An American Werewolf in London (1981)
Director: John Landis
Country: United Kingdom / United States
Length: 97 minutes
Type: Horror, Comedy
I saw this first when I was a teen, on late night TV in the 90s when it scared the hell outta me. There were a few good jump scares but I remember the one with the curtains causing me to leap about a foot in the air. It was burned on my brain, so inevitably these shocks didn't work a second time. About 25-years later there were other elements to enjoy.
John Landis observes the mundane details of early 80s Britain so well and the differences between the north and south of England. The drizzle, bad service, fog, queuing, graffiti covered phone boxes, country pubs, hospital food, grotty Soho porno theatres, strikes, punk kids and the line where American David says
"Lot of weather we’ve been having lately" to a stranger is so comically English. I’d forgotten Cockney acting legend
Alan Ford has a wee monologue, accompanied by many other top drawer character actors. I loved the film-within-a-film cheesy porno
"See You Next Wednesday", one of the lines had me in stitches. Another thing I hadn’t appreciated when I was younger was the significance of the main characters being Jewish. The nightmare sequence originally seemed totally bizarre and random to me but now I could see that a gang of hideous monsters in Nazi uniforms bursting into David’s safe and cosy home and machine gunning his family was a very specific type of nightmare. The Nazis were also obsessed with Wolf and Werewolf imagery, so that’s a more subconscious type of horror at finding yourself suddenly one of them.
Griffin Dunne is an absolute treat as David’s morbidly sarcastic sidekick Jack. I think he gives the best line delivery in the whole film when he describes being undead as
"It’s boring". Jacks is trying to make light of his predicament but Dunne delivers it in a chilling way that says "I’m staring into the void, at an eternity alone in purgatory, for the love of God please kill me". I must seek out some more Dunne movies. A lot is made of the contrasting comedy/horror tone but it mostly works just fine but I'm still not sure about the incongruously upbeat ending song choice.
Mark of the Beast: The Legacy of the Universal Werewolf (2019)
As this feature-length doc was on the
'An American Werewolf in London' blu-ray, at first I was wondered when it'd get round to talking about the 1981 movie, then I twigged it was actually an overview of the whole Werewolf movie genre. Oops, silly me. I didn't realise that a lot of the stuff we consider ancient Werewolf "lore" originated, or was cemented by
Curt Siodmak's script for the 1941
Lon Chaney Jr. film. The doc only seemed to have access to trailers, so occasionally the interviewees talk about a scene and it isn't shown as illustration which felt odd. The super hi-res scans of vintage posters (god those old Universal monster posters are beautiful!), magazine articles and trade papers are really wonderful. I've never seen the poorly received 2010
Benicio del Toro film but the assembled Werewolf-film experts talk about it with a lot of respect and
Rick Baker was involved with the FX, so this doc has made me want to check that out.
Beware the Moon: Remembering 'An American Werewolf in London' (2009)
I made a mistake by watching this definitive feature-length doc about the making of
'An American Werewolf in London' after seeing most of the other bonus material on the Arrow blu-ray because I'd heard several of the same anecdotes 4 or 5 times by then. It's the kind of making-of that says everything that needs to be said and has interviews with just about everybody. The section where
Rick Baker takes us step-by-step through the separate elements that made up the transformation sequence is excellent.