An American Werewolf in London (1981)

You can't carry it with you if you want to survive

Watched "An American Werewolf in London." A strange energy looms over the picture, which is no surprise, given its director. What we see on the screen is nothing less than an exorcism ... an attempted banishing of some atavistic cultural chromosomes left over from the Seventies. As if the world was trying to say, here's to the werewolf, the dog days are over.

The entire thing is a goulash of horror and dark comedy and it scores perfect marks on both counts. Look, you probably already know the plot--two American college kids carrying a barely-submerged death wish lope across an Old World moor.

Five minutes before, they'd stopped in a backwoods pub all but named the Ominous Foreshadowing. The dart-throwing cream of British rural yokelry hiss at them: avoid the wasteland where a hideous mystery parades around. But did they listen? Hell no, the two kids prance right into the arms of the rabid night-beast who shoots at them like a guided missile. He reduces one of the Americans, Jack, into sashimi and bites David. The wolf is gunned down like Dillinger, and lo, what remains is someone's English uncle stone-cold dead on the foggy earth.

The surviving American, David, gets carted to a London hospital where a nurse essentially airlifts him into her life, and from then our hero is a ticking time bomb counting down to the next full moon. Which eventually comes, as it must.

What I have just described to you is the entire plot, no elaboration needed. This movie as stripped down as a motorbike built by Shaker mechanics. There's nothing there that doesn't need to be. AAWIL buzzes along through the horrors with all the frenzy of a coked-up dolphin aiming to capsize a rowboat.

What drives AAWIL into the stratosphere is the repeated visits from the ghost of David's thoroughly eviscerated buddy Jack. Jack has rebranded himself as an undead and steadily-decaying apparition: spectral influencer who returns from beyond the veil to warn our protagonist of his responsibilities. We're talking a demonic version of Jiminy Cricket, including the green. The Jack visits are legitimately difficult to watch--in 1981, they must've represented an intriguing frontier in marrying laughter with nausea-inducing body horror.

The American Werewolf should've listened to his dearly departed, because the rest of the movie is a comedy of errors where David starts regularly lunching on Brits while being in utter denial about What Is Happening.

Sure, he has hints: in dreams, David walks down the dark corridors of his unconscious, which include nightmares of Nazi werewolves shooting up his family. The lines are not hard to read between. The Old World is alive and well, personified as a bestial nightmare which would be hard to take seriously in Fresno or Portland or any Trader Joe's but seems right at home in Thatcher's London.

But the most hallucinogenic segment of the program is the transformation scene, which really is the culmination of a hundred years of practical effects in cinema. Nobody would pay money for this now, due to the pernicious strain of CGI. And that's a shame, because the scene where David goes full beastmode is a Lynchian masterpiece. Rick Baker created an excruciating and grotesque masterpiece based in prosthetics, sound design, and makeup.

We have to end with this, because it's crucial. The unsettling unaesthetic that haunts this movie finds its fullest justification in these scenes. I cannot emphasize this enough: the movie is disturbing in a peculiar way.

There are more visceral films--the Saw series, Texas Chainsaw Massacre--but they replace real haunting with gore. AAWIL is different; different in kind, not just in degree. It has the casual cruelty of the early Eighties film. A real steel-wire tension runs the length of it. What's there is deranged, but it has such a forward momentum that as Mr. Toad's Wild Ride careens off into the abyss of the weird, you're enchanted, if that's the word for it. Drawn in closer to the derangement would be better. If Hieronymus Bosch had been born and raised in Los Angeles, he would've made this film. Huh, I'd like to meet his tailor.