The Howling (1981)

Director Joe Dante and screenwriter John Sayles had collaborated on 1978’s Jaws cash-in Piranha and produced an unexpected trash classic. For a follow-up, Dante split off from New World Studios, where he had gained his start on Hollywood Boulevard (1976), and made The Howling, a loose adaptation of Gary Bradner’s novel, and he got Sayles to completely rewrite Terence H. Winkless’s script. The result proved a hit that set Dante on the path to making Gremlins for Steven Spielberg and enabled Sayles’ own move into directing. Released the same year as John Landis’ An American Werewolf in London, The Howling marked along with that film a startling revival of the werewolf movie through sophisticated new make-up effects, utilised in a set-piece sequence of transformation. Like Landis’ film, The Howling combines puckish comedy with a dash of lampooning and straight-no-chaser genre business in a weird brew that invites knowing audiences to chuckle before blindsiding with raw-edged horror. But it also takes a stranger, more original path into this particular neck of the spooky woods. 

TV news anchor Karen White (Dee Wallace) is first glimpsed trying to keep a rendezvous with a vicious sex criminal who’s been stalking women in Los Angeles’ red light region, with two cops (Kenneth Tobey and Steve Nevil) trying to watch her back and a studio full of anxious colleagues keeping track of her via a radio link. Karen encounters her quarry, Eddie Quist (Robert Picardo), in a porn store peepshow, and something so terrifying takes place before the cops barge in and gun down Eddie that she blocks out the memory, and freezes on camera when she tries to return to work, much to the consternation of her boss, Fred Francis (Kevin McCarthy). Karen takes the advice of prominent psychiatrist Dr George Waggner (Patrick Macnee), who was consulting on the case, and heads with her husband Bill Neill (Christopher Stone, Wallace’s real-life husband at the time) up to a communal retreat he runs on the northern California coastline. 

Waggner’s retreat is packed full of oddballs, including feral-looking brother and sister T.C. (Don McLeod) and Marsha (Elisabeth Brooks) and world-weary old-timer Erle Kenton (John Carradine). Marsha’s uninhibited come-ons to Bill soon begin appeal as he gets frustrated with Karen’s post-traumatic freeze-outs. Cattle near the retreat are found dead in the night, torn up by some terrible beast, and the local sheriff Sam Newfield (Slim Pickens) warns everyone to stay in their cabins at night. Meanwhile the news program’s director Chris Halloran (Dennis Dugan) and his girlfriend, researcher Terry Fisher (Belinda Balaski), look deeper into the case, chasing down hints of occult motives and locating Eddie’s flat, which proves to be full of beautifully rendered, perplexing sketches of animalistic people and coastal landscapes. Chris and Terry visits the morgue and find, along with the perplexed attendant (Sayles), that Eddie’s body has vanished. When Karen appeals for help, Terry comes to the retreat and realises that Eddie’s sketches were done there. 

The most novel and bracingly eccentric aspects of The Howling are also responsible for its rather scattershot totality. Dante and Sayles readily betray affection for the genre they’re riffing on, as just about every supporting character is named after a director who had made a werewolf movie sometime in their career. Dante slips in many of his trademark flourishes, like glimpses of thematically appropriate movies and cartoons on TV, cameos by the likes of Roger Corman, and the compulsory employment of Dick Miller. But the filmmakers also don't seem entirely comfortable working within genre margins. Sayles’ script certainly has more on its mind than movie buff in-jokes. In a fashion that anticipates some of his later non-genre films as director like City of Hope (1991) and Lone Star (1996), Sayles uses Bradner’s novel as a template to take a panoramic jibe at 1981 California with its sleazy and violent boles, New Age kooks, and mass media legionaries, stopping along the way for sideways swipes at journalistic ethics, feminist frustrations, and countercultural hangovers. Released at the height of the slasher movie’s reign, The Howling decides to purvey an old-school horror trope like the werewolf by walking it through realistic precepts.

That’s why the opening scenes reflect a grimy, urban sensibility and sense of real-life monstrosity close to Taxi Driver (1976) and The Driller Killer (1979) – “I don’t know where they come from but they’ve got to where they’re going,” Tobey’s veteran cop notes gruffly as he surveys the mean streets from his cruiser – as Karen ventures into Eddie’s hunting ground. Karen, in turn, anticipating media philippics like Nightcrawler (2014), is taking a chance in the name of netting a great story to prove herself more than a decoration for the news desk, entering into a foreboding pas-de-deux of sick obsession as the shadowy pervert has insisted on her because he loves watching her on the news. Dante and Sayles correlate their own on-the-make enthusiasm with Karen’s careerist escapade, flirting with the seamy side of life to get their own, more specific ambitions off the ground. Eddie’s calling card, a smiley face sticker beaming out with blank cheer in the midst of decadent surroundings, might well have inspired the same device in Watchmen. The core of Bradner’s novel is still present in the depictions of Karen and Bill’s crumbling marriage being subjected to a truly cruel and gruelling metaphorical amplification.

Dante and Sayles might have taken some licence from the beloved cult TV show The Night Stalker in situating the drama in a gritty, reportorial framework and setting surreal menaces loose. The film sharply adjusts tone and pace as the scene moves to Waggner’s ranch, making time for gently ribbing the encounter group flimflam unfolding under the avuncular gaze of Macnee’s dubious, celebrity-anointed expert. Bewildering moments like Erle freaking out and trying to hurl himself onto a bonfire to end it all must be accepted as just another episode in the consciousness-expanding, neurosis-expelling project. Miller turns up in a droll cameo playing an occult bookstore owner who purveys his wares with disdain for the types who lap it up – which could also be a little projection from Dante and Sayles. All this ties in with the eventual uncovering of lycanthropy with a dry if facetiously delivered punk moral, as Dante and Sayles expound certainty the wild, violent, obscene side of human nature will claw its way out through the blissed-out mask of post-liberation dictums just as surely as its uptight, buttoned-down precursors. 

Dante would take up this theme again in more overtly scurrilous form in Gremlins and in a muted key in the childhood mythologies of Explorers (1986) and Matinee (1993), as dreams bring the call of other worlds, eruptive forces break loose, and the familiar crumbles easily into chaos. Just as Bill is glad to throw off the strictures of LA health nuts, lifestyle fads, and career women to smoke a cigarette, eat meat, and bone the wild girl, Waggner is trying to keep a lid on his fellow werewolves’ eruptive natures, only for the glory of cutting loose and gnawing on bones and guts to be too great a pleasure to be restrained. Soon Bill is transforming and making the beast with two backs with Marcia in the woods. "Screw all this ‘channel your energies’ crap!” Erle declares. Dante meantime has fun generating old-fashioned atmosphere with mist boiling through the forest trees, but inverts expectation as he stages a lengthy daylight suspense sequence, as Terry explores the retreat and begins to put together the pieces of the mystery as she’s stalked by monstrous forces. Terry ventures into Marcia and T.C.’s cabin and realises Eddie was another member of the family, as clawed beasts besiege her. 

Rick Baker dropped out of the production to work on An American Werewolf in London, so Rob Bottin stepped in to create the film’s groundbreaking transformation effects, displayed in minimalist terms when Terry hacks off the arm of one of the beasts and sees it turn into a human limb. Another werewolf confronts Terry in Waggner’s office, ripping her throat out with a perverse display of a lover’s delicacy. Shortly after, Dante stages the film’s best-known sequence, as Eddie confronts Karen and displays his shape-shifting gifts, clawing the cop bullet out of his brow and transforming into lupine form, before Karen gives him a snout full of acid. The transformation is still impressive although from a contemporary perspective it’s show-stopping in both senses of the term, playing out as a vivid but long-winded spectacle. Picardo gives a sublimely disquieting performance as a pervert who’s been granted the perfect tools to indulge his malign desires. 

Elsewhere Dante makes use of ropier special effects betraying the low budget, including a glimpse of stop-motion werewolves and even the use of cartoon animation as he depicts Bill and Marsha transforming in silhouette as they rut beside the fire, before the camera rises up through matte painting trees to a glowing moon; here Dante’s vision happily ignores sophistication in favour of illustrative verve. The Howling often feels less like a well-found horror comedy than two or possibly three films unfolding simultaneously, and there’s some weirdly draggy pacing at points despite the short running time. The idea of a commune filled with scarcely reformed lycanthropes trying urgently to behave themselves is utter irresistible, but the revelation and explanation all comes out in a rush, when it might have been used to whip the satirical element to a frenzy. 

The Howling still manages to be hugely entertaining despite all such hesitations, because no matter how uncertainly organised, it’s still filled to the brim with fun stuff, alternating jokes, sharply staged horror thrills, and bits of character business. Great vignettes range from McCarthy’s Fisher gruffly pointing at his own picture on a screen following Karen’s meltdown and declaring, “Now that’s a professional!” to a bilious commuter telling the impatient Chris at a gas pump that “Not all of us have got enough money for a Mazda, some of us have to work for a living.” Chris comes to the rescue with silver bullets bought from the bookstore owner, too late to help Terry but plucking Karen from the midst of the monsters. Dante cuts loose with style in the climactic movements Karen confronts the collective in the retreat’s barn with canted camera angles and variegated lighting effects, before disquieting visions of alien ferocity as the werewolves try desperately to escape through holes gnawed in the barn’s walls as fire consumes it. The film’s wry and bloodthirsty facets finally conjoin in moments like Waggner groaning, “Thank god!” as Chris shoots him and releases him from his duplicitous existence, and the genuinely bizarre and moving finale. 

After unwittingly shooting Bill in werewolf form as he bites her from the backseat of Chris’s car, Karen stages her own apocalyptic coup of news gathering as she literally becomes the story, transforming into lupine form before the news studio cameras with a howl of primal woe and a glistening tear before Chris puts a longed-for bullet in her. But of course, the stupefied audience scarcely knows what they’ve just seen, as the capacity to tell reality from fancy on television has long since atrophied. It’s one of the most strange and bleakly witty climaxes to any horror movie, even if Dante feels a need to undercut it with a weak punchline revealing Marcia still alive and a final shot lingering on a frying hamburger to appeal to the carnivore in all. The Howling confirms here it was the product of immature talent, but damn, what talent. The film’s success gave birth to seven generally awful sequels, including two mishmashes helmed by Australian director Philippe Mora and a fourth based more closely on Bradner’s book.