Werewolves and Terrorism

I've been interested in the notion that werewolves were the terrorists of the middle ages, not in the literal sense, but more in the idea that the authority used them to control the population through fear. One day I'll write a full-fledged post about that, right after I write the werewolf movie script, but until then, here's a snippet I found in a post called Wolf Dreams and Nightmares.

Werewolves were a fact of life for many centuries in Europe. They were the embodiment of all that was terrifying about the night and they combined human intelligence and malice with the deadly strength of the most dangerous animal predator of the day... Any threat to daily life was “the wolf.”

The threat of werewolves was exaggerated a great deal by those in power, as it gave them the authority to enact punishing laws against the population, specifically those that threatened to upset the balance of power. Patriot Act, anyone? The article puts it fairly succinctly:

[T]he werewolf myths were one of the weapons in the Church’s arsenal to ensure its control of the people.

All in all, it's a solid argument, not meant to discredit the entirety of werewolf mythology, but to help flesh out how certain parts of that mythology came into being. We should always look at the source of the stories.