It isn’t a return. Baring-Goulds werewolves are thin metaphors for behaviors that we would associate with serial killers, rapists, cannibals. People that have succumbed to the worst impulses of their nature. Those have always been with us. And most of those destructive impulses are uniquely helpful in the short term for the individuals engaging in them. The werewolf has always been the malignant outsider or hidden threat.

A few decades of comfort does not negate a long lineage of behaviors that are maladaptive for a group but potentially positive for the self-serving individual.

The shortlived Pax Americana is not evidence that we have somehow altered millions of years of human nature.