The Howling (1981) - film review

For some time, TV news presenter Karen White has been stalked by a serial killer named Eddie Quist.  She agrees to cooperate with the police to lure her persecutor into a trap but the confrontation with Eddie, at a cheap porn theatre, proves more horrific than she can ever have imagined.  The police arrive just in time and shoot Eddie dead, but Karen is in shock and suffers from amnesia, as though she cannot bear to recall the encounter with Eddie.  Karen consults a leading psychoanalyst, Dr George Waggner, who sends her and her husband Bill away to the countryside to join a small community known as The Colony.  Here, the couple meet several strange individuals who look and live like hippies.  One of the colonists, Marsha Quist, is a nymphomaniac who wastes no time trying to seduce Bill.  He resists but a short time later he is attacked by a large wolf-like creature.  Karen soon discovers that her husband is not the man he once was...

One of a spate of werewolf films released in the early 1980s, The Howling impresses with its state-of-the-art special effects (the man-to-beast transformation sequences are still impressive) but is marred by its juvenile excesses, uneven pacing and shallow characterisation.  Like John Landis’s An American Werewolf in London, released the same year, the film attempts to combine humour and horror, but is less successful and, lacking a sympathetic central character, is a much less appealing film.  The Howling was directed by Joe Dante, a graduate of the Roger Corman school of budget film making who had recently distinguished himself with Piranha (1978).

Whereas Landis’s film is more in the line of a black comedy, more preoccupied with delivering laughs than frights, The Howling attempts to be a more serious horror film and, consequently, has dated less well.  What scared adult audiences in the early 1980s is unlikely to send even the faintest trace of a tremble up the spine of today’s more savvy teenagers.  Many of the horror sequences in The Howling have lost their shock impact and the only one which still chills the blood is the one in which we first see the killer Eddie Quist turn into a werewolf.  (After the third transformation, the production crew obviously got bored and stopped trying to make it look convincing, which somewhat diminishes the film’s credibility in its latter half, and this could explain why it ends up looking like an episode of Scooby Doo.)  

References to old horror films abound in The Howling, with many of the characters named after well-known film directors in the horror genre, excerpts borrowed from classic horror flicks and guest appearances from horror masters John Carradine and Roger Corman.  All this self-referential fun may amuse the ardent fans but it does diminish the film’s integrity and comes close to reducing it to the level of a film school prank.   However, for all its imperfections, The Howling is worth seeing, if only for its effects.  It now enjoys the status of a cult horror film and is highly regarded amongst aficionados of the genre.  Alas, the same cannot be said of the six appalling sequels that it spawned.  These are truly horrific, but not in the way that was intended...

© filmsdefrance.com 2009

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