Flashback Corner-- An American Werewolf in London

“I didn’t mean to call you a meatloaf Jack.”

          If you have anywhere from 5 bucks to .99cents lying around you could own your very own DVD copy of the greatest werewolf movie ever made.  “An American Werewolf in London”.  Released in 1981 this terrific blend of horror and comedy written and directed by John Landis remains the werewolf film by which all others are measured.  In my opinion the only films ever to come close to this kind of greatness are Silver Bullet, Ginger Snaps, Dog Soldiers, and The Howling, the last two of which I think do their best at the horror to humor ratio as it did in ‘American Werewolf’.

The story starts as two college students David and Jack who are hiking through the Yorkshire moors in England.  They come across a pub where they are not welcomed and bullied into leaving but not before they get the warning of “Beware the moon, and stick to the road.”  Advice they do not head as they are attacked by a wolf on the moors.  Jack dies and David is admitted to a hospital in London.

From there the film slows down on the werewolf action, but does not stop on scares.  There are incredible creepy dream sequences that still cause me even at the age I am now to not completely focus on the screen, but I can’t stop watching.  There are some comedic moments with visitations by Jack as a rotting corpse, who comes to David to warn him about what he’s become.  This all leads to one of the great moments in cinematic history, the wolf transformation scene.  Creature creator Rick Baker gives us a memorable and painful look at what it would be like to turn into a werewolf.

What’s great about the film is that most of it all still works, the tone, the sound effects, the humor, the language, and the mythology.  I see now that John Landis really took some chances with this film.  Exposition usually kills me in movies when done badly; here he explains the same thing three times, as warnings to David.  The last of which takes place between him, his almost fully decomposed dead friend, a group of talking corpses, during a horrible porno movie in a Piccadilly Circus theater, and then Landis has David acknowledge that fact.  Genius.

Now I’ll admit I have not seen every werewolf movie ever made, I hear some of the foreign werewolf movies are worth watching; though I still doubt any can surpass An American Werewolf in London which still holds up over thirty years later.

 

--Robert L. Castillo