Exploring the Sequels/Horrorble Romance

# 17 An American Werewolf In London

Howl a really good boy went off the chain, caught up in the nightlife of “lycanthropic lunar activities”…

When horror fans think of werewolf movies it’s easy to focus on the typical genre cliches of full moons and silver bullets, beginning with the OG wolf men, Henry Hull in Werewolf of London and Lon Chaney Jr of The Wolfman, while the more recent British and Canadian takes on the classic monster, Dog Soldiers and Ginger Snaps, chose to alter or do away with such tropes within the genre. Regardless of the rules, werewolf films, much like their vampiric cousins, have always had their paws firmly planted in deeply human metaphor.

Personal addiction, one’s Jewishness and coping as “the other” abroad, new age spiritualism and therapy, environmental and cultural degradation and theft, male mid life crisis, stressors of parenting, military criticism, the struggles of male and female puberty, and even maintaining independence and relevancy as we fight aging into the retirement of our “golden years”, have been explored and cross pollinated through the forests of losing control of who and what we thought we were, and maybe even a bite of fear that such a supernatural fur coat might be more appealing than we care to admit.

Werewolf films are rarely thought of as high pedigree in “body horror” in comparison to the filmography of David Cronenberg, and more recently with the French directors, Coralie Fargeat (The Substance) and Julia Ducournau (Raw, Titane), nor as deeply romantic as say, Dracula or Lestat.

But much like the previously discussed, The Fly, one such movie released and directed by John Landis in 1981, rejuvenated the “wolf man mythos” by lending it a perfect balance of dark humor, dramatic scares with artistic flare, and a worthy budget with special effects that, 45 years later, still sits atop the werewolf food chain, maybe never be topped by another apex predator. And there is no horror fan like the werewolf movie fan who knows what making do with the giant paw you’ve been dealt is like. In a large kennel of shitty-okay-pretty good werewolf films, it’s that rare stray of greatness like this one that keeps us coming back, howling for more (*gratuitous werewolf puns stop here).

An American Werewolf In London (AWIL), along with, The Howling and Wolfen, kicked off a werewolf renaissance similar to vamps throughout most of the 1980’s, ushering in some of the best and most thoughtful output. AWIL and its werewolf protagonist, David, succeed much like Seth Brundle’s tale in that both films force it’s audience to empathically follow each tragic hero’s transformative journeys of decent humans coping with the fall out of galloping full force into places they don’t fully understand, and have no control of. Much like, The Fly, AWIL is one hell of a romance giving the horror unfolding its true power, and main bite that sticks with us (*I lied about the puns, sorry, but this is free and you get what you pay for, sooo).

We meet NY college students, David (David Naughton) and (Griffin Dunne), on break from school, backpacking across the UK. While hitchhiking, the friends end up at a small tavern out of time, in the English countryside called, The Slaughtered Lamb. The situation immediately becomes awkward, and increasingly uneasy when David and Jack are met with underlying hostility by the village locals, noticing a not so random pentagram on the opposite wall of the dart boards. But instead of a shrine to the devil, this is a pagan charm to ward off an unspeakable evil the townsfolk have learned to endure, lurking outside in the untamed hills.

David and Jack are quickly asked to leave once they start to ask too many questions, but are ominously warned that when walking in the Moors to keep to the roads. Soon on foot both young men realize they have trailed off the path, are completely lost, and some kind of howling animal is circling them in the distance of the night.

Once the mysterious mammal moves in closer, they take off sprinting, but Jack is immediately attacked, and mauled as David flees. As Jack calls out screaming for his help, David stops, finds his conscious, and heads back to help his friend. The hulking beast then claws David on his chest knocking him unconscious, but is shot dead before it can claim David’s life, by a band of patrons from, The Slaughtered Lamb. David, in a haze of pain and shock, makes out a dead, naked man lying next to him.

David awakes from a coma days later spending the next few weeks in a London hospital being treated by, Dr. Hitsch (John Woodvine ), and a beautiful young nurse named, Alex (Jenny Agutter). David is told that Jack was killed by a very strong madman, but David contests this, telling everyone they were attacked by a large wolf. During his stay David and Jenny begin a flirtatious relationship spurred by mutual attraction, trauma, and vulnerability.

Both he and Alex fall for each other immediately. Simultaneously David begins to have increasingly bizarre dreams of him killing deer with his bare hands and teeth in the forest, his family being attacked by Nazi wolf men, and Jack appears to him as a ghost in his mauled state, warning him of the curse of the werewolf, that he is now one as well, and that death is the only option. When David is finally discharged with no place to go until he can be sent back to the states, Alex invites him to stay with her. David takes her up on her offer and their new love affair begins.

Later one night, David, half heartedly reading a book as his first full moon since the attacks, looks over him from outside Alex’s apartment while she is working the night shift, leaps up screaming profanely from his chair that’s he’s burning up. Sweating profusely, skin on fire with new found yet unrealized strength he rips his shirt and pants away as if the suddenly weak fabric of the clothing will destroy him. David falls violently to the floor shifting shape to excruciatingly monstrous effect.

We bear witness like a fly on English wallpaper (or that symbol of American innocence, a toy of Mickey Mouse watching over David from atop the television) as coarse, black fur sprouts from David’s body like lupine thread aggressively needling through terrified pores.

Mid transformation he painfully calls out to Jack, apologizing for calling him a “meat loaf”. This dialogue in different hands may have felt solely as a moment of humorous levity in a powerfully upsetting scene, but Naughton treats these lines with a frightened, lonesome seriousness underneath, displaying David’s humanity, and a rare moment of humility. Both emotions leave his body as he asks for forgiveness before becoming something that never will.

David then breaks the fourth wall, pitifully looking at and reaching his hand out to us the audience, and all we can do is stare on in amazement thankful to not be there with him. David’s face stretching into a snouted muzzle, bladed canine teeth puncturing through open jaws, closed and teary brown eyes reopening with the lycanthropic shine of black pupils held by golden yellow irises, while bones and muscle modify by fractures of snaps and splits only to collapse, distend, elongate, and reform from the frame of a lovable college kid out of his depth, to a newly birthed creature of the night with only the instinct to hunt and kill.

A scene of jaw dropping horror so great it got special makeup effects legend, Rick Baker, nominated and then won for, the first ever Oscar’s category for 1982’s Best Special Effects. An iconic tour de force that holds up today as it did in ‘81.

David, in werewolf form, stalks and destroys multiple people including a couple walking to their dinner date, a few homeless guys minding their own business around a fire, and a bravura scene of a man on his way home from work, chased through the subway station from the POV of the werewolf, until switching back to the Englishmen’s eyes after he falls and rides up an escalator on his back, unable to get up and run. As the man reaches the top, completely vulnerable, we can see at the bottom of the escalator, from out of frame, the wolf move slightly in to view, to finish off its prey. A genuinely terrifying sequence contrasted with an equally hilarious scene where David awakes naked in the wolf exhibit cage of the London Zoo, and has to steal a little boy’s balloons and a woman’s fur coat in the middle of London.

David’s fear and frustration of knowing now he’s a werewolf while everyone only shows concern for his mental health, his continued visits from a rotting Jack, Alex and Dr Hirsch trying to help him while also investigating what’s happening, and failing to get himself arrested by a police officer, causes him to run away.

In the final act, David is confronted by a fully skeletal, Jack, and the entirety of his decaying undead victims in a very early 80’s Picadilly Circus porno theater. His best friend and each additional angry ghost emphatically plea with David to kill himself immediately in increasingly awful ways to release them from “limbo”, stop the curse in its tracks, and David from continuing to kill others. David responds by saying he doesn’t think he can commit suicide, but his eyes betray such sentiment, and he knows once again, Jack is right.

A full moon rises once more, and David abruptly begins to change in the back of the theater. A riot breaks out as the werewolf kills multiple patrons breaking out of the theater and stampeding into the streets. Citizens scatter screaming as cars swerve and crash to dodge the monster loose among them, and pure havoc wreaks.

The werewolf, chased into an abandoned alley and trapped with no exit, has no choice but to turn and face the street to silently hold its ground in the city’s shadows where its lunar mother can no longer bathe it in moonlight.

As an armed row of swat team police line up, rifles raised, and ready to fire at the entrance, Alex, breaks through the line and bravely approaches the wolf steadied to break its stasis to attack anyone who gets too close. She looks upon the cornered werewolf and then into it, pleading with David to hear her and let her help him, reminding David that he’s still there, and that she loves him.

As Alex says to him for the last time, “I love you, David”, the camera focuses in on a closeup of the wolf’s face as she cries out to it. Two furled, wild eyes soften but for a second in recognition, as something or someone inside it, understanding that she, and love, is the only way forward to end such uncontrollable horror. Seth Brundle’s last moments within the form of a mutant, hybrid fly could bond with David to that same sentiment and their last human choices made to end their own suffering.

As its eyes harden back to a state of animalistic mania, it lunges lashing out, but is immediately fired down upon by the swat team. As Alex weeps, looking upon her fallen partner, we view the tragic scene from above like the moon itself, as a now human David, lies splayed upon the cobbled stones, naked and covered in bloody wounds by spray of gun fire. The beast within gone and he finally at peace. Like the abruptness of the werewolf transformation itself, Blue Moon by Sam Cook, belts out from the soundtrack, and the scene cuts to black as credits rolls and the curse of twenty years of bad werewolf films is broken.

It has been written on that Landis’ use of David’s lycanthropy abroad was meant as a metaphor for being Jewish and the perception of outsiders very wrongly making his Jewishness and him out as monster and menace, and the tragic consequences of doing so. I think that this specific subtextual reading, if true of John Landis, feels a bit muddled, but that could be my lack of personal perception and understanding of his intentions.

An American Werewolf In London can also be read simply through a lense of David and Jack as Americans, regardless of ethnicity, taking the recklessness of youth and the American spirit of exceptionalism and bravado as badges of honor stitched to their green and red parkas. Mindlessly making jokes and talking about girls they want to sleep with as real danger lurks in the night. Two typical American guys, whistling past English graveyards to their doom.

To trek across landscapes outside of our comfort zones, ignoring geographical and cultural warnings to follow the rules and customs to stay safe in urban or rural settings, is deeply American. In David and Jack’s case, when not heeding the advice of locals and their customs, the consequence literally circles back to bite them, and it takes David a delayed stay and newly acquired romance to understand that bad things can happen to them and others when not fully prepared, even if it’s not their intention.

But no recipe for a redemptive path is complete without the love of someone to inspire change. Like David’s confrontation for his sins with the literal ghosts of his past while English porn plays in the back ground, life’s great adventures of discovery in one’s self are not just traveling to distant lands in search of reveling in the spoils of the unknown before settling into adulthood, but the many relationships we form and eventually lose in our short, finite existence.

In our time here, friendship, humor, sex, love, family, loss, and the pleasure and pain in how we cope with and control ourselves in these experiences are paramount to finding and not losing what makes us most human before an inevitable death. May we all stay to the road of the metaphorical Moors by holding onto this as we move through life to know when to listen, and make needed changes and sacrifices in ourselves to protect and hold onto the ones we love. Because sometimes, lads and ladies, if you stray too far from your path, it may be a monster, perched in a moment of moonless shadow, waiting to embrace you in the darkness instead.

So take my horrorble advice. Clear out your schedule this weekend, throw on your best puffy jacket, light a highly concerning fire hazard level amount of candles, put on some Van Morrison, take down your family pictures to draw an unnerving five pointed star on the wall, and show us your best full moon before watching one of the greatest horror comedies, romances, and hands down best werewolf movie ever made. I won’t dog you about it but you can’t get much more Horrorble than, An American Werewolf In London!

Next up we will tackle THE definitive art house film about an American contracting lycanthropy while visiting Paris in the 90’s. The absolutely not a classic…..and well, straight forwardly titled, An American Werewolf in Paris. Stay tuned to see if this werewolf chain smokes while wearing a beret, and constantly holding a paper sack of baguettes as is the law in France.