An American Werewolf in London (movie review)

• Title: An American Werewolf in London
• Year: 1981
• Rating: R
• Director: John Landis
• Cast: David Naughton, Jenny Agutter, Griffin Dunne, John Woodvine

An American student backpacking through England is attacked and infected by a werewolf. In love with his nurse and haunted by his dead friend, he must come to terms with what he has become — and accept that he must die.

Rewind . . .

. . . I must have seen nearly every special effects shot from this film before I ever actually saw it properly as a movie. At the time, Rick Baker’s creature makeup and effects were revolutionary, and the scenes that stick most in my mind after all these years are those that involve either painful lycanthropic transformations, or decaying corpse spirits. It’s no surprise to me that the effects that wowed audiences so much almost thirty years ago — and hence made their way into so many highlight reels and TV specials about movie FX in the 80s — should stick in the memory so, and stand up fairly well so many years later. Not for nothing did Baker win the first ever Special Makeup Effects Academy Award — the category was invented for this movie.

But I was six when An American Werewolf in London came out, and there was no way in hell I was going to be allowed to see it. But I was aware of it, I had clocked it on my radar along with a host of other werewolf movies released at the same time (The Howling, Wolfen). Of course, as the 80s moved majestically on, the time eventually came when it popped up on late night cable and a twelve or thirteen year old version of myself finally got to see all that verboten blood (quite a lot of that) and sex (not really so much of that).

I’ve never been a fan of certain kinds of horror — slasher films to be precise — but I like monsters, and I like the psychological aspects of people becoming monsters even more. Horror has always been for me more about despair than fear. An American Werewolf in London satisfies that itch and goes a step further, taking a surprising black comedy angle. That may be standard practice now, but it was something fairly unheard of in the day. From the creepy yet somewhat nonsensical start on the moors of Northern England (where exactly are they going?), to the scenes in London itself (why did the wounded David Kessler end up there when he was hiking in Northern England?) the movie maintains a somewhat detached and nonchalant attitude toward what is going on, and never staunches the vein of humor that underlies even the grisliest scenes.

This is demonstrated perfectly in what is probably the movie’s best scene — or, at least my favorite — in which David gets suicide tips in an adult theater from the mutilated ghosts of his victims. Funny and unsettling at the same time, but containing also an undercurrent of tragedy — it’s the perfect setup for the quick, chaotic climax of Piccadilly Circus.

Fast Forward . . .

. . . and I now realize that this film was directed by the same guy that did the Blues Brothers and Animal House and, logically enough, Michael Jackson’s Thriller video. The first two may explain this film’s somewhat unusual comedic approach, and the last is foreshadowed by American Werewolf’s visual style. Looking at Landis’ list of other films, there isn’t a whole lot I’d consider all that enduring (Three Amigos anyone?), but American Werewolf has, in my opinion, certainly achieved cult classic status.

That’s not to say it isn’t without its flaws. But lapses in logic can be excused by the taughtness of the plot, and, if the limitations of the effects are sometimes highlighted rather than concealed by the camera work, the effects themselves are so ground-breaking it’s easy to forgive Landis’ eagerness to show them off. Any pretensions, too, that this film somehow satirizes the US-British cultural divide aren’t supported by the few gags to that effect sprinkled in the film (the TV with only a couple of channels, the punks on the tube, the precise elocution of one of David’s victims). No, despite mention of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, this film isn’t about cultural satire, and it could have taken place almost anywhere.

But the opening scene of the movie does resonate with a certain suggestion that our protagonists are about to confront the menace of the Old World, and in that respect the need to place the situation in Europe isn’t about sowing the seeds for the films comedic elements, but its horrific ones. In a lovely bit of symbolism, David and Jack are literally trucked in — sharing the back of a farmer’s open-topped lorry with a bunch of sheep. Our two New World innocents — though horny and smart-assed, they are essentially a pair of kids — then find themselves at a pub called the Slaughtered Lamb. It’s obvious without being heavy-handed, and all the more appropriate because this is a black comedy at heart.

Many of today’s horror-comedies tend to be broad farces and spoofs — furnishing the cheapest laughs in our age of cynicism and supposed sophistication. But American Werewolf is different, it’s a true hybrid, and the comedy is often less about yucks than it is about getting at the humanity of the situation. And it’s the comedy that makes the horror all the sharper — a person can be doing something silly one moment and be dead the next, and it’s entirely possible to laugh with death right around the corner. When a horribly mutilated and decaying ghost gives an appreciative wink over an attractive woman it’s funny, sick, and sad all at the same time — but mostly sad. And during David’s first, excruciating, transformation Landis’s cutting to the oblivious smiles of the Disney characters that bear mute witness to David’s suffering only enhance the horror of the scene — perhaps, in truth, these cuts may be the only thing that grounds the scene psychologically for an audience that, in that moment, would have more than likely been marveling over the special effects and wondering less about the human effects. It’s the instances of human vulnerability that comedy allows that really let the horror dig in and take hold.

And the films final two scenes suggest an almost nihilistic bleakness — from the unsettling humor of the pack of angry ghosts demanding David kill himself we sweep to an abrupt, and final, transformation into the beast. More people die, and the appearance of the werewolf in the city creates an explosion of vehicular carnage — in fact it seems as if panicked motorists kill more people in this scene than does the beast. Backed into a corner by rifle-armed police, David’s lover tries to reason with him and gets nowhere — David in fact attacks her. The final shot is a bullet-riddled human corpse, and a sharp cut to the end credits overplayed by “Blue Moon.”

It’s a bit like a slap, and this time there are no laughs to relieve the tension. It’s as if Landis is saying to an audience that had expected some happy resolution that being likable, innocent, and in love only saves your life in the movies — and then only sometimes.

• Nostalgia Rating: Moderate
• Rewatch Potential: Once in a Blue Moon
• Wilhelm Scream?: No
• Unexpected Cameo: Strike a light! If it isn’t me old china Bricktop driving that smash.
• Verdict: A movie with an oddball charm all its own, where the comedic elements don’t hit you over the head, and the horror elements don’t kill the humor.

What I Learned: That spirits in limbo walk the Earth until their unclean killers are dead, and that British nurses are easy.

Top Marks: Griffin Dunne as the bloody shade of Jack Goodman. Dunne had to know this was the best role in the film, a smart-assed sidekick who dies in the first ten minutes only to return as a restless — and progressively decomposing — spirit. Tempering his plea for David’s suicide with a little college humor and an appreciation for the ladies that belies his undead condition, Jack manages to steal every scene he’s in — even when he’s a skeletal animatronic puppet.

If (When) It’s Remade: It will be split into two movies; An American Werewolf, a bloody satire of corporate culture starring Christian Bale as a junior executive leading a double life, and In London, a teen sex comedy starring a bunch of attractive twenty-somethings you’ve never heard of that gets a lot of mileage in pointing out that the British use different words for things — “I asked for chips and they gave me fries! It’s like they don’t even speak English.”

Final Thoughts: “Please, Nurse Price, something for the pain!” I’d happily get mauled if that’s all it took to get into Jenny Agutter’s, um, flat. Agutter, though still only a year away from Renewal and roughly the same age as her co-star, seems every inch the sexy older woman in this film. I honestly never picked up that Alex and David were supposed to be around the same age until rewatching American Werewolf, as Naughton seems like such a wide-eyed kid (mostly deliberately), whereas Agutter is all woman. When David calls her a “girl” I have to cringe and attribute it to his confused state. I can only hope that when I’m eventually gunned-down by the law, I’ll have someone like Jenny there to scream over my bloody corpse.

This review is part of an ongoing series entitled Movies of a Misspent Youth, that looks at all the great fantasy, science fiction, and horror films available to the generation of kids growing up in the boom years of the 1980s. For more in this series, please visit my Film & TV page.