Creature Features: Wendigo

Marvel Comics' Wendigo, courtesy
Wikimedia

Editor's note: Erin Lilley is a filmmaker and producer with Fighting Owl Films, a production company that has produced the paranormal comedy The Night Shift and is in pre-production for the horror, The Jersey Devil Expeditions. She has joined us to discuss some of her favorite monster movies, and the stories behind them with the Creature Features column.

BY ERIN LILLEY

When you think "creature," your mind probably jumps to the iconic images of the Frankenstein monster, Bigfoot, or maybe even that funky Metaluna Mutant dude from This Island Earth. For me, though, one of the scariest creatures has to be the Wendigo because it can look human, and if it doesn't eat you, it can possess you.

Sure, that sounds similar to a zombie, but where a zombie is a dead person brought back to stumbling, groaning life, a person afflicted by the Wendigo curse retains motor functions, so you might not know anything is even wrong with them until it's too late. If that's not scary enough, the Wendigo can also come at you in the form of an enormous, emaciated giant, desperately searching for the meal that can end its eternal starvation and suffering.

Pop culture is full of references to the Wendigo, although many diverge from the Native American legends. He emerged in Algernon Blackwood's 1910 story, "The Wendigo," and has been name checked in Stephen King's Pet Sematary and appeared on The X-Files, Charmed and Supernatural. He's shown up or been referenced in movies  (Wendigo, Ravenous), and made cameos in Dungeons & Dragons, Final Fantasy and Warcraft games. Within comics, Marvel heroes Wolverine and The Hulk have faced off against The Wendigo (shown here), and he was the focus of a storyline in the Hellboy-universe B.P.R.D. comic series by Dark Horse.

For my purposes, I've pulled two of my favorite television appearances - from Syfy's Haven and the short-lived Fear Itself anthology series - that I think well represent the different facets of the mythology...