The ancient Greeks already spoke of men who transformed into wolves, such as Lycaon, who was punished by Zeus for his impiety.

In Rome, Pliny the Elder recorded testimonies of lycanthropes in his Natural History, blending folklore with observation.

During the Middle Ages, fear of the wolf took on religious overtones, and the werewolf became a symbol of sin and demonic possession.

Between the 16th and 17th centuries, Europe experienced a wave of lycanthropy trials, such as those of Pierre Burgot and Jean Grenier, who were treated as witches or cannibals.

Lycanthropy was even recognized as a disease in medical treatises of the Renaissance, where it was debated as something between the physical and the spiritual.

Soon, the myth gradually faded into medicine and psychiatry, but it survived through oral tradition and folk tales.

During the Romantic period, the werewolf reemerged as a tragic figure, a victim of a curse rather than of his own evil.

The novel Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf (1847) was the first to make the werewolf a literary protagonist, with gothic and philosophical overtones.

In the 20th century, cinema turned the werewolf into a horror icon with The Wolf Man (1941), establishing the full moon as the trigger.

From that point on, the werewolf became a horror classic, alongside vampires and zombies, appearing in movies, comics, and TV series.