An American Werewolf in London: Attack of an Unfunny, Unscary Beast

Timothy Sáenz

Blog Post Assignment – An American Werewolf in London

RIG – Monsters, Spring 2021

Prof. Scott Johnson

Due: 25 March 2021

MFA in Writing Popular Fiction

Sometimes a film impresses as being stranger than the premise with which it is associated, and if it’s purpose is to present a black comedy at which we could all nervously chuckle, it must be sculpted painstakingly by the calloused hands of a master.

With John Landis at the helm, that was not and is not the case for An American Werewolf in London, a 1981 film with a mostly forgettable cast. AAWIL neither makes me laugh nor scares me. It’s just another of many Hollywood efforts cranked out by the Blah Machine. That, at the least, is my personal, admittedly subjective, take on the film. I’m not a fan of black comedies to begin with, much less poorly executed ones.

David (David Naughton) and Jack (Griffin Dunne) decide to take a hike through the Welsh hill country. Like Night of the Living Dead, they can be seen near the opening walking along a rural road under an overcast sky surrounded by bleak and chilly weather. They come to a hamlet named Proctor, or East Proctor, to a pub named The Slaughtered Lamb. A 3-D wolf’s head protrudes from the sign, it’s jaw agape, jagged teeth chewing on tattered pieces of bloodied, white lamb in an expression of unsubtlety, joined a few moments later by a common, a large, 200-year-old, five-pointed star drawn in red on one of the pub’s walls.

Seems the town lives under a curse, the full moon curse of the werewolf. The pub crowd ejects the Yanks for being busybodies, though they know on this full-moon night the boys will likely be killed. “Then murder it is,” says one of the unrepentant cursed. Later, after the boys ignore the caution to stick to the road, the werewolf mauls Jack to death but only gets a few scratches on Dave before the werewolf is taken out by rifle fire. The easy killing begs, grovels for the answer to this question. Why didn’t the townfolk take out the werewolf sooner?

The setting of the killing is an unintended laugher. It’s so far out in the Welsh countryside the boys become lost. It’s overcast, and a downpour descends on the Yanks, yet mysteriously, the beams of the full moon break through and bathe them in light and incite the lethal, lycanthropic transformation. It has been overcast the entire movie until the moment the script calls for carnage.

The bite infects David with the curse that transforms him into the next generation of werewolf, and all the victims, including Jack, become living dead who walk in limbo (on the earth strangely enough) but whom only David can see when they reappear for him in their ever-deteriorating corpses. They will remain the living dead until the curse is removed by the death of the last werewolf, so they prod David to kill himself.

Then there are all the obvious “we-don’t-want-to-know-the-truth” scenes. The doctor, the lead detective, the representative from the U.S. embassy – in short, all the people who did NOT witness the attack on David and Jack – all work diligently to tell David what he actually saw and experienced. Granted, they are predisposed to doubt David’s story because it’s contradicted by the townfolk’s lies, but they did not even consider the possibility some large beast beside the mythical werewolf might have attacked the friends. Men don’t make wide claw wounds like those on David and Jack, and a half-decent medical examiner would have identified the bite marks as not being of human origin. The scene was intended to draw laughter by the use of a mildly clumsy subordinate detective whose instincts about the killing are spot on in contradistinction to the others, but it’s played flatly by the actors, so their reaction could have been a reaction in a serious horror film. It generated frustration rather than fear or humor, like adults who don’t listen to what the teenagers knows just because he’s a teenager.

David’s transformation into the new werewolf was and is stunning enough of an optical and prosthetic performance and won an academy award in the makeup effects category for Rick Baker. However, most of the effects in other scenes exuded cheapness. Shots of the werewolf attacks are confined to mostly frontal head shots of the beast rather than the action of the attacks. Dark of night obscures the werewolf’s leisurely stroll through London after his porn theater meals, especially at the bottom of the screen. We never see the animal’s mobility. Unlike in the original Wolfman movies, the creature in AAWIL walks on all fours, not upright.

I could go on, but I don’t think it’s necessary to belabor the point. Many people hold AAWIL in high regard, and it performed handsomely at the box office, to which I contributed when I first saw it in the theater. The film never felt scary or funny to me, just kind of flat and weird. After I watched it this second time, I read the article on AAWIL in Wikipedia. One point it mentions is that the protagonist, David Kessler, is awakened to his “growing awareness of his ‘otherness’ as a werewolf alongside his own outsider status as a Jewish American in England.” It’s another piece of irony that didn’t work, or I missed something. I had zero sense that the protagonist was Jewish.

If you examine the history of Landis’ films, he enjoyed a successful run of directing from 1977 through 1988, suggesting there was a short span of time in which his understanding of what appealed to moviegoers and the execution of his craft bore fruit. He has not had one critically or financially successful big screen film since 1988 and has not directed since 2010.

If I wanted to learn something about black comedy or overlapping the genres of humor and horror, I would go to another film than AAWIL or to another director or screenwriter than John Landis.