The Howling
1981
D: Joe Dante
**********
Pros: Good buildup, Visuals, Werewolf design
Cons: Characters could have used more work, Awful ending
Though most
people know Joe Dante for the classic Gremlins
as well as many questionable family movies he made more recently, he got his
start in horror. His big break was Piranha, which has the reputation of
being one of the best Jaws rip-offs,
an honor which would be more dubious had that not been the assessment of Steven
Spielberg himself. Dante had enough of a
reputation in the genre that the villain of Death
Machine was named after him, and that’s got to count for something. One of his most known horror films is his
contribution to the werewolf subgenre, The
Howling.
Based on a
novel by Gary Brandner, it begins with Los Angeles anchorwoman Karen White (Dee
Wallace) taking part in a sting to catch serial killer Eddie Quist (Robert
Picardo), who has been stalking her for some time. As this happens, her network’s therapist Dr.
George Waggner (Patrick Macnee) foreshadows the movie’s plot by airing a monologue
about repression, animal desires and human nature. Karen meets Eddie in a particularly
oblivious/permissive inner city adult theatre, and he menaces her while playing
brutal rape footage. He’s about to
attack her when the two cops on the case show up and shoot him in the ensuing
commotion. Understandably traumatized
from the experience, Karen has no memory of what happened in the theatre and
has nightmares that vaguely suggest that Eddie turned into a werewolf. She freezes on air during her report of the
event, much to the frustration of her producer Fred (Kevin McCarthy). In response, Waggner sends her and her
husband Bill (Christopher Stone) to a therapy commune that he runs.
When they arrive, they meet a few quirky
individuals, including a suicidal old man named Erle (John Carradine), a creepy
nymphomaniacal hippie named Marsha (Elisabeth Brooks) and Slim Pickens. Among
the oddities, Karen meets the relatively friendly and well-adjusted Donna
(Margie Impert) and quickly befriends her.
Bill has an awkward encounter with Marsha in which she subtly comes on
to him in a way that reflects her disdain not just for his marriage, but the
concept in general. It’s nice to know
that this scene from a 1981 film perfectly captures what it feels like to be on
Tumblr.
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| I've had enough of this Social Justice Wolves. |
The commune also takes Bill on a hunting trip when Karen
and Donna find a mauled cow. The fact
that a therapy commune in which people are treated for PTSD and suicidal
tendencies grants its patients unrestricted access to firearms should be a
yellow flag. I think it’s pretty clear
that at least some of these people are hiding lycanthropy. After all, it’s stated to be a werewolf
movie, and if it turns out there are no werewolves after a lot of buildup, the results are generally disappointing.
Bill’s
fidelity to Karen makes him initially likable, but this sympathy breaks down
quickly. When Karen is disturbed by the
howling of wolves at night in the commune, his response is unimpressive. I probably would have pointed out that wolves
generally can’t break into houses and so she shouldn’t worry. Instead, he doubts her judgment, saying, “The
wildest thing you ever heard was Wolfman Jack.”
Yeah, well, that and that serial
killer that almost murdered her a couple days ago, Bill. After experiencing another unsuccessful
attempt at seduction by Marsha, he is bitten by a wolf-like creature in the
woods. Succumbing to the effects of the
bite, he meets the seductress again and they have sex by firelight as they
begin to transform. Predictably, she is
shown in full frontal, but he is not.
Meanwhile,
Karen’s coworkers Chris Halloran (Dennis Dugan) and Terri Fisher (Belinda
Balasky) are investigating Eddie Quist’s property, finding many drawings,
including many of wolfmen and one of coast.
They visit the coroner (John Sayles) to find that the door to Eddie’s
storage unit has been dented from the inside and his body is missing. They also look to a bookstore run by Walter
Paisley (Dick Miller) who gives them a few books on lycanthropy. He also informs them that werewolves can
change at will and only silver bullets or fire can kill them. After Bill’s bite, Terri is called to the
commune by Karen and she makes the connection between Eddie and the location by
seeing the coast from his drawing. She
looks for answers, but is attacked by a werewolf. She escapes to Dr. Waggner’s office and makes
a call to Chris. She looks through some
files searching for Eddie Quist, and one of the funniest things happens in the
movie: just when she finds the file, a werewolf’s hand calmly takes it from her
hand from offscreen. Then we get the
first good look at what the werewolf looks like. Not only is it a great reveal, it’s one of
the best werewolf designs I’ve seen.
This is comforting because a disappointing number of movies can’t seem
to get this simple task right.
Karen
confronts Bill over his infidelity, and he responds by slapping her. Disgusted, she flees to the Doctor’s office
only to find Terri’s body and a still living Eddie Quist. Before he attacks her, we see the werewolf
transformation in all its glory. The
effects on it are good and have a B-Movie charm. There’s also a rather putrid pulsating effect
it has on the flesh which is distinctive.
While the metamorphosis is creative and the effects are good, the whole
thing is sullied by the fact that Quist is standing in a static pose the whole
time. This really does mess up the
credibility of the scene. Karen also waits
until it’s before she throws acid into his face and flees.
Having heard
Terri’s death over the phone, Chris grabs some silver bullets from the
bookstore and drives desperately to the commune. The drive over is well integrated with the
rest of the movie and edited well to induce tension. When he arrives at the Doctor’s office, he
encounters Quist with half his face melted off.
He kills Quist before he can transform, which is a shame because I
wanted to see what his acid-burned face looked like in werewolf form. He finds Karen held captive by the other
members of the commune in a barn. They
reveal that they are all werewolves, including Dr. Waggner. Waggner formed the commune as a way to help
them suppress their urge to eat humans, but all the others have had enough of
him and his ways. He argues with them a
little, but to no avail. Chris rescues
Karen, and they lock the werewolves in the barn. They then set the barn on fire, which is too
bad for the werewolves because they apparently share the Signs aliens’ weakness in regards to wooden doors. The two escape the commune, but Karen is
bitten at the last second by a werewolf who is revealed in death to be Bill. For no reason whatsoever, there is a
momentary full-body shot of two stop-motion wolves, which is distractingly the
only time this effect used.
The final
faceoff is actually rather anticlimactic.
Now, I love this trope when it’s done right, but not when
the threat is built up as a credible one.
While the twist is fairly obvious to anyone who actually heard of the
movie and didn’t just stumble into it accidentally, the buildup is effectively
executed and promised to something more.
The werewolves should have been far more of a challenge once all bets
were off, and it should have taken a hell more than just one journalist with a
bolt-action rifle full of silver bullets to defeat an entire commune of what
should be the perfect killing machines.
A lot of this is because the werewolves are apparently idiots. When Chris tells them that he has silver
bullets, they stupidly call his bluff instead of rushing him after he gets the
first shot off and has to manually chamber another round. It wouldn’t have been any less cheap if John Preston had entered the barn and used Gun Kata against all the werewolves, but
it would have been a lot more fun to watch.
Upon
returning home, Karen and Chris agree that the public must be told. While Karen reports on the communes burning
on live TV, she voluntarily turns into a werewolf, with a few funny reactions
from her fellow anchor and some TV viewers.
This I think is where the movie should have ended. It would have left the film with a sense of
ambiguity and a little bit of dark humor.
Instead, Chris “mercifully” shoots Karen dead.
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| Unfortunately, she had not gotten past the Pomeranian phase of her transformation. |
This is not only questionable to say the least, but it
makes little sense. It’s like they
wanted to shoehorn a tragic horror movie ending in there just for the hell of it. Granted, the movie never made it obvious how
much control a person has in wolf form, but it was made very clear that the
werewolves were people who had a choice in how they acted; it’s just that these
particular made a choice in the end to kill.
Also, the finale makes the offensive suggestion that a group of people
who have a condition that makes it more difficult to adjust to society should
not be given a chance to live at all. It’s
a disturbing (an increasingly more fashionable) idea that people should not
make any effort to resist they’re primal urges or practice self-control, and if
one happens to have a more harmful, idiosyncratic urge, that person’s life is
not worth living.
The ending
isn’t the only problem. Characterization
in this movie leaves a lot to be desired.
Karen is an extremely passive character until the end. We don’t get to know Bill well enough before
his fall to feel too bad about it. Terri
is the most active and most intelligent character in the movie, but she’s the
first to die. Perhaps the most
disappointing character arc is Donna.
She could have been one of the more complex characters in the
movie. She’s a werewolf, but she
befriends a human and comes off as likable.
However, in the final confrontation, she shows no conflict. She doesn’t have Waggner’s back when he tries
to reason with the other werewolves even though it makes perfect sense for her
take his side, especially when she clearly detests more zealously pro-homicide
Marsha earlier. She and Waggner
demonstrate that the werewolves are perfectly capable of being moral, but the
movie ignores this in the end. Karen
ignores this in her final speech, and her monologue of the
uniqueness of humanity’s ability to make moral choices, which is meant to
justify her killing, makes sense in real life, but applies equally to the
werewolves in this movie. If people were
to follow the intentions of her murder/suicide, it would result in a tragic
persecution of werewolves.
While the
movie is problematic, it has great style and effects. The werewolf design is excellent, and my only
complaint about it is that that the werewolves have some very skinny
digitigrade legs that seem really awkward to stand upright on. The campfire yiff scene finished off with
what looked like the silhouettes of two traditionally animated werewolves. In contrast with the pointless stop-motion
shot later in the movie, it looked stylized and mysterious, helping the
atmosphere of the film. Gore effects and
makeup are really good. Scenery of the
woods was very atmospheric as was Pino Donaggio’s score (in a cheesy B-Movie way). A
slight complaint is that the movie is billed as a horror/comedy, but the comedy
is pretty sparse, which is a criticism that fortunately does not apply to this movie's more famous contemporary. The movie has enough
style to be worth a look for any werewolf fan, but its ending prevents it from
being a truly good horror movie.
QUOTES
DR. WAGGNER: Repression. Repression is the father of
neurosis, of self-hatred. Now, stress results when we fight against our
impulses. We've all heard people talk about animal magnetism, the natural man.
the noble savage, as if we'd lost something valuable in our long evolution into
civilized human beings. Now there's a good reason for this.
KAREN: I don’t know if I want to remember.
BILL: What?
KAREN: Doc said once I remember what happened, it won’t
scare me anymore. I’m not so sure.
BILL: Honey, give this place a chance, ok? We gotta do something.
KAREN: Well, I hope these people aren’t too weird.
[cut to Erle
hollering]
[Bill walks up to
Marsha’s table and takes some food]
MARSHA: [passive-aggressively]
You want some?
DONNA: Haven't you ever done Assertiveness Training?
Before I looked into the Doc, I did it all - EST, T.M., Scientology, iridology,
Primal Scream... I don't know, I figure another five years of real hard work,
and maybe I'll be a real human being.
PAISLEY: We get 'em all: sun-worshippers,
moon-worshippers, Satanists. The Manson family used to hang around and
shoplift. Bunch of deadbeats!
SAM NEWFIELD (SLIM PICKENS): No, no, don’t bother. I’ll get the state guys over to the
center. I wouldn’t worry, Mr. Holloran. I’m sure she’s safe.
[Cut to Terri
getting killed by a werewolf]
DR. WAGGNER: [upon being shot] Thank God.
KAREN: Good evening.
From the day we’re born, there is a battle we must fight. [teleprompter is clearly showing something
different] A struggle between what
is kind and peaceful in our natures and what is cruel and violent.
FRED: What the hell is this, an editorial?
KAREN: That choice is a birthright of human beings, and
the real gift that differentiates us from the animals. It is as natural to us as the air we
breathe.
FRED: [to Chris]
Did you pass this material? This is not
reading on the prompter
CHRIS: We changed it a little bit.
KAREN: But now for some of us, that choice has been taken
away. A secret society exists and is
living among all of us. They’re neither
people nor animals but but something in between [Fred chuckles and facepalms]
Because of this mutation their violent natures must be satisfied. I know what you’re thinking because I’ve been
where you are.
FRED: That’s enough.
CHRIS: Leave it.
FRED: Leave it?
Cut!
CHRIS: Leave it!
KAREN: But I have proof and…tonight I’m going to show you
something…to make you believe. [transforms
into werewolf]
ANCHORMAN: Holy Shee-it!
GUY WATCHING TV WITH WIFE: What is this?!
BOY: Wow!
MOM: What are you kids watching?
GIRL: The news lady’s turned into a werewolf!
PAISLEY: Hoo-boy.
[final lines]
MAN: Hey Ernie? Put that pepper steak on for me, will ya?
And a hamburger for the lady.
ERNIE: How do you want that?
MAN: How you want it, honey?
MARSHA: Rare.
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