We Are All Teenage Werewolves

Dr. Funk’s real name is Greg Funk; Dr. Dre’s real name is Andre Freitas. My guess is that one of the Tylers started this “Dr. Funk”/“Dr. Dre” thing, probably Tyler Posey, who plays the primary teenage wolf on “Teen Wolf,” a new MTV series loosely based on the 1985 Michael J. Fox film of the same name. He is, at 19, one of the youngest members of the cast and exactly the kind of hyper goofball who’d make up rap names for the makeup artists. It might also have been Tyler Hoechlin, who plays Derek, the older, brooding werewolf who sort of mentors Posey’s character in the way of the lycanthrope, but he’s 23, and calmer, so I doubt it.

It was the final day of principal photography on the first season of the show, which has its premiere in early June, and as Posey and Hoechlin had their fierce, sloping, man-wolf foreheads and Hugh-Jackman-as-Wolverine sideburns applied one last time, the prevailing vibe was school’s-out-for-summer. Funk and Freitas had a classic-rock playlist going on Funk’s iPod — Lynyrd Skynyrd, Jeff Buckley, Neil Young, the Beatles. Posey in particular seemed barely able to sit still, or resist luring Hoechlin into mock arguments in the “Shut up/No, you shut up” vein.

MTV’s “Teen Wolf” was conceived as a darker, sexier reimagining of the “Teen Wolf” story, and also a gorier one. Within the first few minutes of the pilot episode, for example, Posey’s character, Scott McCall, discovers the naked, dismembered body of a young woman in the woods. So it’s clear right away that this will not be a sweet, silly sports comedy, like the old “Teen Wolf.” There will also be brooding! There will probably not be triumphant werewolf-basketball montages!

And there will be blood! The supplies at Funk and Freitas’s makeup stations included My Blood brand stage blood in Standard Red; Reel Body Art Ink in Deep Red #7; and an ominous squirt bottle labeled MOUTH BLACK VOMIT. The pink Post-Its identifying the contents of the cabinets behind their makeup-chair stations read WOLF EARS and LOOSE HAIR and ADD’L BURN SCARS. A dry-erase calendar on one wall of the trailer listed several weeks’ worth of unfortunate werewolf-related events, like THROAT RIP. Feb. 28 was apparently a rough Monday — it required Funk and Freitas to simulate MOUTH BLOOD, and also a STOMACH WOUND, and an ARROW IN ARM. The werewolf-face prosthetics, which are delicate, like sleep masks made of pancetta, are stored on plastic molds of the actors’ heads. The prosthetic scars for small wounds — cuts, scratches, bullet wounds — are stored flat in HOT AND DELICIOUS! pizza boxes. Sometimes someone who doesn’t know the deal will tidy the makeup trailer and throw the boxes away, and Funk and Freitas will have to dig through a Dumpster for them.

Hoechlin looked into the makeup mirror, bit into a breakfast taco and said, “A werewolf eating a taco,” to his reflection, as if pondering the strangeness of the chain of events that had taken him here.

I was pondering the same thing.

The horror genre has always been where the culture goes to process the issues of the day via fake-blood-spattered psychodrama. AMC’s zombie-survival serial, “Walking Dead,” is about economic collapse and our sense that we’ve been abandoned by institutions; torture-chamber flicks like “Saw” are about our guilty complicity in reality TV’s soft sadism. But the teenage-monster movie works with more evergreen subtextual materials, making metaphorical the weirdness of adolescence — of waking up one morning with uncontrollable urges, new and troubling hair growth and a sense that the whole world hates and fears you.

Which is not to say that “Teen Wolf” doesn’t reflect its cultural moment. Obviously no one involved with the making of the show wants to come right out and say it, but MTV’s getting into the teen-horror game because of the world-beating success of Stephenie Meyer’s “Twilight” novels, which are among the most read borderline-unreadable books of the last decade, and the movie franchise they inspired, which has grossed nearly $1 billion to date and forced an entire generation of girls to pledge allegiance to either Team Edward (the vampire) or Team Jacob (the werewolf). The animating tension of “Twilight” is that the high-school mope-rag, Bella Swan, wants Edward to turn her into a vampire so they can be together forever — symbolically taking her virginity by taking her humanity. While the idea of erotic exchange between human beings and the undead has always appealed to Goths and Fangoria subscribers, Meyer’s story cunningly transformed that racy, quasi-pagan fantasy into a crypto-Christian abstinence parable that good girls could enjoy while twisting their promise rings.