Legend of the Wolf Woman
1977 Anne Borel
On the night of the full moon, deep within a forest, a beautiful young woman starts a rhythmic, ritualistic dance inside a circle of fire . . . As she reaches a frenzied climax, she collapses on the ground, writhing and groaning as her pure skin and lovely features assume the ugliness of a wild animal. Villagers searching the forest are attracted to the shrieks and cries of the wolf woman and one man, who has wandered apart from the others, is suddenly viciously and ravenously attacked .
Awaking from this nightmare with a scream, the same beautiful young woman, Daniella, recounts the events to her father, explaining that she had found an old paper in the attic of their country house telling of the true Legend of the Wolf Woman - an ancestor of Daniella's who looked exactly like her.
A few days later, before Daniella has yet fully recovered from her ordeal, her sister Irene arrives at the house with her new husband. Daniella is appalled to see that the
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young man exactly resembles the villager who was attacked in her dream. That night, through a crack in the door, she watches him making love to Irene. Confused, jealous and dismayed, she runs out into the garden, where he follows her. Reenacting her dream, she hides in the bushes and suddenly attacks like a wild animal, biting and clawing his throat. She throws his lifeless body into a ravine and collapses, sobbing, on the ground.
Recovering in hospital, it becomes clear that she has assumed the personality of her ancestor, the werewolf. The doctors try to find a cure and in the meantime restrain her in her room. She soon escapes however, leaving a trail of bloody killings across the countryside.
With the police on her tail, and cowering for shelter underneath a hedge, she is found by a young stunt actor, who takes her home and cares for her. The two fall in love, and Daniella returns slowly to the beautiful, fun-loving girl she once was. But this idyllic life is soon brought to an abrupt end when Daniella is attacked one night when she is alone in their cottage. Three local thugs brutally rape her, and kill her boyfriend as he rushes into the house to help her.
After first revenging her boyfriend's death by killing all three of the attackers, Daniella returns to her werewolf image and takes to the woods, where she is finally found by the police-a beautiful young woman dancing inside a circle of fire - .
About Lycanthropy
Lycanthropy exists only in fiction. Yet untold numbers of stories have been written and thousands of legends told about the search for the werewolf. One such legend, as it is written, took place over one hundred years ago in a small countryside a few miles south of Florence, Italy. It established the true story of the film "THE Legend of the Wolf Woman", one of the most unusual ever found in medical history. Daniella Nesneri was placed in a mental institution on September 23, 1968. At the start of the filming of the picture, she was 39 years old and lived in that same institution in a totally catatonic state.
Her sister, Irene Nesneri, whose husband Daniella had so brutally murdered, remarried in 1973 and now lives in Berkeley, California. Their father, Count Nesneri, committed suicide shortly after Daniella was hospitalized. Obviously, the names of persons and places in the film have been changed and any reference to actual persons or events is purely coincidental.
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