American Werewolf in London: Moonstruck

From the director of Animal House – A different kind of animal.

When John Landis decided to finally make the horror comedy he wrote ten years earlier, studio bosses allegedly suggested that Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi should play the two leads. Landis refused – this was not going to be a film in the vein of his Blues Brothers (1980), but one that would earn its R rating based on the blood and the scary atmosphere. The movie arrived on the heels of two other pictures about werewolves, The Howling and Wolfen, but this one had the edge.

American twentysomethings David Kessler and Jack Goodman (David Naughton, Griffin Dunne) are backpacking on the Yorkshire moors. When it starts to rain one evening, they seek shelter at a local pub but the customers are so hostile that they decide to go back to the moors. They are warned not to leave the safety of the road but end up in the middle of the moors anyway. They hear a howling and are attacked by a fierce animal of some kind; Jack is killed and David ends up in a hospital. He is nursed back to health, not least thanks to the tender care of Nurse Alex Price (Jenny Agutter), but suffers from bloody nightmares and is startled when Jack visits him as a ghost. David’s friend tells him that they were attacked by a werewolf and that he is now undead; unless David takes his own life, Jack won’t find peace and David will turn into a werewolf and start killing people. David foolishly refuses to believe in him…

The film wouldn’t be this good without Landis’s sense of humor. The songs that are peppered throughout the flick all have the word “moon” in their titles (“Blue Moon” is the perfect choice for the opening scene), and most characters behave somewhat bizarrely. That’s particularly true in the case of the wary Yorkshire pub customers, but it is also amusing to watch how uptight Londoners react to David’s werewolf attacks. Naughton and Dunne have great rapport as the college students whose friendship takes a very unusual turn. David’s conversations with Jack’s rapidly decomposing corpse are hilariously laidback, especially the one in the porno theater where David is confronted with his freshly killed victims who are rightfully annoyed with him. Still, no one should make the mistake of thinking that this is merely a comedy. People are killed in gruesome ways here; Jack is virtually slaughtered on the moors and the final scenes in London where the police are hunting David have several car crashes with very bloody consequences. That along with the eerie tension is what shapes the backbone of the horror. There’s no need for blood in the sequence where the werewolf goes after a man in the London Underground; that’s scarier than anything else in the film. Rick Baker’s brilliant makeup design is so good it made the Academy of the Motion Picture Arts and Sciences invent a new category; David’s now-classic transformation into a werewolf is still damn impressive.

Fusing comedy and horror is very difficult. It’s a pity that Landis makes movies so infrequently these days because he’s one of those directors who know how to do it. He successfully repeated the formula in 1992 with Innocent Blood. It’s about time he came up with another funny, gory idea.

The YouTube clip shows a trailer.

An American Werewolf in London 1981-U.S. 97 min. Color. Produced by George Folsey, Jr. Written and directed by John Landis. Music: Elmer Bernstein. Makeup: Rick Baker. Cast: David Naughton (David Kessler), Jenny Agutter (Alex Price), Griffin Dunne (Jack Goodman), John Woodvine, Brian Glover… Frank Oz, Rik Mayall.

Trivia: Followed by An American Werewolf in Paris (1997).

Oscar: Best Makeup (first winner of that award).