July has arrived and with it comes another franchise marathon. This time around I've decided to tackle the Howling series, both because I've tended to avoid the werewolf genre somewhat as I've never been all that taken by it (I've only ever seen four werewolf films before this that I've really enjoyed - An American Werewolf in London, Dog Soldiers, Ginger Snaps and Brotherhood of the Wolf - and one of those doesn't even have any actual werewolves in it), and because I didn't really feel ready to tackle the convoluted mess that is the Amityville series just yet. So let's start at the beginning, of course, with the 1981 film The Howling.
News Anchor Karen White is investigating the case of a Los Angeles serial killer known as "Eddie the Mangler". She's been communicating with him for some time and has agreed to meet him while also being part of an undercover police sting to capture him. Things go wrong, however, and she is nearly killed by Eddie in a porn theatre before he is shot dead by cops. After this, Karen and her husband Bill are invited to stay at a coastal community called the Colony so that Karen can recover from her trauma. Things and people are a little odd at the Colony, however; not the least of which is Marsha, another resident there who is said by the others to be a nymphomaniac and who wastes no time in coming on strong to Bill. Meanwhile Karen is hearing strange animal howls in the night, Bill starts to act stranger and stranger as he becomes more involved with the others at the Colony, and as two of Karen's fellow journalists investigate deeper into Eddie the Mangler, they uncover a disturbing supernatural background for him that could mean he is far from dead...
The Howling was released in the same year as that other classic werewolf (and 80s horror!) movie An American Werewolf in London, and it's interesting to compare the two. Aside from the obvious point of both featuring werewolves, both deal with the idea of an outsider coming to terms with the idea of werewolves and possibly being cursed with lycanthropy themselves and both have some spectacular special effects for the transformation from human to werewolf. It's also interesting to note that while An American Werewolf in London ends in a porn theatre, The Howling begins in one - a coincidence, I'm sure, but an interesting one; werewolves being linked to unbound and even deviant sexuality, both in cultural folklore over the centuries and more explicitly in The Howling (Marsha's "nymphomania" and Eddie's obvious interest/fetish in rape). The sexuality on display in The Howling is also considerably darker than in An American Werewolf in London; perhaps it could be seen that the former film is picking up where the latter ended and kicking things up a notch or two - but that would have to have been a conscious decision on the part of director Joe Dante and as I said, I don't think that's the case here.
Joe Dante is a favourite director of mine, having directed two of my favourite horror-comedies - The 'Burbs and Gremlins 2: The New Batch, and while The Howling isn't a horror-comedy here, it does have one or two moments - the recurring motif of certain characters eating from cans of "Wolf" chili being one of them. Another is the character of Walter Paisley, played by long-time Dante collaborator and B-movie stalwart Dick Miller, who is the owner of the occult bookstore that we get a lot of the werewolf exposition from. For the most part, though, the movie is played as straight horror, which is good as I think adding humour, however black, to this film would have run the risk of diluting the horror of it and leaving it open to accusations of being an inferior An American Werewolf in London.
There's a lot of sexual politics in The Howling as well. Eddie the Mangler's deviant and obviously predatory sexuality throughout is clear, but there's also the idea of the wolves being more sexually open and free to do what they want in general. There's also an interesting comparison between Karen, the pretty blonde reporter whose job and trauma seem to have inadvertently emasculated her husband, and Marsha, the dark, mysterious and very sexually aggressive woman who sets about seducing Bill by being everything that Karen is not. Once she seduces him, Bill's whole personality changes; he becomes aggressive towards Karen and starts devouring meat when before he had been a vegetarian - a slightly ham-handed (hah!) metaphor for the freedom that lycanthropy brings, but an effective one nonetheless.
The special effects are a bit of a mixed bag. While some scenes are spectacular, particularly the scene in which we finally see Eddie's full transformation (that demonic lupine grin will haunt me for some time), other scenes are a bit too obviously claymation or badly drawn cell animation. And the final transformation at the end of the movie looks less like a werewolf and more like one of Chewbacca's family from the Star Wars Holiday Special. Robert Picardo, who played Eddie, had to spend up to six-and-a-half hours in the makeup chair for some of those scenes, and at one point complained that his first acting role in California was "[his]face get[ting] melted in a low-budget horror movie.". Personally, I'm more amused to see him in a role where he has hair, as today he's probably more known as the Doctor in Star Trek: Voyager. Interestingly, there's also surprisingly little blood throughout, especially if we go back to comparing it with An American Werewolf in London - the emphasis is more on the creeping, psychological horror of it all.
As a werewolf film and a product of the 80s horror movie boom, The Howling is an important, if sometimes overlooked, film. It takes things in a different direction to certain other werewolf films of the same time - a direction which it can't really be said it managed to maintain throughout its sequels...
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