The Howling

The first inkling I ever had of The Howling was hearing the opening notes of Pino Donaggio’s score sampled in the Primal Scream song “Pills,” produced by Dan the Automator. When I finally saw the movie years later (my adolescent music nerd phase predated my obsession with VHS horror), I was scandalized. It’s such a good flip. Primal Scream’s XTRMNTR album is an object torn between two aesthetic principles—the lockstep motorik beat of electronic music and the chaos of free jazz and noise. Director Joe Dante is equally torn between creating an anarchic teardown of convention and a thesis by a student of not only genre but of film history. No director has ever had more reverence for horror as an aesthetic and a lineage while feeling free to do whatever the hell he wanted with it. He felt this throughout his career—for example, he took a hellish work-for-hire job on Looney Tunes: Back in Action (2003) because he felt he owed it to his hero Chuck Jones.

The opening 15 minutes of The Howling are a neon-soaked Los Angeles slasher movie, having more in common with Cruising and Vice Squad than any existing werewolf movie. Its advertising campaign and amazing poster cannily sold the film as a slasher. The conceit of The Howling is that this serial killer happens to be a werewolf. Eddie Quist (a never better Robert Picardo) lures news anchor Karen White (Dee Wallace) to a porn shop on the Sunset Strip with a series of smiley-face stickers only for him to reveal himself as a monster to Karen, who then watches him get shot (to death?) by a trigger-happy cop. She is traumatized to the point of dissociation and can’t remember what exactly happened. Four years later, the first issue of Watchmen would borrow so massively from this section of the movie, down to its iconography and color scheme, that it’s a wonder how no one ever mentions it.

A pop psychologist (Patrick Macnee) who works with Karen recommends she and her husband (Christopher Stone) drive up to his retreat—populated by weirdos (all named after horror directors)—and the movie starts to play the themes of animalistic urges (masculinity, mysticism, cheating, horniness of any kind) versus civilization (the ubiquity of urban violence, psychology, rules characters learned from movies, those movies play on television) in two morally weighted locations (the bay and the city). Thematically, this is illustrated in a hunting trip with a city boy that leads into a sex scene, both visually recalling Straw Dogs, of all things.

The undead serial killer werewolf being an urban creature who exists in both worlds is the film’s counterargument, probably to the novel’s thesis. Dante and screenwriter John Sayles are playing with those ideas but have always been heading toward the monsters—the definitive werewolf sex scene, the effects-reel masterpiece of Eddie’s transformation, a sea of claws reaching through a cop-car roof—that’s where their heart is. As would be beaten into the ground in the next era of horror, everyone in The Howling has seen the movies they are talking about and knows what a werewolf is (as laid out by the occult bookseller played by Dick Miller). Cinematographer John Hora and special-effects artist Rob Bottin both drag what could be a witty genre film into modern territory. Hora’s use of shafts of light and huge washes of color are more like De Palma and Argento than any of the films the characters are aware of.

Most of the special-effects technology used in The Howling was developed by Rick Baker in preparation for An American Werewolf in London, which had been in development for seven years. When the film finally got funding and Baker went to London to shoot it, the job was handed over to his assistant, Bottin. A teenage runaway living in Baker’s garage who became his apprentice, Bottin was 22 when The Howling was released, and it was his second project as lead practical-effects artist. Both films will forever be linked not just in their subject matter, release year, and crews but in the sea change they were a part of—which we now recognize as the VHS horror era. 

To say you love An American Werewolf in London is to say you love screenwriting. You love structure and emotion and delivery. You love pure tragedy and setups and payoffs that utilize special effects to wrench your insides out. To say you love The Howling is to say you love movies. You betray the love behind everything in the glee that the end goal of all the little moments, whether funny or dramatic or knowing, is to entertain. Too messy and happy to fuck around with tropes, happy to be a serial-killer picture one moment and a lecture on the semiotics of vampires the next. No one in The Howling is doomed in the Shakespearean sense; they’re fucked in the victim sense. Sometimes in other ways. That gives the game away. It’s unseemly having so much fun. 🩸