and Brothers and Sisters) as lead, the MTV-produced series resembles its ‘80s muse only in that its main character, also named Scott, is still an average teenager yearning for recognition from his peers.

But where Howard’s wolf is huge and hairy, McCall’s is sleek and sexy, with glowing eyes, fangs and a set of ripped abs the only things in the way of visible transformation from human to beast. And while Howard inherited the werewolf gene, McCall was infected with it, having been bitten in the woods by Derek Hale (Tyler Hoechlin, Road to Perdition and 7th Heaven), another male model of a shape-shifter. 

What happened to the supernatural in the new millennium? It used to be that monsters were exactly that: the spawn of nightmares, freaks. Now they are invariably beautiful young people made even more attractive by preternatural powers.

Take the witch. The word was once synonymous with “hag,” as in the crooked, wart-riddled old woman in Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, or Granny Hart in The Twilight Zone. By the 1990s, though, “witch” meant Prue, Piper and Phoebe of the series Charmed, or Willow from Buffy the Vampire Slayer — all young, beautiful, clear-skinned women. And today there’s J.K. Rowling’s Hermione, played by the strikingly lovely Emma Watson.

The 80’s movie version of Teen Wolf subscribes to our age old views of the werewolf: glowing eyes, fangs, and an incredible amount of hair.

Or vampires. Bela Lugosi’s Count Dracula had a peculiar charm to him, but he was a blood-sucking fiend who preyed on innocent women and could turn into a bat. In Buffy and its spin-off Angel, the vampire’s evil still manifested physically, but was limited only to the face. Today there’s Edward Cullen of the Twilight Saga: tall, pale and handsome, sparkly in the sun and made dreamy by a very human love for Bella Swan.

There are two ways of looking at this evolution. One, society has become so obsessed with beauty that it can no longer abide the hideous in pop culture. Or two, society has realized that there is beauty even in the most monstrous, and has increasingly given this concept a human face in television and movies.

It would be nice to think that today’s world has finally accepted that what makes us unique is what makes us beautiful, and that what’s different isn’t necessarily evil or ugly. Could that be the reason why programs with sexy supernatural characters are on the rise while those with less eye candy are becoming extinct?

It’s something for the viewer to mull over as he or she catches the season premiere of the latest show to be a part of the new definition of the uncanny. MTV’s Teen Wolf — no warts or Chewbacca look-alikes here! — as it screens on AXN Beyond.