Content note: This article contains references to sexual assault — ed.
In 1981, An American Werewolf in London changed the werewolf game forever with one of the most astounding werewolf transformations ever put to film. But it was actually the third werewolf movie released that year, a month after Wolfen and five months after The Howling…changed the werewolf game forever with one of the most astounding werewolf transformations ever put to film. (I have not seen Wolfen yet, so forgive me if it also changed the werewolf game forever with one of the most astounding werewolf transformations ever put to film.) Joe Dante’s classic does have more to offer than that one scene, of course — cheeky humor, creepy atmosphere, a leather-clad Elisabeth Brooks — but Dante knows what he’s got in Rob Bottin’s incredible practical effects work. Even now, that burbling, bone-crunching sequence of Robert Picardo’s Eddie Quist turning from man to wolf boggles the mind.
Yet that sequence lasts nearly three minutes. It makes perfect sense that a horror audience would enjoy marveling at this wolfing out for three whole minutes, but it makes much less sense at first that Dee Wallace’s Karen White would simply stand there instead of making any attempt to escape. While she does eventually, the entire time Quist’s body is morphing — a process we see up close and personal — every cut to Karen is nothing but a few seconds of her staring at the monster with one brief glance to the exit that she doesn’t act upon for many, many seconds. Why doesn’t she move? Why doesn’t she do anything? Wallace projects so much terror in her eyes, and it’s a terror we’ve seen before.
In the first act of the film, Karen finds herself trapped in an adult theater booth with Quist, who forces her to watch violent pornography as he speaks to her from behind, breathing heavily. She can’t see Quist at all, and we can barely see him in the dark either. And then he asks her to turn around. We don’t see what she sees, but we do see the terror in her eyes and an almost paralytic inability to scream. Whatever she sees, it’s so traumatic that she blacks it out. Apart from one salacious close-up of Quist licking his lips — his clearly human lips — that Karen flashes on when kissing her husband, we never do learn exactly what she saw in that room, which somehow makes it even scarier than the beast we’ll see later in the film. But we can assume that she may have gotten a brief glimpse of Quist’s lupine side, which she promptly forgets about.
Meanwhile, John Sayles’s script — a rewrite of Terence H. Winkless’s original adaptation of Gary Brandner’s novel — ensures that basically every other character in the movie except Karen is aware that werewolves exist. As in Piranha (1978) and Alligator (1980), Sayles delights in playing with the levels of information various characters have about the monster. The entire encounter with Quist that sends Karen to the werewolf colony is original to the film; in the book, she’s attacked and raped in her own home. I appreciate that in the film, Karen willingly puts herself in the traumatic situation. She’s a reporter seeking the truth, making it all the more ironic that she’s one of the last people to find it. Her husband, Bill, succumbs to the seductive wiles of Brooks’s Marsha…after she attacks him in herwerewolf form and lycanthropizes him. Karen’s colleagues, Terri and Chris, investigate Quist and his mysteriously disappearing corpse and discover the film’s werewolf lore. Notably, Karen remains completely unaware of all of this, though she does wonder what may have attacked her husband and what that titular howling is. None of these worries trigger any flashbacks, however, so her mind continues to shut out her traumatic experience.
Until she is confronted with the man she thought she’d seen die, a man who now transforms into a giant bipedal wolf in front of her eyes, and she cannot do anything for three whole minutes. It’s all coming back to her now, everything she had tried to forget, as she witnesses a kind of violent pornography all over again. It’s easy as a viewer to forget that Karen’s entire worldview is being shaken right now, since we came in knowing this was a werewolf movie and we’ve watched other characters discover this was a werewolf movie over the last hour or so. And yet poor Karen actually discovered this was a werewolf movie before them, and it fucked her up so hard she blocked it from her memory. So I don’t blame her for not moving when confronted with the truth of this world, and I applaud her for subsequently choosing to tell the world the truth.
