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HAVE YOU EVER TALKED TO A CORPSE?
An American Werewolf in London exists at the crossroads between boyhood dreams and adult fantasies, between childhood nightmares and male neuroses. It is determinedly schizophrenic, ingenuously plotted, thematically complex, surprisingly honest and its special effects were not just dazzling, they were pioneering. The singular triumph of An American Werewolf in London is that it manages to be both funny and scary at the same time. It is a special alchemy that John Landis achieves, managing to accomplish this without the comedy compromising the horror or the horror overwhelming the comedy. An American Werewolf in London deliberately channels its own cinematic bloodline while carving out a unique niche for itself, paying homage to the great horror movies of Universal Studios with an Eighties attitude and perspective. Movies had come a long way but the same old demons were still inspiring art. Like most horror, you could psychoanalyze it to death. This movie is particularly resonant for a particular kind of American male,. After all, it's their neuroses being enacted on-screen, their fantasies being played out. It makes sense. John Landis was a young man himself when he wrote the script. For boys like me at the time, (I was a teen-ager) it was simple: An American Werewolf in London was scary, gory, funny and it had a sexy nurse. It was a practically perfect movie.
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The plot is classic horror movie stuff: two American college students are attacked by a horrific beast underneath a full moon, one dies, one becomes a werewolf. The survivor falls in love with a beautiful woman, turns into a monster, kills and is, in turn, killed. It happens. Along the way, Landis is clever if not especially subtle. When we first meet the boys, David (David Naughton) and Jack(Griffin Dunne), they're riding in the back of a truck with a bunch of sheep. In a werewolf movie, that's what you might call a bad omen. The boys themselves are engaging, charming, witty. You like them. It helps that they obviously like each other so much. Naughton and Dunne achieve an easy chemistry in the early scenes that shouldn't be underestimated. Without that connection between the two of them the rest of the movie would fall apart. Everything depends on the audience recognizing and enjoying Jack and David.
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Before long, shocking scenes of horror and gore have exploded into the audience's imagination, sensational, brutal, invoking the most violent childhood fantasies. There is undoubtedly a pornographic quality to the violence, it's so horrendous you feel a creepy giddiness when you see it. Some hidden part of you, the part of you that would enjoy watching another human being getting ripped to pieces by an animal, has been exposed. When Jenny Agutter, the Sexy Nurse mentioned above, enters the scene, the subconscious is fully engaged and has been brought to the surface for everybody to see – to either laugh at or to be scared by. This is made obvious the deeper we go into David's mind and watch his psychoses erupt in dreams of blood and monsters and death. Seriously, how is that not funny? You feel grateful that someone pointed it out to you.
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It's visceral stuff, not especially sophisticated but true. The humor feels new, casual, but it's not. It's very, very old. You can see it on display in any actual Grimm's fairytale or story from the Bible, where people get swallowed by whales or turn into pillars of salt (I mean, why salt in particular, all out of oregano? But I blaspheme...) or hack part of their foot off so it'll fit into a glass slipper. Like those stories, Landis' characters suffer real pain and die real deaths...that just doesn't make them unfunny. This is a universal principle. Our own death might feel like a tragedy to us but only be a punchline to somebody watching. It happens to the best. Ever laugh about the way Elvis died? Ever hear a joke about the Kennedy assassination? Landis never tells you what to feel. On the contrary, in a given scene, he might offer several different options. We don't generally expect this kind of expansiveness in a horror film, which for the most are a starkly conservative in their moral structure. This deviancy from the norm plays like the first rebellion against parental authority by a middle class teen-ager, but that doesn't make the anger and the horror less valid – it's still real to the teen-ager. Regardless, or perhaps because of this, the monster, having wreaked havoc in all aspects of his life, must die for his crimes and so he does. Guilt is never pretty.
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