Milton Moses Ginsberg's satirical fantasy takes from the serious Hollywood political-horror film of the '30s and '40s (“Who's really in the White House....?”) to give new life to the old vampire genre. Dean Stockwell plays a presidential press assistant “on vacation in the Balkans,” where he encounters a werewolf and is himself transformed into one. Back in the USA, he attacks the first of his several victims, the wife of a Supreme Court nominee. All his confessions and protestations fail to convince the President of his guilt; his resignation is not accepted.
“...this Werewolf skillfully proceeds to adapt the standard trappings of the genre to point up the moral that a politician's capacity for self-delusion in the cause of his own survival should never be underestimated. Milton Ginsberg has chosen not to make the murders themselves moments of high horror.... The real moments of horror occur when Biff Maguire's President, an unctuous study of plausible derangement, realises Jack's true value (as an accomplished fifth-columnist to be used against the hated members of the media) and refuses to admit that he could be the werewolf: ‘You are,' he says at one point, with a sly combination of sincerity and opportunism, ‘like the son I never had'....” --John Pym, Monthly Film Bulletin.
Ginsberg's second film (his first was Coming Apart, 1968), Werewolf of Washington was shown at the 1974 Edinburgh Film Festival.