My father would be horrified if he knew I was making it in the
pictures and that I'm not billed as Creighton Chaney.
I am most proud of the name Lon Chaney. I am not proud of Lon Chaney Jr., because they had to starve me to make me take this name.
Nothing is more natural to me than horror.
All the best of the monsters played for sympathy. That goes for my father, [Lon Chaney], myself and all the others. They all won the audience's sympathy. The Wolf Man didn't want to do all those bad things. He was forced into them.
The trouble with most of the monster pictures today is that they go after horror for horror's sake. There's no motivation for how monsters behave. There's too much of that science-fiction baloney.
[on his makeup for The Wolf Man (1941)] What gets me is after work when I'm all hot and itchy and tired . . . [I've still] got to sit in that chair for 45 minutes while [makeup artist Jack P. Pierce] just about kills me, ripping off all the stuff he put on me in the morning.