Production Notes
Samuel Z. Arkoff wrote in his memoirs that he got a lot of resistance for producing a film portraying a teenager becoming a monster, an idea that had never been exploited in film before.
Dawn Richard, who plays a teenaged gymnast in the film, was actually a 22-year-old Playboy centerfold model at the time, appearing in the magazine’s May 1957 issue, which hit the newsstands a couple months ahead of the movie.
Pepe, the Romanian janitor at the police station, was played by the Russian-born Vladimir Sokoloff, a character actor who appeared as ethnic types in over 100 productions, his most famous being the Old Mexican Man in The Magnificent Seven three years later.
Tony Marshall is the only other male actor to receive billing in the trailer for I Was a Teenage Werewolf, in addition to Landon and Bissell. However, he made only one other motion picture, the obscure Rockabilly Baby for Twentieth Century-Fox, which was released in October of the same year.
The movie was shot in seven days.
This film was the first of four “teenage monster” movies produced by AIP during 1957 and 1958. All four films highlighting a theme of innocent teenagers being preyed upon, transformed, and used by corrupt adults for selfish interests. I Was a Teenage Frankenstein and Blood of Dracula were both released in November 1957 and feature a teenage boy transformed in a Frankenstein monster and a teenage girl transformed into a kind of werecat-vampire. How to Make a Monster, released in 1958, features two teenage boys being hypnotized to kill while disguised as the monster characters "Teenage Werewolf" and "Teenage Frankenstein" of the 1957 films.
Read more about this topic: I Was A Teenage Werewolf
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