“Beware the moon, lads.”
It’s so hard to make a good werewolf movie. The mythology is so baroque, so rooted in the Old World, that it’s hard to tell how seriously you should take it. What do you keep? What do you ignore? Weirdly enough, one of the best werewolf stories in recent memory was the Futurama episode “The Honking.” For whatever reason, the werewolf hasn’t become as ubiquitous as the vampire, but few monsters have; just look at Tom Cruise’s aborted reboot of The Mummy. An American Werewolf in London is one of the best straightforward werewolf movies. Even though it comes from a comedy director (director John Landis also helmed Animal House and The Blues Brothers), it is played completely straight. At times it is frankly mesmerizing.
Werewolf plays like a feature-length homage to the Hammer horror film of the 1970s, albeit with a distinctly Jewish-American approach. The opening is gorgeous: foreboding shots of the moors of northern England, set to the strains of “Blue Moon,” which will appear a few times throughout the film (every song on the soundtrack has “moon” in the title). It is here that we meet David Kessler (David Naughton) and Jack Goodman (Griffin Dunne), in the midst of a backpacking trip that neither is sure they are enjoying. Jack in particular pines for Rome, and a girl named Debbie Klein who is supposed to meet him there. Naughton and Dunne have fun chemistry, and they play against an Ugly American stereotype that would have been easy for the film to embrace.
David and Jack find themselves in a pub with the cheerful name of The Slaughtered Lamb – you know, as in a sacrifice – where the locals warn them to stay off the moors. Against the bartender’s protests, David and Jack are allowed to leave. They get attacked by a wolf (the unearthly howling sound was made by mixing the cries of several animals together) and Jack is killed. When the locals kill the wolf, the body lying next to David is that of a man, pale and balding.
Werewolf exists in an in-between period. Much of the film takes place during David’s convalescence, and his time spent staying with a pretty nurse named Alex Price (Jenny Agutter). Landis plays with our expectations, and withholds any carnage for a good portion of the film. If this sounds boring, it’s not. David is repeatedly visited by Jack, in various states of decay, who tells him that he’ll turn into a wolf during the next full moon, and the only way to stop it is to kill himself. Seeing the rotting corpse of your best friend, and listening to him tell you to commit suicide, is an incredibly disturbing notion (Dunne’s mother had trouble watching this film and seeing her son in his realistic makeup), and Werewolf doesn’t shy away from that.
When David finally makes the transformation into a werewolf, it’s one of the most riveting sequences in any horror film. The practical effects and makeup work are astounding, and what’s most impressive is that none of what we see – David’s hand elongating, for instance – was created digitally. The great Rick Baker won the very first Oscar for makeup for this movie; he’d go on to win another for 2010’s The Wolfman. Naughton is no slouch here either. He makes the transformation look as painful as it must be for David, and at times the scene is genuinely upsetting. At other times it’s darkly funny. It’s a wonderfully physical performance.
Beyond that, An American Werewolf in London has one of the best uses of a Creedence Clearwater Revival song ever, right up there with “Sinister Purpose” in Green Room or “Looking Out My Back Door” in The Big Lebowski. The buildup to the transformation is set to “Bad Moon Rising,” possibly the group’s best track, and the apocalyptic lyrics (“Hope you have got your things together/hope you are quite prepared to die”) add tension and dread to even mundane shots, like David checking the refrigerator.
Werewolf has more on its mind. This is a film about feeling out of place; more than that, of being excluded. David and Jack are American, yes, but they’re also Jewish. This is an explicitly Jewish film, and when David has a nightmare about werewolves, it’s a surreal scene that has wolves walking on hind legs, dressed in SS uniforms, mowing down his family in imagery uncomfortably reminiscent of kristallnacht. Jack explains that he is in a kind of limbo, which mirrors, in a way, the Jews’ forty-year trek through the desert.
But the film isn’t all heavy-handed moralizing; Landis is able to get in some sly sight gags as well. Seeing London through David’s American eyes, it makes a weird kind of sense that children would be dressed like Victorian schoolboys, the subway would be full of outlandishly dressed punk rockers, and the policemen would be charmingly incompetent.
An American Werewolf in London has lost some of its potency – it isn’t as frightening now as it must have been in 1981. But it has lost none of its ability to entrance. This is a staggeringly well-made film, and Landis approached with the same nuance and craftsmanship he brought to any of his landmark comedies. (John Woodvine’s Dr. Hirsch, for instance, is top-to-bottom a role that Peter Cushing would have played for Hammer.) Werewolf doesn’t get talked about as much as it used to, but Landis’s work here so embraced Michael Jackson that it won him the job of directing the music video for “Thriller.” Landis is a hell of a director – don’t come to Werewolf to be terrified, come to it to be impressed.
10/1: Dawn of the Dead
10/2: Drag Me to Hell
10/3: Pet Sematary
10/4: The Descent
10/5: Repo! The Genetic Opera
10/6: Desierto
10/7: The Blair Witch Project
10/8: Blair Witch
10/9: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
10/10: A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010)
10/11: Prince of Darkness
10/12: 30 Days of Night
10/13: Friday the 13th (2009)
10/14: Slither
10/15: Tremors
10/16: Pandorum
10/17: It Follows
10/18: A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night
10/19: Poltergeist
10/20: Paranormal Activity
10/21: Creepshow
10/22: VHS
10/23: Nosferatu the Vampyre
10/24: An American Werewolf in London
10/25: The Witch
10/26: The Rocky Horror Picture Show
10/27: Cronos
10/28: The Hills Have Eyes
10/29: The Hills Have Eyes (2006)
10/30: Tucker and Dale vs. Evil
10/31: Halloween (2007)
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