AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON (1981)
“Have you ever talked to a corpse? It’s boring!”
AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON is a gamechanger on many levels. The bone-crunching transformations are still a pinnacle of practical special effects work. It was so inarguably groundbreaking that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences immediately created a new annual award for “Best Makeup” that very year so Rick Baker could receive credit for his exemplary work.
Removing all those obvious platitudes from the table, there’s still ANOTHER element to film that would have a similarly seismic effect on the horror genre in ways that are rarely discussed. That’s the character of Jack Goodman (Griffin Dunne), the ill-fated best friend to the titular Lycanthrope.
This movie is 40 years old so I'm gonna spoil most of the story: From the moment we first meet him, we know Jack is dead dead dead. Nobody who wanders the moors so blighty fares well. We instantly love Jack. He feels like he comes from John Landis’ earlier film, ANIMAL HOUSE. He could be another fraternity member of Delta Tau Chi, specifically Peter Regent’s Boon. From the moment Jack opens his mouth, he’s predominately concerned with sex. He plans to meet up with childhood crush Debbie Klein in Rome and from what we can infer, it seems to be a long unrequited relationship. But as we’ll soon see, Jack’s dedicated to hopeless causes.
More than any character in a horror movie up to that point, Jack is us: an everyday American in an extreme situation. Dunne’s performance is the best of the movie and one of the greatest of the genre. Future horror films (including many on this month’s list) internalized his naturalistic tone that centers AMERICAN WEREWOLF’s delicate balance of horror.
Jack’s rapport with fellow American David Kessler (David Naughton) is incredible. All of Naughton’s best scenes are the banter between the two of them. Jack’s the smarter one of the two and more situationally aware. He immediately spots the pentagram and understands what it represents. In a sense, he’s the first iteration of the self-aware sidekick in a horror movie. Jack is of the movie brat generation that grew up with countless television reruns of Universal Horror movies. The movie is filled with the postmodern deconstruction of the genre that would become standard in the ‘90s. Like future iterations of the surrogate character (Evil Ed in FRIGHT NIGHT, Hudson in ALIENS, Randy in the SCREAM films, Sgt. Vail in THE MUMMY (2017)), he knows exactly how expendable he is.
David even gets bitten because of Jack. Poor Jack, who is in the wrong place, at the wrong time, gets RIPPED TO SHREDS by a werewolf, screaming his best friend’s name as David understandably runs away. And it’s also understandable when David runs back in a futile attempt to save Jack.
Brief sidebar about one thing people always forget when trying to out-smart horror movies: we do the stupidest things out of love.
But Jack’s now dead and David’s been bitten by a werewolf. We’re 16 minutes in and Griffin Dunne is out of the picture. Or so we think.
Wes Craven once said (paraphrasing) that the genre of horror-comedy only works if you play both straight. So the horror is scary and the comedy is funny. Don’t mix them up. SOMEHOW this movie somehow figures how to flip-flop the tones back and forth within scenes.
Most of the movie’s discomfort is based on incongruity. Each new nightmare monster or transformation is frightening then funny then just plain weird. We’re unsettled by the erection metaphor of a human hand stretching and growing hair. The needle drop soundtrack plays in places it shouldn’t. Then sudden moments of comedy occur where you don’t expect.
Undead Jack bridges the tone between the separate elements of comedy and horror. While Jack appearing again is a mild surprise, seeing him undead with his neck ripped out is not as shocking a revelation after David’s nightmares. What we don’t expect is the smile on Undead Jack’s face. Or his easy-going manner as he politely asks, “Can I have a piece of toast?” The following plays like self-deprecating gallows humor. Undead Jack admits surprise to how much he is beloved posthumously. David, thinking he’s dreaming, reassures Jack, “you were a very well-liked person.” Undead Jack sees the irony of his murder sending his childhood crush Debbie Klein into the bed of Mark Levine, who is in his words: “An Asshole. Life mocks me even in death.”
Undead Jack is the most disturbing moment in the entire movie because he brings the worst of news: David’s a werewolf, now cursed to suffer a painful bone-breaking transformation every full moon. He’ll make other people what Jack is now, an undead soul fated to walk the earth until this unnatural curse can be lifted… by David’s demise. Jack’s words are far more frightening than the previous warnings of the creepy villagers because Jack says all of this as earnestly as possible.
While previous horror stars like Vincent Price would expertly play camp humor and horror, there’s nothing heightened about this scene. Undead Jack flip-flops in how he speaks to David. Best friend one moment then harbinger of doom the next. It’s because Undead Jack doesn’t want to upset David. He’s compassionate for his plight. Hell, he’s even happy David gets laid in the middle of all this. But he also expresses a growing frustration with his friend’s insolence in the face of the supernatural (“Don’t be a putz, David!). It all leads to the best lines in the movie: “Have you ever talked to a corpse? It's boring! I’m lonely!” It’s morbidly funny, then tragic, all within two words.
Undead Jack keeps revisiting David through the movie, rotting and looking worse for wear each time. But David refuses to listen. So David changes painfully (as Jack warned) and David Hellhound kills many innocent people (also as Jack warned).
Through it all, Jack still remains David’s best friend.
In the back of a porno theater with Undead Jack (now just a skeleton with rotting skin), David tries to apologize. Jack lets him off with a “You don’t have to say anything…” followed quickly by a sharp “I did tell you so, you schmuck!”
So Jack introduces David to the bloody victims of his rampage, now cursed undead like Jack. They cheerily suggest ways David should kill himself to break the curse.
They throw out the most horrible ways to off oneself, some with cruel glee. Jack meanwhile keeps up a breezy enthusiasm to be helpful. This moment is the picture’s comedy pinnacle. It’s like some forgotten Monty Python sketch suddenly dropped into the movie.
This all goes back to Dunne’s brilliant performance. Dunne grounds the film in humanity. Jack loves David the way lifelong best friends do.
And even in the Oscar-Winning make-up, Dunne’s performance doesn’t feel muted or obscured in any way.
The gore and that one dangling piece of skin just accentuate his charm.
(Confession: I went as Stage One Jack for Halloween one year)
For stage three Undead Jack, Rick Baker’s animatronic puppet was controlled behind the set wall by Griffin Dunne himself in an early version of motion capture.
It’s amazing work as you can feel Dunne’s natural rhythms coming through the gestures of the prosthetics. Even physically removed from the screen, he finds the pathos that makes us care. And fear. And laugh.
