An American Werewolf in London (1981)
Few films have managed to straddle two genres as confidently as An American Werewolf in London. Released in the summer of 1981, John Landis's horror comedy arrived at a curious crossroads in mainstream cinema, when the slasher boom kicked off by Halloween and Friday the 13th was still very much in the air, and audiences were broadly willing to let genre films do something a little unexpected. Landis, to his considerable credit, took that permission and ran with it, setting a story rooted in old British folklore (the Yorkshire Moors as a place of dread, suspicious locals, warnings ignored) against a thoroughly American sensibility of wisecracks and wide-eyed bewilderment. It is a combination that, on paper, ought to fall apart. That it does not is a testament to how precisely calibrated the whole thing is. The film connects, too, to a longer tradition of horror pictures that use the English countryside as a place of creeping menace rather than picture-postcard charm, a tradition that had served Hammer well for decades before Landis arrived and put two young Americans right in the middle of it.
Landis came to the project on the back of Animal House (1978) and The Blues Brothers (1980), two broad American comedies that had made him a commercially reliable name without quite preparing anyone for what he would do here. An American Werewolf in London was produced through Lyncanthrope Films and PolyGram Pictures, with a modest budget that forced some genuine ingenuity, particularly in how the production used London locations and practical effects work in place of lavish sets. The script was Landis's own, reportedly gestating since the early 1970s when he observed a burial ritual while working as a production assistant in Yugoslavia and found himself wondering what it would mean to be genuinely haunted by the dead. The result is a film that feels personal in a way his earlier work did not. David Naughton, best known at the time from an upbeat Dr Pepper advertising campaign (a piece of casting that adds a quietly funny layer of irony to his predicament here), carries the lead with an accessible, slightly hapless charm. Griffin Dunne, as his doomed travelling companion Jack, provides the film with much of its mordant wit. Jenny Agutter, already well established as a serious British screen presence, and the reliable John Woodvine as a hospital doctor lend the London sequences a grounded quality that keeps the more outlandish elements honest. For fans of horror more broadly, the film shares a certain DNA with pictures like It Follows, in which a slow-building, inescapable curse does as much psychological work as anything explicitly shown on screen, and even with something as tonally different as Monkey Shines, another genre piece from roughly the same era that wrestles with a body turning against its owner.
The film's other great claim on history is Rick Baker's special effects and makeup work, which won the first ever Academy Award for Best Makeup after the category was created partly in response to what Baker achieved here. It is the kind of craft that still prompts conversation more than four decades on, and it sits at the heart of why the film endures beyond mere nostalgia.
I first caught John Landis’s 1981 classic An American Werewolf in London as a teenager, and my recollection of it had distilled over the years into two vague, glowing memories: it was brilliant, and the effects were brilliant.
Rewatching it two decades later, I braced myself for the inevitable disappointment that usually accompanies such nostalgic reunions. To my immense relief, my memory served me perfectly. It remains, quite possibly, the absolute pinnacle of the werewolf genre, holding up with a rare, enduring vitality.
The opening act is a cracking piece of atmospheric filmmaking. Two naive American backpackers, David (Griffin Dunne) and Jack, wander onto the misty, isolated moors of Yorkshire and are savagely attacked. The mood is pitch-perfect, blending genuine dread with a dry, darkly comic edge that Landis handles with effortless flair. However, once David wakes up in a London hospital, the film hits a rather prolonged middle gear. Because lycanthropy operates on a strict lunar schedule, we are forced to wait alongside David for the next full moon. This stretches into a rather languid 50% of the runtime, largely occupied by his burgeoning, somewhat stilted romance with a kindly nurse, played by Jenny Agutter.
I won’t pretend this mid-film drag is a dealbreaker. Landis smartly peppers this waiting period with macabre, decaying visions of David’s deceased friend, offering both brilliant practical makeup and tantalising sneak peeks of the horror to come. But honestly, it’s the final quarter of the picture where the film truly ignites. Once the moon rises and David finally succumbs to the curse, the movie unleashes absolute, unbridled chaos upon an unsuspecting London. The pacing suddenly snaps into high gear, and you find yourself desperately craving more of this glorious, destructive mayhem.
It is here that the legendary special effects and makeup truly earn their historic reputation. The infamous transformation sequence remains a staggering piece of body horror, a visceral, bone-crunching spectacle that still stands as the undisputed standard-bearer for the subgenre today. Landis orchestrated a finale that is as terrifying as it is thrilling, marrying top-tier practical wizardry with genuine, pulse-pounding action. It is a remarkably impressive, deeply satisfying piece of cinema.
An American Werewolf in London occupies a genuinely rare position in horror history: a film that is openly funny without ever losing its nerve, and openly frightening without ever becoming po-faced about it. Landis understood that comedy and horror are closer relatives than most filmmakers dare admit, and the best of this picture lives in that uncomfortable overlap. The central pacing issue is real, and it has kept this from being an unqualified classic in some quarters, but the sequences that work, and there are several, are as good as the genre has produced. Audiences who enjoy the slow-burn, high-payoff structure here might find similar pleasures in Hungry Wives, or in the more recent comic-horror energy of Bodies Bodies Bodies. For a film whose tagline is just three words long, it has a lot to say, and most of it still lands. Beware the moon, indeed.
Rating: ★★★★ | Year: 1981 | Watched: 2026-08-01
Trailer
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