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An American Werewolf in London
A John Landis film
Plot (Spoiler Alert)Two American tourists, David Kessler and Jack Goodman, travel across the North Yorkshire moors. On a night of the full moon, Jack gets killed by a werewolf and David survives. He wakes up in a hospital in London. Jack shows up as a spirit telling David that they were attacked by a werewolf and that he is the last remaining one. Jack must walk the Earth in limbo unless David kills himself and has the werewolf curse lifted. David believes he is just seeing things and ignores the facts. One of the nurses, Alex Price, finds David attractive and has him stay with her when he gets out of the hospital. The next full moon night David transforms into a werewolf and kills six people. News goes around that six people have been found dead half eaten and David finally realizes that what Jack was trying to warn him about was true. David tries to find a way to kill himself but before he can the full moon rises and he transforms again. His werewolf side goes out in public and causes havoc around the streets of London. Police shoot him down and David is no more. 
Blaine: The story came to John Landis when he was eighteen years old and was in Yugoslavia as a production assistant for the 1970 war comedy, “Kelly’s Heroes”. He said while he was there he witnessed a funeral with gypsies who were performing a ritual on a man being buried so that he would not rise from the grave. John couldn’t understand what was going on, but he was told that the man had committed some kind of crime. John thought that making sure a person stays dead was a good idea for a movie because what if this guy did claw his way up to the surface. John wanted a monster movie and he was thinking what monster it should be and he hit upon werewolves. He did research and found out that the people who were executed for being werewolves were in France and Wales. He thought London was a good place for a Gothic horror to take place. So Landis started writing the script and wrote the first draft at age eighteen and he was happy with it. When he got people to read it they couldn’t understand if it was supposed to funny or scary. A few years later, John Landis made his first feature, “Schlock”, a low-budget movie about a gorilla. Landis told his makeup artist, Rick Baker, about “An American Werewolf in London” and the script was already finished and Rick thought it was exciting. Rick Baker has been obsessed with doing monster makeup all his life and what Landis wanted was to show a werewolf transformation without shooting different positions, which is called lap dissolves. Rick didn’t know how to do it at the time, but it sounded really cool to him and he had time to figure it out. John Landis wanted “American Werewolf” to be his next movie after “Schlock”, but the problem was no one wanted to make it, so it took some time to get the approval. John Landis became successful after making hit comedies like “The Kentucky Fried Movie”, “Animal House” and “The Blues Brothers”. The producer of all of those movies was George Folsey. Landis asked him if he was interested in producing “An American Werewolf in London” with him and Folsey thought it would be fun and a great opportunity to take on something new. After “Blue Brothers”, PolyGram productions read Landis’s screenplay for “American Werewolf” and they liked it and understood that they could combine horror and comedy together. So they gave Landis and Folsey a ten million dollar budget to make the film and after waiting a decade, John Landis was finally given a green light. As years passed, Rick Baker thought that “American Werewolf” wasn’t going to happen and had given up on it because no one would accept it, but when John Landis finally got an approval to make “An American Werewolf in London”, Rick Baker had taken another job for another werewolf movie, “The Howling”, behind John’s back. John was pissed off and yelled at Rick over the phone. Rick decided to leave “The Howling” and have his protege take charge and left behind some designs for the werewolf transformation for that film. John Landis gave Rick six months to take molds of the two lead actors and test out the prosthetics before principal photography began. John Landis wasn’t quiet looking for movie stars to play the two lead characters, they just had to be American. Landis and George Folsey had to go through 300 people who were auditioning and it was not easy to get the guys they were looking for. The characters are sort of based on how John Landis and his friend were at ages fifteen and sixteen. They found David Naughton after seeing him sing and dance in a Dr. Pepper commercial. Landis liked seeing David on screen and thought of him as a likable guy and that’s what got David the job. Once David was hired, he had to meet with Rick Baker to have these molds done. And Rick asked what character he is playing and David was hired to play David Kessler. John Landis met the other star of the movie, Griffin Dunne, through casting and he gave Griffin all the info on the movie and how thrilling and exciting it was going to be. He sent David the script and he had read it right so he could call John Landis and let him know if he was interested or not. Griffin called John and he thought he was going to have to audition over the phone, but all he had to do was say “yes" or “no" and say if he was claustrophobic. And so Griffin Dunne was in. John Landis said he knew Jenny Agutter for years. Jenny had lived in L.A. for a while and Landis and his wife, Deborah, were the first two people she met there. Jenny was already known for successful movies in the 1970s like “Walkabout”, “Logan’s Run” and "Equus”. John Landis had sent Jenny the screenplay for “American Werewolf” after he got the money to make it and explained that there was a role in there that he felt suited her. So she read the script and she thought it was a really ambitious piece and thought there were well written roles. And she said that as an actor you're anxious to see what those roles are like. But she couldn’t understand how horror movies worked, but she just trusted John Landis. John Woodvine was working with a theatre company, Royal Shakespeare Company, and they were doing “Nicholas Nickleby” which they took to New York and it became successful in America. John Landis saw the show and was really taken with it, so much so that he wanted to cast everyone in “Nicholas Nickleby” for the movie. In the endand he not only got John Woodvine, but David Schofield as well. David couldn’t believe he got the gig and he thought “Werewolf” was going to be a fantastic project and it became a very exciting experience for him. He was nervous because it was one of his first movies, but at the same time very excited. Windsor Great Park is the location they shot the scene where David and Jack first encounter the werewolf and Jack dies and David gets injured and they said it was the coldest place to shoot. They had to make it rain for that scene and the cold air froze the pipes and so they had to wrap them with hot water bottles and electric blankets that melt ice. David Naughton and Griffin Dunne were very brave to shoot with the water on them in that cold air without freezing to death. And as soon as John Landis yelled “cut” they would have people rush them some blankets and Landis said there was huge chunks of ice frozen in their hair. It was freaky for Griffin Dunne seeing himself in the mirror as Rick Baker was putting the makeup effects for the scene when he shows up as a ghost with his left side slashed and you can see the vein because it was gruesome for him. People were avoiding him on set because it was hard to look at him with that makeup on. And it was also upsetting for him that the was his big movie break and no one would want to look at him. It took a while for John Landis and producer George Folsey Jr. to calm Griffin down and convince him that they knew what they were doing and he got use to wearing those makeup effects. For the tests Rick Baker did on Griffin, he would have blood and dirt all over him and John had told Rick that he wanted him to start off clean when he shows up at the hospital even though he had wounds and the next time he visits, he is rotting away. It was exciting for Rick and his makeup team to add more makeup on Griffin, but not for Griffin and as soon as they were done, he wanted to take it off after six or seven hours in the makeup chair because it wasn’t easy for him to wear. 
John had told Rick Baker about the scene in the script where David dreams of Nazi demons and Rick had no idea what a Nazi demon was. John told him to use his imagination, make them look scary and Rick just started making designs. He made some of them look werewolf like. There is one that’s dead where it’s missing it’s skin and all that’s left is veins. They weren’t makeup effects, they were more like Halloween masks. The sound of the werewolf in the film is a combination of a wolf and an elephant. John Landis said it’s a combination of seven or eight different animal howls cut up and remixed. John Landis didn’t want the werewolf transformation to be cutaways like Lon Chaney Jr.’s in “The Wolfman" and he wanted full light on it, he even made storyboards as an example of what he wanted. Rick and his team had done it in a workshop in London and they weren’t completely done with the parts for the werewolf transformation. It took one week to shoot that scene, they would only do two shots a day and it would take four or five hours to put the makeup on David Naughton. John wanted the transformation to be painful for the character because that's what he thinks the body is going to go through. David had no problem even though he had a hard part and he had no complains about the time it took to put all the different makeup effects on him. The music score was done by Elmer Bernstein and was recorded in a church in London which I find odd to be recording a score in a church for a movie that has nudity, blood and taking the Lords name in vain as you are being ripped to pieces. Elmer wanted to write the score for the werewolf transformation, but John Landis wanted to use Sam Cooke’s “Blue Moon”. The song “Blue Moon” is used three times in the movie and the third time is in the main title and it was never intended to be used there. It was originally supposed to be “Moonshadow" by Cat Stevens, but Cat did’t allow it because he didn’t want them to use his music that way. Bob Dylan had problems as well for religious reasons when they wanted his version of “Blue Moon”. When John Landis wrote the script in 1969, the Eros Cinema was a cartoon theater and when Landis returned in 1981 to scout, the Eros Cinema had become a porno theater. So that was the only thing that changed in the script and he decided that they made their own little porno and it only took two days to shoot. The crew was in an awkward position because they went from shooting a werewolf movie to a porno. In the porno theater, the character, Jack, the left side has been completely torn off and you can see the skull and that was a remote controlled puppet in that scene. It was bad news for Griffin Dunne because his screen time had been replaced with a puppet. “An American Werewolf in London” had two test screenings before it’s release. Chicago was first and the place was full of people and they were loving the movie until Jack got murdered and John Landis said that 45% of the people got up and left the theater. The next theater was Syosset, Long Island and it was a younger audience and before the movie started, Jon Landis made an introduction and informed the audience that the film was full of nudity and violence and they were cheering because of that and they ended up loving it. A lot people were clapping when it came to the werewolf transformation. People were thinking that John Landis had created something completely different from other werewolf movies because it was both a horror and a comedy and the werewolf transformation was unlike anything they ever saw. Of course two other werewolf movies that came out that same year, “Wolfen” and “The Howling” before “An American Werewolf” and the producer said it kind of took the edge off them a bit. No one really appreciated it at the time and it didn’t get great reviews. According to his producer, George Folsey Jr. said that John Landis never got good reviews on any of his movies. Critics only thought of John Landis for making comedies and they thought he shouldn’t make horror movies, but what do they know? They don’t appreciate talent like everyone else. Rick Baker said that John knows horror films and he’s a funny guy. Today “An American Werewolf in London” is known as one of the best movies ever made and it is what inspired Michael Jackson to make “Thriller” the music video and he had hired John Landis to direct it and Rick Baker to do the make up. And it also became the first movie to win an Academy Award for makeup because they didn’t have an award for that before then. My rating on “An American Werewolf in London” is five out of five stars. Music |