An American Werewolf in London (1981) - film review

David Kessler and Jack Goodman are two American college backpackers who decide to make a tour of Europe.  Where better to begin than the bleak, soggy Yorkshire moors?  As night falls, they enter an inn named The Slaughtered Lamb, hoping for rest and refreshment.  Instead, they receive a deathly cold reception from a sinister collection of locals who, not liking foreign folk, drive them away with a warning not to stray on the moors.  Naturally, David and Jack stray on the moors and pay the price when they are attacked by a wild beast.  Jack is mauled to death but David is saved when the locals arrive and shoot his attacker dead.  When he regains consciousness, David finds himself in a London hospital.  As he recovers from his injuries, he suffers strange and horrific nightmares and is visited by his friend Jack who, now a walking cadaver, tells him that he has become a werewolf.  At the next full moon, David will turn into a murderous flesh-eating lycanthrope.  Unless David commits suicide, he will go on a killing spree and all of his victims will, like Jack, be forced to walk the Earth forever as an undead spirit.  Unsure whether he is imagining things, David ignores his friend’s advice and begins to have a passionate love affair with his nurse, Alex.  He moves into her apartment and he could not be happier, until the night of the next full moon, when David undergoes a change for the worse...

The Wolf Man, the last of Universal Pictures’ quadumvirate of Gothic horror fiends, had difficulty making a comeback after Lon Chaney Jr. donned the famous lupine makeup for the last time in 1948 for his fatal run-in with Bud Abbott and Lou Costello.  Dracula, the Frankenstein monster and the Mummy all enjoyed a new lease of life when Hammer Films revived the Gothic horror genre in the late 1950s, but wolfie was sadly overlooked, making a fleeting return in Hammer’s The Curse of the Werewolf (1961).  And then, in the early eighties, the Wolf Man was back, scarier, hungrier and sexier than ever, proving that there was still life in the old dog yet.  1981 saw werewolf-themed horror in not one but three films, Michael Wadleigh’s Wolfen, Joe Dante’s The Howling and John Landis’s An American Werewolf in London.  Of these, the latter is unquestionably the best, a film that has become a cult classic.

Director John Landis conceived the story and drafted a script when he was 19 but was unable to find anyone interested in making it into a film.  It was not until he himself had become a successful filmmaker, with three notable hits under his belt – The Kentucky Fried Movie (1977), Animal House (1978) and The Blues Brothers (1980) – that he was finally able to make the film, arguably his most inspired, most entertaining work to date.  Pop singer Michael Jackson was so impressed by it that he hired Landis to co-write and direct his famous Thriller video, released in 1983, which includes sound effects from the film.

An American Werewolf in London broke new ground, first by achieving a perfect balance of black comedy and visceral horror, and also with its special effects and makeup.   The full body transformation of the naked David Naughton into the werewolf was, and still is, cinema’s best realisation of the man-to-monster metamorphosis, terrifying to watch and yet absolutely mesmerising.  Indeed so impressive was this effect that a new category was created at the Oscars, the award for Outstanding Achievement in Makeup, of which this film was the first recipient.

Although he himself was an American and had spent little time in Britain prior to this film, Landis had acquired a thorough grasp of English customs and eccentricities, which he uses to devastating comic effect.  This is best illustrated in the country pub scene at the start of the film, which has been copied endlessly since.   Unlike much of his subsequent work, Landis appears remarkably restrained here and much of the film feels like a traditional British horror flick, of the kind that Hammer had begun to make during its declining years in the early 70s.   It is only the quirky dark humour and manic swings to Grand Guignol visceral excess that distinguish this film from the mild chillers that audiences had enjoyed in the previous decade – yet it is these elements, married so perfectly, which make the film so innovative and enjoyable.   

With its unique blend of horror, humour, pathos and eroticism, An American Werewolf in London is one of the finest films of its kind, arguably the best comedy horror film to be made in Britain.  You only have to watch its uninspired downmarket sequel An American Werewolf in Paris (1997) to see immediately how great this film is.  Here is a true, gutsy horror fest, one that will freeze your blood, make your hair stand on end and have you howling with laughter, but only when the moon is full...

© filmsdefrance.com 2009

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