Nazareno Cruz y el lobo

• This is the most-watched film in Argentine history — roughly 3.4 million admissions, an attendance record no domestic film has touched in fifty years.
• Leonardo Favio was already one of Latin America's best-selling romantic singers when he made this. He directed, co-produced, and co-wrote it with his brother Jorge Zuhair Jury — but he stayed behind the camera, casting Juan José Camero as Nazareno and legendary stage actor Alfredo Alcón as the Devil.
• The story comes from a hugely popular radio play by Juan Carlos Chiappe, itself built on the lobizón legend — the South American werewolf superstition that the seventh consecutive son is born cursed to turn wolf.
• Argentina picked it as the country's official submission to the 48th Academy Awards for Best Foreign Language Film, and it screened at the 9th Moscow International Film Festival in 1975. The Oscar nomination didn't land, but the record books at home more than made up for it.
• Months after its release, the March 1976 military coup hit. Favio — a vocal Peronist — was banned by the dictatorship and forced into exile through Chile, Colombia, and Mexico. He made just one more film (Soñar, soñar, 1976) before a 17-year gap that ended with Gatica in 1993.
• Severin Films rescued it for English-speaking audiences in the All the Haunts Be Ours Volume Two folk-horror box set — which is why a film this massive in Argentina is finally getting whispered about by genre fans up north.

The Devil's ultimatum — abandon love or become a monster — reads as Favio's allegory for Argentina itself circa 1975: a country forced into monstrousness by political violence, where the choice is never really a choice at all.

Nazareno's lycanthropy functions as a metaphor for class rage. He is poor, rural, and powerless; the werewolf is the only form available to him that makes the landowners and townspeople afraid. The curse is less a punishment than a redistribution of fear.

One reading argues the monster is Nazareno's own grief given flesh, not a literal creature — the transformation is emotional first, supernatural second, which is why the film spends more time on the lovers than the wolf.

Nazareno Cruz is the seventh son born to a poor family in rural Argentina — and in local legend, that makes him cursed. The boy grows into a brooding young man who falls for Griselda, a local beauty, but the Devil shows up personally to make him an offer: give up your love and take riches and freedom from the curse instead. Nazareno refuses, the curse hits, and the transformation tears through the countryside with tragedy behind it. Part folklore horror, part doomed romance, all Favio: the werewolf as a man who loved too much to let go.