Still a sucker for a good title card gif.
Okay well I guess I have to thank Amazon’s streaming service for helping me find this one. I actually studied one scene from this movie in a horror film class two years ago and was always upset that I had never seen it, because it looks crazy and awesome.
An American Werewolf in London begins with two boys, David Kessler and Jack Goodman, backpacking across the Yorkshire moors in the dead of night. They stop in to a pub, where an uninviting group of men persuade them to keep going, which leads to the first attack.
Unfortunately Jack dies. But David survives with just some claw marks! Then, during his long recovery in a London hospital, he is visited by Jack, who tells him that he will become a werewolf and he should kill himself.
He also has some crazy visions.
He quickly falls in love with the nurse, and when he is discharged from the hospital two days before the full moon, he stays at her place.
They totally do it. And then everything goes to hell when the full moon comes the second night.
This has to be one of the craziest, most drawn out transformation sequences I’ve ever seen. If I had to pick a close second though, it would be Freddy Krueger clawing his way out of Jesse in A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge.
But this scene goes so hard!
If there was every a super gritty Animorphs adaptation, it would look like this. Literally everything, from the paws to the snout to the ears to the hair, gets its own sequence of transformation shots. And all practical effects! But poor David does NOT seem to be enjoying it. I mean… the second the light of the moon hits him, he rips off his shirt and jeans in a violent rage.
An American Werewolf in London won the first EVER Academy Award for Best Makeup at the 1982 Oscars. I have to wonder if they made up the category just for this movie.
I wasn't kidding.
An American Werewolf in London won the first EVER Academy Award for Best Makeup at the 1982 Oscars. I have to wonder if they made up the category just for this movie.
So poor undead Jack keeps coming back to remind David that the only way out is death, and David doesn’t listen, and things go VERY wrong.
Watch out for some cheesy 80s horror movie special effects. Even with sound effects, cutting, and tons of blood… these are still the least realistic wolf attacks I’ve ever seen. But it’s okay.
An American Werewolf in London is the perfect blend of comedy and horror, because it really doesn’t try too hard to take itself seriously. And like any horror movie with young people, ideas of gruesome violence, monster transformations, and sexuality are interwoven to give us a horrifying understanding of the sexual repression in 1980s America. I mean… one of the final scenes takes place in a porn theater… so yeah.
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