A werewolf showing a lot of skin

Opening the October Halloween special, I’m going to talk about one of the movies that impacted me the most as a child: An American Werewolf in London.

Directed by John Landis, it was released in 1981 and won an Oscar in 1982 for best makeup. No wonder: The first transformation sequence (without CGI) leaves you stunned. Personally, I don’t know what impressed me more: the transformation or that the actor was naked.

The genius

Rick Baker was the creator of the prosthetics and robotic parts, both for the transformations of the protagonist and the slow decay of his zombie friend. The academy was so impressed that they decided to create the “Best Makeup” category and it has been present at the awards ever since.

A little backstory

It all started when John Landis was working in Yugoslavia as a production assistant for the film “Kelly’s Heroes”. During a trip, he and one of his co-workers came across some gypsies, who were performing a ritual during a burial. The goal of the ritual was to prevent the dead from rising from the grave. Landis knew that he would never be able to face something like that, so he came up with an idea for a movie, where a man his age would have to do exactly that.

He wrote the first draft in 1969. With the money he earned from shooting several successful comedies, he managed to find a budget to shoot this movie. Over time, it became a cult movie.

The Sequel

In 1997, An American Werewolf in Paris was released, with different characters and a story that seems to have no connection to the first movie. At the moment of writing this post, I haven’t seen it yet, but I will soon.

The plot

David and Jack are two college students who go on vacation to Europe. They plan to go to Italy, but first they go through England. A trucker takes them near a town called East Proctor, but warns them to stay on the road and not try to cross “the moors”.

Arriving in East Proctor, they try to spend the night at an inn called “The Slaughtered Lamb”, but the locals there are not very friendly to them. The boys decide to leave, despite the fact that the owner of the inn fears for their safety. Before they leave, the villagers warn them about the full moon.

And they go off the road

The boys continue on their journey, but accidentally get lost in the moor. In the darkness, they hear the roar of an animal. The situation gets more and more tense. They try to run away but one of them, David, falls to the ground. Before he tries to get up, a huge wolf attacks his friend Jack, tearing him to death.

The animal then pounces on David, injuring him, though not seriously. The wolf tries to continue its attack, but the villagers shot it just in time . Before losing consciousness, David looks at the wolf, but in its place, he only sees an unknown man, mortally wounded.

Hello Nurse

David wakes up in the hospital, where the doctor informs him that his friend Jack has died. The police believe they were attacked by a homicidal maniac, but David insists it was an animal. No one believes him, at first. During his hospitalization, David begins to have nightmares. In some, he runs naked through the forest and feeds on a deer. In others, a squad of Nazi monsters attacks him for no apparent reason. Also, in others, he turns into a monster.

Later, the ghost of Jack, disfigured by the wolf’s injuries, appears before David. Jack explains that he cannot rest in peace, because he was killed by a werewolf and is now doomed to wander the earth as a wraith. Jack also warns David that now the curse has passed to him and on the next full moon, he will transform and kill more people. According to Jack, the only way for him to rest in peace and break the curse is for David to die. Jack insists several times that David must kill himself. The problem is that David is already too confused by his nightmares and believes that Jack is just another bad dream.

David finds solace in the beautiful nurse Alex Price. When the doctor says he can leave, he moves in with her and things seem to go well, for a while.

And the moon rises

Unfortunately, Alex has to work right on the first night of the full moon. David stays home alone and tries to entertain himself by reading a book. But as soon as the moon rises, David feels a terrible headache. The fever makes him tear off his clothes. He gets completely naked. He looks in horror at his hand as it stretches out. His feet begin to stretch as well. Hair grows all over his body. Tumors sprout from his back as he screams in pain. His mouth and nose stretch. He grows fangs and ears. His eyes change. He can no longer stand on two legs. He has turned into a gigantic and monstrous wolf.

Some citizens of London, who walk the streets late at night, fall victim to David-wolf. The next morning, David wakes up in a zoo, in the wolves’ cage, naked. He doesn’t remember anything from the night before.

The investigation

Meanwhile, the doctor who treated David suspects that his version of the story may be true and heads to East Proctor to investigate. There he discovers that the locals tried to cover up what really happened. He suspects that David has gone mad and thinks he is a werewolf. He tries to reach him, but when he phones Alex’s house no one answers. The doctor asks Alex to let him know as soon as she sees David again.

David manages to steal some clothes and return to the apartment. He feels very well and does not give too much importance to the matter of the zoo. Alex asks him to go with her to see the doctor. David has no problem with that and they take a taxi together.

The taxi driver comments on the murders of the night before. At that moment, David realizes that Jack was right. He tells Alex that he loves her and that’s why he should stay away from her and turn himself in to the police. David tries to make a policeman arrest him but it doesn’t work. He calls home to talk to his parents. Another person answers the phone. It seems from their conversation that David is saying goodbye. He then tries to cut herself on the wrist with a razor, but he doesn’t have the courage.

No boobs, no paradise

Jack appears again and guides David into a porn theater. I remember the first time I saw the movie (on TV), when it came to this scene, my father came home and, because he saw what was in the background (which I wasn’t paying attention to), he changed the channel, making me miss the ending out. When I watched it again, it turned out to be a silly erotic movie with a topless woman and very bad jokes. For one boob he ruined an entire movie for me! What he did not know was that I was much more impressed by all the skin that David showed throughout the film.

Back to the scene, as they watch the movie, Jack (whose face is now completely rotten) introduces David to the specters of all the people he has killed. David feels guilty, but it’s already clear that he doesn’t have the courage to take his own life. It’s too late anyway: the moon has risen again and David turns once more. Before he completely loses consciousness, he tries to tell everyone in the theater to run, but of course, they’re too busy for that.

This time, David-wolf wreaks havoc in Piccadilly Circus, with heads rolling and cars crashing into each other. The police chase him into a dead end. Alex asks the police to wait and approaches David-wolf to try to help him. There, the girl confesses that she loves him too. Will this be enough for David to get his humanity back? You’ll have to watch it to find out.

The locations

The moorland scenes were shot near a mountain called Hay Bluff, which overlooks the Welsh Marches, in the Brecon Beacons National Park. The place is about four miles south of a town called Hay-on-Wye, in Powys. East Proctor is an actual town ten miles west of Hay Bluff called Crickadarn. The exterior of the slaughtered sheep was a private house in Crickadarn redecorated to look like a pub. The Angel of Death statue, in the center of town, was created for the film. The scene inside the slaughtered sheep was shot in a pub called The Black Swan, in Effingham, near Leatherhead, Surrey. Alex’s flat is on Coleherne Road, near Earls Court. The subway scene was shot at Tottenham Court Road station on the London Underground. The final scene was shot in Clink Street, London, although today, it is unrecognizable due to renovations.

Music

All the songs in the movie are about the moon. There is a slow version of Blue Moon at the beginning. When Alex and David make love, Van Morrison’s Moondance plays. In the scene where David is alone in the apartment, Creedence’s Bad Moon Rising plays. Landis tried to get permission to use Cat Stevens’ Moonshadow and Bob Dylan’s Moonshiner, but they both said no.

Here the trailer:

Bibliography

https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Un_hombre_lobo_americano_en_Londres

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