Stuart
Walker’s 1935 horror classic Werewolf of
London was the first major Hollywood film to prominently feature lycanthropes
on the big screen, paving the way for the likes of The Wolf Man with Lon Chaney, Jr. and spawning an entre generation
of horror movies for decades to come. Both
films were produced and distributed by Universal Pictures which would establish
its own brand of monster movies throughout the 1940s. The subgenre of humans transforming into murderous
human/wolf hybrids is an ongoing one but few years in horror films gave such a
bright spotlight to the creature of the night than 1981 which saw the creation
of not one but five werewolf movies: Night
of the Werewolf; Full Moon High; Wolfen; The Howling and the Academy Award winning An American Werewolf in London.
Of
the four the most technically sophisticated ones were The Howling and An American
Werewolf in London with some measure of competition between the two. In an unusual bit of crossover, visual
effects artist Rick Baker who copped an Oscar for his work on London was originally hired to do The Howling before passing the work onto
The Thing maestro Rob Bottin. To this day there’s still fierce debate over
which film is the superior of the two technically and in terms of horror. What’s undeniable though is that out of the
four werewolf movies to grace the multiplexes in 1981, only one of them treaded
into the uncanny valley of horror comedy or a straight-laced horror film that
happens to also be riotously funny. This
is due in large part to the film’s (at the time) iconoclastic writer-director
John Landis who found his footing as a comedy filmmaker but at heart had his
blood in horror movies.
Originating
in 1969 by a then twenty-something Landis while working as a production
assistant on Kelly’s Heroes, the
project sat on the shelf while Landis began work on his first film Schlock which forecasted many of the
jokes and payoffs found later in his National
Lampoon’s Animal House as well as An
American Werewolf in London. Up
until this point, Landis was the last man you would expect to deliver a full-blooded
horror film as his consistent sense of humor in his previous film The Blues Brothers cemented the
filmmaker as a first-rate comedy director.
As time and legacy have shown, however, Landis would have the last laugh
in a movie that was among the first epic horror comedies of the 1980s, paving
the way for such like-minded big budget productions as Ghostbusters, Gremlins and
Little Shop of Horrors.
The
story is an exceedingly simple fish-out-of-water setup: two New York-based American
college kids, Jack (Griffin Dunne) and David (David Naughton), are on a trip
through the moors of Yorkshire, England when their evening is upended by a
deadly werewolf attack, leaving Jack dead and David mortally wounded. Awakening in a hospital, David is
recuperating from his inhuman cuts and scratches but finds himself plagued by
nightmares of running naked through the woods feasting on animal flesh when he
isn’t experiencing hallucinations of his dead friend appearing more and more
decomposed and rotten with each ghostly visit.
Soon David finds his world unraveling after awakening naked in a zoo as
reports of residents in the London area are attacked and mutilated by a strange
creature.
What’s
most memorable about An American Werewolf
in London is the iconic in-camera, in real time transformation of David
into the titular creature of the night.
At the light of a full moon, David screams in agony and strips naked as
every part of his body slowly starts to physically change before his petrified
eyes as instincts beyond his control gradually take over his mind and
body. It’s a still spellbinding
technical achievement which rightfully won the much-deserved Academy Award and
forever changed the ways of makeup effects in horror films. Many who see this for the first time will
notice a similar effect also provided by Rick Baker in John Landis’ music video
for Michael Jackson’s Thriller, right
down to the same sound effects, another testament to the film’s changing power
in the horror landscape.
Then
there’s the recurring ghostly vision of David’s dead friend Jack who first
reappears with his throat torn out and half of his face ripped off. Each recurring visit the character is more
and more decomposed, with his flesh turning gray and peeling from his face
until by the end he’s a skeleton with eyes still intact. It’s a remarkable mixture of comic irony and
abject horror, successfully traversing into comedy-horror territory without
making a misstep. It also helps that it
plays like a horrific sight gag, inviting you to laugh while also startling you
with the level of grisly grue on display.
In
the years since it’s release, An American
Werewolf in London is largely contextualized by the point in the
writer-director’s career it had before an all too infamous tragedy on the set
of the director’s Twilight Zone: The Movie
threatened to scrub the filmmaker from the public eye completely. It’s also known by most as a companion piece
of sorts to his Thriller video by
serving up the same grungy aesthetic with brilliant makeup effects by Rick
Baker and for continuing a long-running gag of characters in Schlock, An American Werewolf in London and Thriller watching a film called See
You Next Wednesday. Though Landis
would dabble in comedy again years later with Coming to America, the director returned to horror once again with
the vampire horror film Innocent Blood along
with his contribution to the Masters of
Horror series.
An American Werewolf in London also managed to spawn a sequel film (without
Landis), An American Werewolf in Paris though
that film by contrast was widely derided and is now all but completely
forgotten while London continues to
terrorize, thrill and entertain horror fans.
The film also managed to spawn a radio play by Alien III: Audible director Dirk Maggs with some of the original
cast members reprising their roles. While
word of a remake penned by John’s son Max Landis floated around for a bit
before allegations of abuse all but kicked the proposed project into
development hell, the announcement of another stab at this story seems
pointless.
Newly
remastered and re-released in a deluxe special edition by Arrow Video with the
full participation and supervision of Landis himself, the original remains a
timeless classic of modern horror that remains a product of its time which
still manages to impress with its stunning visual effects and inspired mixture
of comedy into the proceedings. It also
remains the pinnacle of John Landis’ career in terms of bringing comedy, horror
and technically proficient filmmaking together in a fashion that paved the way
for arguably one of the greatest modern monster movies ever made.
--Andrew Kotwicki