An American Werewolf in London (1981)

An American Werewolf in London (1981) is John Landis’s horror comedy about two American backpackers who are attacked on the Yorkshire moors, and about the one who survives long enough to change. Landis wrote and directed it. Universal Pictures released the film in the United States on August 21, 1981. David Naughton, Jenny Agutter, and Griffin Dunne star. Rick Baker’s transformation effects won the first Academy Award ever given for makeup. The film is a monster movie that refuses to stop being a joke, and a joke that refuses to spare its lead.

At a glance

Release date	August 21, 1981 (United States)
Director	John Landis
Writer	John Landis
Starring	David Naughton, Jenny Agutter, Griffin Dunne, John Woodvine
Runtime	97 minutes
Rating	R
Genre	Horror comedy, werewolf
Budget	About $5.8 million to $10 million (reports vary; commonly cited near $10 million)
Box office	About $30.6 million domestic; about $62 million worldwide

Plot summary

David Kessler and Jack Goodman are American students walking across the moors. They stop at a pub called the Slaughtered Lamb, where the locals go quiet at the word “moors” and at a pentangle chalked on the wall. Pushed back out into the night, the two men are followed. A large animal kills Jack and mauls David. The locals shoot the animal. David wakes weeks later in a London hospital, under the care of Nurse Alex Price and Dr. Hirsch. The police say it was a madman. David remembers a wolf.

Jack appears anyway, dead and conversational, and getting worse each visit. He tells David they were attacked by a werewolf, that David is one now, and that the people David will kill are trapped until the bloodline is cut. Alex takes David home. The nights get worse. Landis plays the romance straight and the haunting as a sick joke between friends. The transformation, when it comes, is not a dissolve behind a curtain.

Spoiler section: the ending

David changes in Alex’s living room and kills through Piccadilly Circus. Cornered in an alley by police, he recognizes Alex and hesitates. She tells him she loves him. The police fire. Jack’s curse ends with David. The last song, as with several others in the film, has “moon” in the title.

Production and behind the scenes

Landis wrote the script in 1969, after working as a production assistant in Yugoslavia, and could not get it financed until Animal House and The Blues Brothers made him bankable. Universal and PolyGram backed it. He insisted on a real transformation, not a lap dissolve, and hired Baker, who built a body suit and a set of pneumatic pieces that stretch Naughton’s face, hands, and spine in view of the camera. The sequence runs several minutes. Baker’s Oscar, the first in the new makeup category, was the industry’s way of admitting the trick had changed.

The moor scenes were shot in Wales, around the Black Mountains, after the Yorkshire locations Landis wanted proved impractical. The Slaughtered Lamb was a set. London hospital and street work used real locations, including Trafalgar Square and an alley near Piccadilly. The porn theater David wakes up in was a working cinema dressed for the scene. Naughton was known in the United States for a soda commercial. Landis cast him because he could play a nice man who does not have a plan. Dunne’s Jack decays across the film in a series of Baker appliances, still telling jokes.

The soundtrack is all moon songs, from Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Bad Moon Rising” to Sam Cooke’s “Blue Moon,” used as a running gag and as a way to avoid a conventional horror score. Elmer Bernstein wrote original music that was mostly set aside. The film made about $30.6 million in the United States and Canada. A loose sequel, An American Werewolf in Paris, followed in 1997 without Landis.

Cast

David Naughton as David Kessler
Jenny Agutter as Nurse Alex Price
Griffin Dunne as Jack Goodman
John Woodvine as Dr. Hirsch
Brian Glover as the chess player in the Slaughtered Lamb
David Schofield as the dart player

Trivia

Baker and Landis had fallen out on Schlock and The Incredible Melting Man. American Werewolf was the reconciliation, and the job that defined Baker’s career.
Every featured song has the word “moon” in the title. Landis treated it as a rule, not a coincidence.
The homeless men David encounters in the Underground were played by extras who were not told the full shape of the attack, to keep the reaction small.
Naughton spent hours in the change suit. The bones-stretching shot used a fake back and arms locked to his real performance.
The 1997 Paris sequel is not a continuation of David’s story. Landis was not involved.
Landis appears for a moment as a man smashed through a shop window during the Piccadilly panic.

Movie Clips

Watch this official clip from An American Werewolf in London (1981), courtesy of Universal Pictures: