Category: Film, Television & Music

Even if it had only brought us An American Werewolf in London, 1981 would have been a banner year for werewolf fans. After all, that year also saw the release of Larry Cohen’s jokey Full Moon High (featuring a football-playing subplot that was a clear antecedent of Teen Wolf) and Michael Wadleigh’s socially conscious Wolfen (based on the novel by Whitley Streiber). But the one that beat them all to theaters — and stole some of American Werewolf‘s thunder with its groundbreaking transformation effects, courtesy of Rick Baker protégé Rob Bottin — was Joe Dante’s screen adaptation of The Howling by Gary Brandner.

First published in 1977, Brandner’s paperback novel is about a couple that moves from Los Angeles to the quiet mountain town of Drago after the wife, Karyn, is brutally raped in their home. Of course, it isn’t entirely quiet because Karyn starts hearing the titular howling almost immediately after they move in, but it takes a while for anyone, least of all her husband, to tweak that there’s something unnatural going on. Also, it doesn’t help matters that he winds up leaving her alone for long stretches, but Karyn soon strikes up a friendship with an older woman from the neighboring town who has some interesting theories about Drago…

On its way to the screen, The Howling wound up in the hands of Joe Dante, who was just coming off a fruitful apprenticeship with Roger Corman that had seen him cutting countless trailers for New World Pictures and getting two directing credits, most recently on 1978’s Piranha, the best and by far the wittiest of the Jaws knock-offs. One of its screenwriters had been John Sayles, an unusually thoughtful writer when it came to genre fare, so when Dante inherited a script he wasn’t crazy about he gave Sayles a ring and had him rewrite it from the ground up. (Terence H. Winkless still receives a co-writing credit on the film, but precious little of his work remains in the final product.)

The first thing Sayles did was to throw out most of the novel’s plot and characters, changing emotionally damaged rape victim Karyn Beatty to Karen White, a fearless TV news anchor (played by Dee Wallace) who suffers a terrible shock while acting as bait for a notorious serial killer (who naturally turns out to be a werewolf). Sayles also pokes fun at various new-age fads when, at the suggestion of her therapist (Patrick Macnee), Karen and her husband (played by her real-life husband Christopher Stone) retreat to a secluded mountain resort called The Colony so she can recover from her post-traumatic stress. But wouldn’t you know it, she keeps hearing this howling every night and, well, I could go on, but chances are if you’re on this site, you’re already plenty familiar with the plot of The Howling. In fact, you may even know all about the in-jokes Dante and Sayles inserted into the script (like the fact that most of the supporting characters are named after the directors of earlier werewolf films — even the terrible ones). Before I close the book on it, though, I’d like to single out Robert Picardo’s Eddie Quist as the scariest werewolf ever put on film. Sure, his big transformation seems to go on forever while Karen just stands there screaming her lungs out, but he manages to be über-creepy even before he sprouts fangs and fur, and that’s nothing to sneeze at.

Just as Gary Brandner’s novel spawned two sequels, published in 1979 and 1985, Joe Dante’s film was successful enough to inspire its own progeny, which were made to cash in on The Howling name, but failed to recreate its style and intelligence. Of the eight films in the franchise, I’ve only seen the first four — and a couple of them grudgingly — because the law of diminishing returns kicked in almost immediately with 1985’s Howling II: Your Sister Is a Werewolf. Directed by Phillipe Mora, who admitted on the commentary for Howling III that he wasn’t given the time or the money to make the kind of film he wanted to, and co-written by Brandner, who hadn’t liked the liberties the first film had taken with his story, Howling II unfortunately rolled back many of the advances that had been made in the art of the werewolf film, replacing Rob Bottin’s state-of-the-art makeup effects with quick cuts between the same half dozen or so effects shots (which get recycled from scene to scene) in an attempt to paper over its obvious budgetary limitations. And while The Howling and American Werewolf are often remembered for their humorous moments and touches, there was also an underlying seriousness that Howling II severely lacks. Mora may not have gone the total horror/comedy route (as he would with 1987’s Howling III: The Marsupials, which I can at least enjoy on the level of camp), but he was clearly already heading in that direction.

On the story front, Howling II is a disaster, even though it picks up right after the events of the first film at the funeral service for Karen White. There we meet her skeptical brother (Reb Brown) and a reporter friend (Annie McEnroe) looking into her mysterious death. (Because I guess no one is really buying the whole “turned into a werewolf on live television and was felled by a silver bullet” explanation.) Then occult investigator Christopher Lee (who had appeared in Mora’s superhero spoof/musical The Return of Captain Invincible a couple years earlier and clearly looks like he’d rather be anywhere else) shows up and tells Brown that his sister is a werewolf, at which point we’re off to the races!

From there, the film wastes no time in introducing its werewolf characters, who it must be said are a rather scruffy bunch. And when the action shifts to The Dark Country, a.k.a. Transylvania, we meet werewolf queen Stirba, an old crone who is transformed into Sybil Danning during a ludicrous rejuvenation ceremony, and witness her taking part in a hairy three-way because this film has to be remembered for something. It certainly won’t be for the werewolf attacks, which are poorly lit and chaotically edited, or the dialogue, which includes howlers like this exchange between Danning and Lee: “Finally, we meet again.” “For the last time.” Reminds me of the time some months back when I reluctantly sat down and watched Howling II: Your Sister Is a Werewolf. I also swore it would be for the last time.

Next time: I take on a pack of marsupial werewolves and go back to the source to experience the original nightmare. Until then, happy howling!

He’s the hairy-handed gent who ran amuck in Kent
Lately he’s been overheard in Mayfair
Better stay away from him
He’ll rip your lungs out, Jim
I’d like to meet his tailor

Three years before John Landis was able to bring to the screen his tragicomic tale of an American-turned-werewolf who goes on a bloody rampage in Jolly Old England, Warren Zevon released “Werewolves of London,” which quickly became his signature song and his highest-charting single. With its references to Lon Chaney and Lon Chaney, Jr. walking with the Queen and little old ladies getting mutilated by the titular creatures (who nonetheless enjoy drinking piña coladas at Trader Vic’s and prowling the rainy streets of Soho in search of Chinese food), it was a cheeky tune that both respected and poked fun at the hirsute monsters of yore. Of course, Zevon and Landis were far from the first people to conceive of letting a lycanthrope loose in London town. In fact, the very first werewolf film of the sound era was Universal’s Werewolf of London from 1935, which was also the first to feature a two-legged wolf-man, although star Henry Hull balked at wearing the heavy monster makeup that Jack Pierce designed for his character, thus leaving the door open for Lon Chaney, Jr. to adopt the iconic countenance and make it his own six years later. Werewolf of Londondeserves to be more than just a cinematic footnote, though, particularly since its failure to catch on with audiences is what sent Universal back to the drawing board.

In a story that seems like it was dreamed up by people who had never even heard of werewolves before getting the assignment to write about them, Hull plays an English botanist intent on finding a rare flower that only grows in the mountains of Tibet (and which blooms by the light of the moon) when he is attacked by a werewolf, thus sealing his fate. Upon his return home, he works feverishly in his laboratory trying to perfect a moon ray with which he hopes to artificially cause the phosphorescent moon flower in his possession to bloom, neglecting his wife in the process and driving her into the arms of another. Meanwhile, Scotland Yard has some very puzzling murders on their hands when the full moon arrives…

As one might expect considering his reluctance to hide his face behind makeup appliances and yak hair, it takes a while for Hull to actually become the title creature, and this isn’t until after he has been warned by rival botanist Warner Oland (from the University of Carpathia), who tries to tell him that the bloom of the flower with which he’s working is the only thing that can suppress the transformation from man to beast. Oland also throws around terms like “lycanthrophobia” and “werewolfery,” and claims that “the werewolf instinctively seeks to kill the thing it loves best,” which reinforces the notion that the writers were making things up as they went along. (Another example: Hull reads in a book that werewolves change between the hours of 9 and 10 p.m. during the full moon, which barely gives him enough time to throw on his scarf, hat and coat before going out to claim his first victim.) Oh, sure. Curt Siodmak also invented much of The Wolf Man‘s mythology, but at least he had the good sense to stress its basis in folklore.

Just as the success of The Wolf Man led to a couple of immediate knockoffs (namely, PRC’s The Mad Monster and Fox’s The Undying Monster), its sequel Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man inspired Columbia Pictures to stage its own monster match-up in the form of 1944’s The Return of the Vampire, in which Bela Lugosi’s bloodsucker has a subservient werewolf (played by Matt Willis) to do his bidding. As movie werewolves go, Willis is definitely on the hairier end of the spectrum, and he gets a lot of great close-ups early on because the filmmakers deliberately hold off on revealing Lugosi for the first third of the picture — and they evidently wanted to be sure audiences got their monster’s worth.

The film opens in 1918, when Lugosi (playing a character named Armand Tesla — no relation to Nikola, I presume) is dispatched not by a wooden stake through the heart, but rather by a metal spike, and then leaps forward 23 years to London during the Blitz, when it was being bombarded by the Germans on a nightly basis. Lugosi’s grave is disturbed by one of the bombs and, after the spike is removed by a couple of bumbling caretakers, he’s more than primed to make his comeback. And one of his first tasks is to reconquer the will of his werewolf pal, who has been in remission under the care of a psychiatrist, but it doesn’t take much for Willis to become his sharp-fanged and bushy-tailed self again. Lugosi then turns his attention to those who were a party to his staking, but his neglect of his furry Man Friday proves to be his undoing. After all, as the Underworld movies have shown us, werewolves have a way of turning on their vampire masters when they feel unappreciated.

Having cured their go-to werewolf Lawrence Talbot of his lycanthropy in 1945’s House of Dracula, Universal reached back to turn-of-the-century England for the following year’s She-Wolf of London. At first glance, the film seems to be a throwback to Werewolf of London, but in actual fact it most resembles The Undying Monster, what with all the talk of family curses and attacks on the Scottish moors (which are never actually visited, just described). In this case it’s the Allenby Curse which has lone heiress June Lockhart (yes, that June Lockhart) worried that she’s been creeping into the park near her estate, turning into a she-wolf and savaging random strangers. She isn’t, of course, but that doesn’t stop the filmmakers from dragging things out as much as possible. (If you’ve ever wondered how 61 minutes can feel like an eternity, She-Wolf of London is your answer.). As miffed as I am that The Wolf Man: Legacy Collection doesn’t include the entire Lawrence Talbot saga, I guess it’s somewhat appropriate that it has at least one dog in it.

After She-Wolf‘s ignominious entry, the next time a werewolf paid a visit to London (apart from Lon Chaney, Jr.’s phoned-in wolf-out at the beginning of Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein) was in 1972’s Dr. Jekyll and the Wolfman, the sixth film in Spanish horror icon Paul Naschy’s long-running “Hombre Lobo” series. In it, Naschy’s werewolf character Waldemar Daninsky travels to England to find a cure for his lycanthropy and winds up in the care of Dr. Henry Jekyll, who somehow believes he can use his grandfather’s old serum to do the job. This involves turning Daninsky into Mr. Hyde, waiting for the full moon, and then administering the antidote to quell both Hyde and the wolfman at the same time. This goes about as well as you might expect, but there’s plenty of fun to be had, especially in the scene where Hyde parks himself in a modern-day discotheque and changes back into Daninsky when Jekyll’s serum wears off, only to transform into el Hombre Lobo moments later and go on a rampage. Sure, he may have been a foreigner, but like fellow tourist David Kessler and Warren Zevon’s perfectly coiffed specimens, he knew how to paint the town red.

I can’t pinpoint exactly when I saw my first serious werewolf movie (a distinction that allows me to set aside the likes of Teen Wolf and The Monster Squad), but I do know it was sometime in the early ’90s that I was scanning the Horror section at my local Blockbuster and picked out a movie with the intriguing title An American Werewolf in London. While I had never been that big into horror growing up, I was a fan of John Landis’s comedies, having made Animal House, The Blues Brothers, Trading Places, Spies Like Us, Three Amigos! and Amazon Women on the Moon staples of my movie-watching diet during my formative years. Plus, I had heard that there was some comedy in the film, but since it never came on television I had to make the effort to seek it out. And I’m glad I did because what I saw that evening blew my mind and subsequently inspired me to seek out other films of its type. (Alas, the only other werewolf movie my Blockbuster had on its shelves was Joe Dante’s The Howling and their tape was inexplicably missing the entire pre-credit sequence, but that’s a story for another day.)

It’s strange to think that I’ve been watching lycanthropes lope across TV and movie screens for two-thirds of my life (I’ll even cop to having taken in a few episodes of the Teen Wolf Saturday morning cartoon), but what’s stranger still is the fact that I have yet to tire of them — and the tragic plight of American backpacker David Kessler (as embodied by David Naughton) has a lot to do with that. No matter how many times I’m disappointed by substandard makeup effects, by-the-numbers plotting or the genre’s current overreliance on digital creatures and pretty-boy leads, all I have to do is go back to the Scottish moors and pay a visit to the Slaughtered Lamb to be reminded of where I was bitten in the first place. This is why I’ve chosen American Werewolf as the subject of my inaugural column for Werewolf News. Of course, it also helps that Sunday the 21st marks the 30th anniversary of its theatrical release. Timing, as is often said, is everything.

I used to maintain that The Howling and American Werewolf in London — which were released just four months apart in the spring and summer of 1981 — were tied for the title of Best Werewolf Film of All Time, but when I watched them back to back a few years ago I had to concede that the latter definitely has the edge over the former. It’s not just that Rick Baker’s makeup/transformation effects are better — that comes from having a larger budget — but the human story is that much more involving thanks to the central performances, not just by David Naughton, but also Griffin Dunne (as his best friend Jack, who dies and returns as a progressively rotting corpse to warn him about his curse) and Jenny Agutter (as the London nurse who loves him fangs, fur and all). Shoot, I’m not embarrassed to admit that I tear up every time the film draws to a close because I know there’s no happy ending forthcoming for any of them (although presumably Dunne is released from his hellish afterlife right around the time the credits roll).

Another reason for American Werewolf‘s longevity is that John Landis had harbored it as his dream project from his early days in the industry, even going to so far as to recruit Rick Baker back when they were collaborating on 1973’s Schlock (which, incidentally, contains Landis’s first “See You Next Wednesday” reference). In fact, Landis wrote the initial draft of the script in 1969 when he was on location in Yugoslavia working as a production assistant on Kelly’s Heroes. The twin successes of Animal House and The Blues Brothers a decade later gave him the wherewithal to do whatever he wanted, and what he wanted to do was make the first modern comedy/horror hybrid. There had been previous films that alternated between scenes of mirth and fright (the Abbott and Costello Meet _______ series chief among them), but American Werewolf was the first with some real teeth. Sure, there are funny gags aplenty, but this is a film where the laughter really sticks in your throat. And it also has some incredibly well-crafted scenes of suspense (the chase through the London Underground being a particular standout).

The film is also helped immeasurably by an able supporting cast, including John Woodvine as the skeptical London doctor who looks into Naughton’s wild stories, Lila Kaye as the barmaid at the Slaughtered Lamb, Brian Glover as the Northerner intent on keeping their werewolf problem a secret (with Rik Mayall as the chess player he handily beats in the opening scene), and Frank Oz as the tactless embassy official who’s present when Naughton first comes around. There’s even an amusing parallel with The Howling since that film starts with an encounter with a werewolf in a porno store and this film ends with a werewolf passing his last few hours in a porno theater before transforming one final time. And while the pandemonium in Piccadilly Circus that follows may seem like overkill (you’d think The Blues Brothers and its plentiful pileups would have satiated Landis’s car crash fever, but apparently not), it’s only a minor distraction. (On the other claw, the less said about An American Werewolf in Paris — a film I’ve taken to pretending doesn’t exist — the better.) Thirty years on, the Best Werewolf Film of All Time retains its crown.

artwork by Tandye Rowe