An American Werewolf in London (1981)

 “Channel 4s 100 Scariest Moments” #16

An American Werewolf in London

(1981)

 

Some decades are kinder to Horror film than others, and the 1980s was kinder than most. But each horror surge has its own character and there was something seemed missing in 80s Horror, with its over-reliance on Slashers and a desperate attempt to make Romero-type Zombies fit into every possible narrative for no other reason than, well, Zombies (today, that latter trend seems to be getting worse, not better).

 

In retrospect, one of the surprises of the ‘80s was the lack of tapping into the legacy of Universal Studios Golden-Age of Monsters (1923 through 1941). With most Horror revivals prior there was a re-embrace of these classic Monsters like the Phantom of the Opera, the Hunchback of Notra Dame, Dracula (or at least Dracula-influenced vampires), the Werewolf, the Mummy, and the Invisible Man, though updated and mutated. With no doubt, they all appeared in the 80s, and if you dig through everything, there are even good films, but it was unlike the Hammer-Gothics (late 50s through the 60s) where the Universal cannon was raised high on a pedestal. When nostalgia was evoked, it was for the SF/Horror of the 50s, and yes, that included the Universals, but from a radically different era, reflecting new Monsters introduced by Director/Producer Jack Arnold (first film of note was “It Came from Outer Space” (1953)), and again, Slashers and Zombies beat even them out.

 

In this, Werewolves are a special case. They are great Monsters, but had always been under-used because their narrative possibilities seemed constricted. Still, the 80s gave us four notable (though not all good) major-studio Werewolf movies, “The Howling” (1980) “The Wolfen” and “An American Werewolf in London” (both 1981) and “The Company of Wolves” (1984). Three of these four were fairly radical-reinventions of the concept, but “An American Werewolf…” was more of a nostalgia piece, a period-appropriate bit of revisionist (not really a remake) of Universal’s “The Wolf Man” (1941), the final film of its Golden-Age. Our hero is descent sort who only wants a comfortable life and the love of beautiful woman who has chosen him, but he becomes a victim of a curse for which he is blameless and forced to cope with the emerging reality of his Monstrousness. All the other’s listed, including the awful, “The Wolfen” were more groundbreaking, but “The American…” was the funniest and most comforting of the four, even though it was the one with the most gore-effects.

 

What distinguishes “An American…” over most other Horror films, both before and after, is the near-perfection of its intertwining of Horror and Comedy. It’s not only that most other Horror-Comedies are bad, but that most of the good ones jettison the Horror in favor of the Comedy to succeed: That same decades “The Monster Squad” (1987, which was nostalgic for Universal’s embarrassing post-Golden-era, 1943 through 1951), was a delight, but the featured a Werewolf was about as scary as “My Little Pony” (a franchise marketed to pre-teen girls starting in 1981). Here, while the humorous sequences are funny, our identification with the hero’s dilemma has potency, and the more gruesome scenes still retain the power to shock.

 

The movie opens with American tourists David (David Naughton) and Jack (Griffin Dunne), backpacking across the English moors. They stumble into a country pub cheekily named “The Slaughtered Lamb” where everyone is ominously silent and unaccountably hostile. After Jack asks an innocent question, they get tossed out, but as they are ejected, they are also warned, it is the night of the full moon so don’t stray off the road.

 

Of course, they stray off the road. They are then attacked by a Werewolf. Jack is killed, David is wounded, and wakes in a London hospital a few days later. During his recuperation three significant things happen: His nurse, Alex (Jenny Agutter), falls in love with him, he’s plagued by terrifying nightmares, and he gets the first of several visits from his dead friend Jack, which David dismisses as just more nightmares, which was a mistake.

 

Jack is awful looking (the dialogue describes him as a "walking meatloaf") because in his ghost-form he’s still bloody and torn from the attack on the moors, and with each successive visit he’s that much more putrid because of his progressive decay. The make-up work is by Rick Baker, and it’s marvelous, but there’s much better still to come. Jack’s progressive rotting is a marvelously morbid sight-gag, as his over-all cheerfulness as he explains that unless David commits suicide, more innocent people will die.

 

Naughton as David is adequate in what maybe his career-best performance. Agutter is so irresistibly beautiful that we ignore the weird abruptness of her character falling for David and taking him home. Dunn, as Jack, gave the film’s best performance; he’s aided by have the majority of the film’s best one-liners, but really the key is how comfortably he inhabits his role as a smart-alecky college kid. Dunne is still appealing even with pounds of gory make-up on, or later, when his performance is reduced to a voice-over because Jack’s decomposition is so advanced that that actor was replaced with a gooey, animatronic, skeleton-puppet.

 

So, David doesn’t kill himself, and on the next full-moon, he turns into a Werewolf. The transformation sequence is the main high-light as a film peppered with a lot of stand-out scenes. It, along with transformation scene in the just-barely-earlier “The Howling” (Baker had some pre-production input on that one, but it was really the work of his protegee Rob Bottin), proved landmarks for the Horror Genre and earned Baker an Oscar (the agreement that Baker’s work was superior to Bottin’s nearly universal, but it’s also equally universally agreed that Baker beat Bottin only by a hair (sorry, could resist)). The days of holding the camera still so that the yak hair can be applied to the actor’s face in stop-motion were instantly gone forever, now we have an actor in the motion of writhing pain, anatomies distorting themselves before our eyes, human becoming something other-else demonstrated with breath-taking explicitness. Baker’s techniques would remain unchallenged until the rise of CGI, which rarely looks as good as this.

 

One measure of Landis’ gifts was that this transformation comes at least 60 minutes into the 97-minute film, but the narrative never seemed to drag before that. Then, a lot of story-telling ground is covered in the short running-time remaining, but it never seems rushed.

 

Landis pulls off several wild-tonal shifts that would have been out-of-the-reach of most Directors. Despite the jokey dialogue, the scenes at the Slaughter Lamb and on the moors were effectively sinister. The long interlude that followed, David in the hospital and moving into Alex flat, featured a warm contrast to the truly nightmarish nightmares and Jack’s visitations. Then the transformation and killing spree are dark stuff indeed, but that is immediately followed by David waking up naked in the zoo which is howlingly funny (again, I couldn’t resist). Next, we move to Trafalgar Square where David, finally believing the curse but still unwilling to kill himself, tries to get himself arrested because he thinks he’d be safer locked up. His desperation is tangible while the dialogue is side-splitting as he harasses a police officer:

 

“Queen Elizabeth’s a man! Prince Charles is a faggot! Winston Churchill was full of shit! Shakespeare was French!”

 

“If you carry on like that sir, I shall have to arrest you!”

 

“That’s what I want you to do, you asshole!”

 

And then there is one more, even funnier visitation by Jack, joined this time by the ravaged corpses of all the people David murdered the night before. They pop-in on David as he hides in a pornographic movie house (showing a movie titled “See You Next Wednesday,” which is, in itself, a long-running gag in Landis movies) and the dead cheerfully offer David recommendations of the best way to off himself.

 

The film’s second, and final, transformation, takes place in the porno theatre, and the bloody mayhem begins again, only bigger this time. And the last scene is a shocker, not because of any surprises (as I stated above, this is a very traditional take on the Werewolf tale, so we know what’s coming) but because it is so dark, flying in the face of the films many, lighter-hearted, sequences.

 

This film was the third of four films that represented the pinnacle of Landis’s career. Like the earlier “Animal House (1978) and “The Blues Brothers” (1980), and then the just-barely-later “Trading Places” (1983), it displayed deft comic skills (Landis made a few other Horror films, but they were inferior, Comedy is clearly where he belongs), irrepressible energy and inventiveness. But this  golden time for Landis would not last, “Trading Places” was filmed after, but released before, the fateful accident on the set of “The Twilight Zone Movie” (also 1983) which led Landis and serval others to be charged with involuntary manslaughter after the deaths of actor Vic Morrow and several children. Though Landis was cleared of criminal culpability in the deaths, he admitted to violations of child-labor laws and hit with heavily civil penalties.

 

Presumably “Trading Places” was a job already locked in solid by contract because it’s remarkable he was able to get any work at all in the wake of such a disaster. He did though, but the budgets on his film’s progressively diminished, they were mostly inferior to the work that came before, plagued by box office indifference and critical hostility even when they were good, and by the 1990s he was simply making fewer of them. He apparently had very little to do with “An American’s…” belated sequel, “An American Werewolf in Paris” (1997), which was broadly hated but I haven’t seen.

 

Trailer:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bRVH3z_erjA