It’s that time of the year again. There’s a slight chill to the late summer evenings. Leaves are starting to bring out their fall colors. Each day is just a bit shorter than the last. We can all feel what these changes signify. No, not going back to school, but that it’s the season for monster movies! Between now and Halloween I’ll be highlighting ten of the best toothy, sharp-clawed, and mutated aberrations to shred the silver screen. Some are old classics, others are newcomers, but all are awesome.
“Beware the moon, lads.” Let’s talk about David from An American Werewolf in London.
When I started this series, I promised myself that I would focus on unique monsters and try to stay away from monster archetypes as much as possible. No vampires. No mummies. No zombies. Ok, trolls sort of break the rule, but Trollhunter was just too charming to leave out. But, as much as I wanted to pick the Grabbers or Brundlefly for the fifth entry in this series, a particular werewolf stuck its fangs into my brain and refused to let go.
The classic cinema werewolf is a cookie-cutter creature. Joe Schmo survives an attack by some… thing and the next full moon they look like they’ve jumped into a vat of rogaine and can’t deny the urge to chase cars. John Landis’ classic dark comedy can take all that lore as a given when backpacking students David Kessler (David Naughton) and Jack Goodman (Griffin Dunne) get torn up by one of the mythical canids when they wander onto the moors one moonlit night. (Except for the silver bullet. “Be serious, would you?”) And Rick Baker’s Oscar-winning makeup effects are still unmatched in showing us the painful process in how a man becomes a beast.
But David’s the real monster, and a different sort than I’ve featured on this list up until now. My favorite monsters aren’t evil. They’re animals. You can’t blame trolls for wanting to bash Christians or silicates from wanting to drink bones. That’s just their nature. While certainly vicious, wolfed-out David is the same. A werewolf has no morality to judge. But David, as his day-to-day self, does. That’s what makes him – David Kessler the human – more tragically monstrous than the wolf inside.
You can’t blame David at first. His best friend was ripped to shreds in front of him before getting badly scratched up himself, finding himself alone in a foreign city. It’s easy to pass off the nightmares as the stress and trauma trying to work themselves out. (I had terrible nightmares when I was worried about descending to an excavation in an Ice Age death trap, but, so far as I know, those weren’t a sign I was about to become a monster.) And even when his buddy Jack, looking every bit like the dog’s breakfast, shows up to warn David of what he will become, the natural response is to of course write the omen off as hallucination.
So the first run of six slaughters are a mistake. A horrible mistake, to be sure, but we can give David a mulligan on his first night as a werewolf. The second night, however, is a different story. True, maybe some college student sometime drank themselves into such a state that waking up into a wolf cage wouldn’t be totally unexpected, but for David it’s just the first line of quickly-mounting evidence that his canid self went on a killing spree the night before. He makes a token effort to get locked up by the cops and contemplates suicide, but he mostly ends up running from the truth for so long that a second rampage is inevitable. Even when his victims show up to confront him, all pleading him to let them rest and offering any number of suggestions on how to sacrifice himself, David sits paralyzed in the back of a porn theater until the wolf takes him again.
That’s why David’s the monster. The werewolf is terrible, but it has no choice. David does and, through a belief that a werewolf has to be killed by someone they love, leaves a blood-spattered heap of destruction in his wake. The monster inside was not so bad as the person who left the cage open.
Brian Switek is the author of My Beloved Brontosaurus (out in paperback from Scientific American/Farrar, Straus and Giroux) and Written in Stone. He also writes the National Geographic blog Laelaps.
This is a terrific film, with just the right blend of humor and horror, not to mention all the moon songs. It also cemented my thing for Jenny Agutter that started with Logan’s Run. And the effects were groundbreaking. That transformation scene is astounding.
But something my father said as we walked out of the theater has stuck with me all these years. At the end, the wolf comes bursting out of a crowded theater into another crowd of panicked people, slashing right and left with his teeth. How many people did he infect? How many werewolves are going to be rampaging in London in four weeks time? That, too, adds to David being a worse monster than the wolf.
I never thought of all the new werewolves. Now I want a real sequel.
I loved the dream sequences.
I think the curse is the monster. David didn’t ask to be bitten, though it was very dumb to go walking through spook country at night. Otherwise, he’s as much, or almost as much, a victim as everyone else.
Is it wrong to see it all as an AIDS metaphor? He got this incurable disease from some other inconsiderate bustard, which sucks, but that is how so many people get HIV. He then did not take precautions when he realized he had a horrible, yet tragic, condition and ended up not just killing people but potentially infecting large amounts of Londoners too (although it might be said that werewolf-ism, even at full moon, might be a general improvement on the disposition of most Londoners in my experience) all of which he could have prevented if he’d managed his new lifelong condition better. Maybe it is just me, I’ve attended a lot of funerals of people who were infected by HIV in the 80s -and some of the people doing the infecting definitely knew 100% they were infectious- and it just seems so terribly familiar. Metaphor or applicability?
@@.-@: Probably not. The film came out summer of 1981 and with all the effects and post-production, they probably filmed in 1980. Add time for the whole pitching and scripting process and you’re getting into a time where AIDS wasn’t even identified as a thing, just a rumor about a “gay flu”. Even the release date seems too early for an AIDS metaphor.
#4
In retrospect, it could apply to most any infectious disease. Take the recent ebola scare. An infected man, who probably knew he had something, ignored quarantine and traveled from Africa to the US, spreading the illness to a few others and causing a minor panic. Selfish and stupid? Yes. Monstrous? I think that’s a bit much.
People in denial about their illnesses is an old story, told again and again long before AIDS.
While David is certainly culpable, the way it all plays out is one of the best things about the movie: instead of doing the heroic thing, David just sinks further into his denial, even when it’s absurd to any rational person with any sense of ethics. He lets himself just sit in the damn theatre till he changes. It’s terrible, but perfectly understandable.
#1
I’ll have to watch it again now (it’s been over a decade since I have,) but I remember the werewolf running around nipping at passerby, but never connecting. I think the only ones who did actually make physical contact with the wolf also ended up dead. I could be remembering it wrong, of course, but my impression has always been that the curse came to an end when the bullets magically flew around Jenny Agutter and killed Dave The Wolf.
This was my first real exposure to werewolf movies, so I never thought much of the hairy-faced variety of old. “Real” werewolves became four-legged beasts, to my pre-teen way of thinking.
What about jenny agutter character ? David slept with her , wouldn’t she also be infected with his curse ? Landis actually wrote a script for American werewolf 2 that would have focused on this , unfortunately the movie producers chose to make the god awful American werewolf in paris instead .
@6: Yeah, if we’re using the word ‘monstrous’ in regards to werewolves, I’d save it for someone more like Fenrir Greyback from Harry Potter, or Wolfgang from The Fifth Elephant – characters who are knowingly evil, not some poor bastard who got dealt a shitty hand and isn’t able to face the truth of it.
@7: Having a bunch of dead people telling him he should kill himself, and casually offering up suggestions on how to do so probably didn’t help.