So, it's Halloween soon, and I thought I would do a little blog about scary teeth.
I'm going to focus on teeth that have some kind of connection to real life, rather than total monster teeth, because monster teeth could cover any kind of stretch of the imagination, and since I love to ramble on about teeth we could be here all day. I mean, that monster in the Predator movies, I think it's the Yautja, or Hish-qu-Ten or some sort of name like that, has a very interesting kind of dental setup where the jaw moves sideways as well as up and down when it bites and chews things. But that's not really where I want to focus today.
Alien
I'm going to start with the movie Alien, which came out in about 1979. I wasn't old enough to get into the cinema to see it, and that's probably reasonable enough because some of the scenes in it are pretty heavy-duty, combined with the excellent terror in the plotting and direction courtesy of Dan O’Bannon and Ridley Scott.
Apart from the tendency to stick to your face and insert itself in your windpipe, or burst out of your chest, the alien creature in it has an unusual dental feature: when it opens its jaws, another set of jaws comes out from deep in its throat and protrude beyond its mouth and then bites the people that it's trying to attack. That's putting it mildly, the extra jaws are basically armour piercing.
There's a real-life similarity here to the moray eel.
Now, I used to do a lot of scuba diving, and I've dived in the vicinity of moray eels and conger eels, and they're pretty scary at the best of times - probably about the same length as I am, about the same thickness as my leg, and pure muscle. You wouldn't want to mess with them.
But if they do bite prey, a fish or something like that, instead of trying to swallow it like a normal fish does, the moray eel actually has a second set of jaws in its own throat, called pharyngeal jaws.
They come forward, out of the throat like the alien's jaws, grab the fish and then pull it backwards into the throat of the eel. The teeth on these jaws are arranged backwards so that, when they grip the fish that the eel is trying to eat, it makes it even more difficult for the fish to get free.
You can read more about it here (not an active link):
https://ocean.si.edu/ocean-life/fish/surprising-results-upon-reexamining-curious-jaw-moray-eel
I mean, it's pretty gruesome stuff.
You can also go and look this up on YouTube, although you don't actually see pictures of the jaws in action because, when they are in action, they're usually gripped onto a fish which is stuck in the mouth of the eel. This makes it impossible to actually see the jaws, they just know the jaws are there from doing scientific autopsies on dead moray eels.
But here’s the maddest part of the story about the alien’s extra teeth…
The alien in the movie was designed by a guy called H.R. Giger. He was an artist with a reputation for a crazy and disturbing fusion of industrial machinery components and animal anatomy in his creations, generally referred to as “biomechanical”. I’ve been to his museum in Switzerland and have a picture of his in my study, but I can only handle his work in small doses because I value my sanity.
He was exactly the right choice for this movie. When he was designing the creature, he came up with the idea of the pharyngeal jaws…. but scientists didn't know about the movement of the extra jaws in the moray eel at that time. They only discovered that about 30 years later. He worked this one out himself, out of his own imagination, created one of the most terrifying creatures in fiction, completely oblivious to the fact that it did exist in nature.
Werewolves
Next, I want to look at werewolves.
So, a werewolf is a supernatural creature that spends most of the day in human form and, under certain circumstances, turns into a wolf. This is usually when there's a full moon.
Famous werewolves in the movies that I’ve seen would start the Wolf Man, back in the 1940s. . I don't think I've ever actually seen the Wolf Man's original movie buts when I was a kid, they used to have Abbott and Costello movies on the TV and from time to time, Abbott and Costello met various black-and-white horror movie characters like Frankenstein and Dracula, and along the way they met the Wolf Man
For a later generation, the classic werewolf would be the one in An American Werewolf in London, the movie by John Landis. This is another one that I would never have been allowed to see in the cinema at the time and I can understand why. Fairly gruesome stuff, with groundbreaking special effects at the time and a cult classic.
Then, a few years later, we had Teen Wolf with Michael J. Fox, and Wolf with Jack Nicholson. I did actually get to see both of those in the cinema. Then there were Michael Corvin and Lucian from the Underworld movies, and about ten years after that, we had Jacob from the Twilight movies, when everybody could decide whether they were on Team Jacob or Team Edward.
I think the ladies at Swords Orthodontics were very much on the Team Jacob side of things.
And then, probably the most famous werewolves in literature, in terms of books sold and most readers, would be Remus Lupin and Fenrir Greyback from the Harry Potter series.
The idea of a werewolf goes back thousands of years in folklore and mythology.
A couple of the interesting dental aspects of it are that, when a werewolf is in human form, they may have hairy bristles underneath their tongue.
I am told there are still werewolves in Co Mayo, and I worked in Claremorris for about 10 years, so I might have seen a few, but I have never had a patient who displayed this kind of feature, except where they had a skin graft because of treatment for mouth cancer.
In this case what happens is that the diseased tissue underneath the tongue is removed, and if the area left behind is too big to close by simply stitching it together, then you graft (transplant) some skin from elsewhere in the body to the area, so it can be closed over without distorting the tissues. Sometimes, if that skin has hair on it, they will have hair underneath their tongue. But there's a medical explanation for that, not a supernatural one.
Another aspect of a werewolf is that, when they turn into wolf form, their arrangement of teeth changes completely.
Human beings have an arrangement of teeth which usually involves four incisors, two canine teeth, four premolar teeth and six molar teeth in each jaw. That's a total of 32 teeth between both jaws.
Nowadays, most people that I would encounter don't have enough room for 32 teeth, so they either have dental crowding or impacted wisdom teeth or both.
I guess human beings evolved to have space for 32 teeth, but over the last few hundred years, we haven't had room for them, either because the teeth weren't wearing down as fast as they used to or our jaws have got smaller (or more correctly they aren’t developing to their potential optimum size).
Both of these things have been attributed to the change in diet since we started cooking food, using cutlery and eating softer food, with less chewing involved.
On the other hand, if you're a werewolf, you don't cook your food. You have to tear it off your victims in a raw state, and even though you typically have 42 teeth to do this with, you're unlikely to suffer from dental crowding and need the services of an orthodontist or even a werethodontist.
The wolf dentition is typically six incisors in each jaw, two canine teeth in each jaw, eight premolars in each jaw, four molars in the top jaw and six molars in the lower jaw.
Those canine teeth are about two and a half inches long (about half of that is the root – and canines are usually the longest rooted for human teeth too, but they’re only about 40% the length of a wolf canine), and they also have carnassial teeth in the middle of their jaws (the fourth premolar and the first molar) that overlap like scissor blades for tearing up meat.
A bit like human beings, wolves are usually born without any teeth, and their teeth develop as they get older. On the other hand/paw, after about five or six years old, their teeth start to get blunt and shorter.
Vampires
But, of course, the most famous teeth in horror stories are vampire teeth.
Now, vampires have been around in folklore for a long, long time, including in Irish folk tales about the Abhartach, the Dearg Due and the Neamh-Mhairbh.
But a lot of our idea of modern vampires comes from one very famous Irish author: Bram Stoker.
It’s not just Stoker, there was another Irish writer Sheridan LeFanu who wrote vampire books about a generation beforehand.
Vampires in the movies?
Well, probably the first vampire movie that I know about is called Nosferatu. It was made by a guy called F.W. Murnau and starred Max Schreck. It's said that Max Schreck was so ugly that he did not need makeup to look like a vampire, though I've seen pictures of Max Schreck, and that's probably not true.
Then, in the 1930s and 40s, we had Bela Lugosi as the best-known Dracula on screen, and about 20 years later we had Christopher Lee as Dracula. I would say they were the industrial standard for the middle half of the last century, or the middle third of the character’s existence in popular culture.
There must be dozens of Dracula movies, but for my generation, probably the most famous Dracula of the lot was Gary Oldman in the Francis Coppola movie with Winona Ryder and Keanu Reeves. I was fascinated by that movie, the art direction, costumes, effects, storyline, crafty homages to Akira Kurosawa and William Friedkin…it was magnificent.
But in terms of cinematic vampires since then, there were plenty in Interview with the Vampire (directed by Neil Jordan and also starring Stephen Rea for more Irishness), Buffy the Vampire Slayer (don't forget Angel was from Galway), the Underworld movies with Bill Nighy and Kate Beckinsale, and then the Cullen family in Twilight. Just last year, there was the massively successful movie Sinners (and again, the vampire is Irish!).
We tend to associate vampires with pointy teeth, but when Bela Lugosi was the best-known Dracula actor in the 1930s and 40s, he had normal teeth (although he is the main influence for The Count on Sesame Street, who is one of the few Muppets with any teeth — pointy, of course!). Also, the Cullen family do not have pointy teeth, although their teeth are described as razor-sharp and as hard as diamond.
So where did the sharp teeth idea come from?
If you look at Max Schreck's teeth in the Nosferatu movie, he has two long, spiky front teeth.
It's possible this was inspired by a condition called hypodontia, where people have a reduced number of teeth and a tendency to an unusual shape for their teeth, often resulting in pointy, peg-shaped teeth. Though it's unusual for this condition to affect the teeth right in the middle of the upper jaw, it’s usually the second tooth from the midline (we’d call that the lateral incisor) and the condition doesn’t make them longer than usual.
The pointy teeth made their mainstream comeback later, probably with Christopher Lee in the Hammer Horror movies in the 1950s. These are usually exceptionally large canine teeth, like the werewolves.
When Gary Oldman was Dracula, he wore prosthetic canine extensions, and so did Winona Ryder as Mina Murray. But one of the early victims of that Dracula, Lucy Westenra, has a completely different dental setup. She's played by Sadie Frost, who has a classic set of teeth for a human, but as she turns into a vampire, she actually develops extra teeth that grow down in front of her upper front teeth and replace them. So by the time she’s a full-on vampire, she only has four massive teeth at the front of her upper jaw, and of course, two are very, very pointy.
Lestat (both Tom Cruise and Sam Reid depictions) has pointy teeth, and so does Remmick in Sinners.
But what about the original Dracula ?
Count Dracula's teeth are referred to by Bram Stoker as sharp and protruding beyond his lower lip, but not particularly pointy.
So it's possible he had what would be known now as an increased overjet, probably 10 mm, making him an IOTN 5a and eligible for HSE orthodontic treatment if he had been a young teenager in Ireland today.
But would he consent to treatment?