An American Werewolf in London

As I watched An American Werewolf in London I felt that my thought processes were getting a little too analytical for the good of this movie. I thought about the role of an odyssey in horror, why so many horror movies involve people in strange places, and whether my final rating for this movie should be an eight, nine or ten. The main problem I have with reviewing most horror movies is that the majority of the good ones are made in the past. These ones in the past have come to be revered as cult favorites, and sometimes even landmarks by the "mainstream." With the canonization of films, I run into the problem of my own mind's tendency to distrust what is liked by the majority. An American Werewolf in London, however, is one of those rare movies that is done well enough that I feel I can rate it on its own merits.

I hinted at the premise for this movie in the first paragraph: two guys, David Kessler (David Naughton) and Jack Goodman (Griffin Dunne) are talking a walking tour of England. The night becomes too cold and rainy for them, and they decide to stop at a tavern with a grimly foreshadowing name, "The Slaughtered Lamb." Inside are a group of very unfriendly locals who obviously have something to hide. After a few uncomfortable yet funny moments in The Slaughtered Lamb and a warning to "stay on the road", the two Americans leave and continue on their trek. Luckily, they are foolish enough to not pay attention to where they are walking and soon find themselves well off the road. With that mistake, yea verily, we have a horror movie!

The dark scenes on the moors with the unseen but heard werewolf genuinely scared me a little - a definite plus. David and Jack panic and start running. In a very serendipitous act of fate, David trips and falls to the ground. The werewolf attacks and kills Jack. David runs away and the werewolf does start to attack him, but before much damage can be done, the mysterious locals of The Slaughtered Lamb shoot and kill the werewolf. A couple weeks later, David wakes up in a hospital bed and learns he was attacked, and Jack killed by an escaped lunatic.

The story really gets going with David's nightmares, the "family slaughter" being my favorite, because I've had dreams exactly like it. The dead Jack appears to David telling him that because of his unnatural death, he is forced to wander the earth as a lost soul, until the werewolf's bloodline is cut off, which will release the curse keeping him from passing on. The final werewolf, of course, is David. Jack encourages David to kill himself, but David is reluctant, being a normal person, and his greatest reluctance probably stems from a relationship he develops with his special nurse, Alex Price (Jenny Agutter.) The relationship with the nurse was the only thing about the movie that really got on my nerves, since it seems like two trite things in one. The first is going to "exotic" locations and screwing "exotic" women. The second is laying your nurse, a fantasy that is way too common, given the presence of movies such as Nightshift Nurses, House Call Nurses, and other nurse pornography.

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