Every Monday in October I’ll be reviewing a classic horror film!
Genre: Horror
Premise: After recovering from his friend being killed by a wolf, an American traveling in England heads back to his nurse’s London home, where he begins to suspect that he’s a werewolf.
About: The famous wolf transformation scene in this movie was so impactful that it forced the Academy to come up with a makeup Oscar. Director John Landis came up with the idea for the movie at 18. But no one wanted to make the script for a full 10 years.
Writer: John Landis
Details: 97 minutes
Do you feel that?
It’s the hair standing up on the back of your neck.
That’s because it’s October, the month of ghosts, ghouls, monsters, and zombies. “Smile’s” 22 million dollar box office proved just how much people love to be scared in October.
With horror opening weekends, I’ve learned, it’s not about how good the movie is. It’s about how good the marketing is. That means what does the poster look like? And what does the trailer look like? Smile has that in spades. And it’s something all of you horror writers should be thinking about BEFORE you write your horror scripts. Not after. This movie was marketed very simply on a sinister looking smile and boy did it work. Cause nobody expected this film to take in 22 million dollars.
The lesson Universal learned was a little more complex with “Bros” bombing. I think a lot of people are going to point to moviegoers not being ready to accept a mainstream LGBTQ movie. But I think if you put a real movie star in that role over Billy Eichner, the movie at least has a chance. Eichner is annoying. He built his comedy brand on negativity. He’s not a leading man and is, arguably, unlikable. He just wasn’t going to be the guy to break a gay romcom into the mainstream.
Not sure how we segue out of that into London circa 1981 so I’m not even going to try. I’ll just say that like a lot of you, I saw this movie as a kid, and that werewolf transformation scene blew me away. It was a part of my nightmares for years to come.
But the funny thing about that scene is that it was so good it overshadowed my memory of the rest of the film. I don’t remember anything about this movie other than that scene. So I was really looking forward to watching it again as it was basically like watching a brand new movie.
The film follows two Americans, David and Jack, just out of college, who are traveling around England. After visiting a weird Yorkshire pub, they’re attacked by a wolf and Jack is brutally killed. The Yorkshiremen from the bar shoot and kill the wolf before it can also kill David.
David then wakes up in a London hospital two weeks later where he learns that his best friend is dead. As David recovers, Nurse Alex gets a crush on him. And his doctor, Dr. Hirsch, believes David is suffering from a delusion that they were attacked by a wolf, as the Yorkshiremen claimed the two were attacked by a madman.
While at the hospital, David starts getting visits from his dead friend, Jack, who informs him that David’s a werewolf now and must kill himself because, if he doesn’t, he’s going to turn into a wolf at the next full moon and start killing people. David dismisses these visions as trauma. But in the back of his mind, he wonders if his dead friend is right.
Eventually David is released and he goes to stay with Nurse Alex. Meanwhile, Doctor Hirsch heads to that Yorkshire pub and believes that David might start to hurt people due to believing that he’s a werewolf. It’s too late, though. The full moon comes and – kazow – he finally turns into a werewolf. From that point forward, his killing spree begins.
First off, great movie.
I was starting to worry that I wasn’t capable of truly enjoying movies anymore because I’ve seen so many. But this proves that it’s not me. It’s the movies. The people making the movies have to do better. Cause this film was basically brand new to me and I thought it was great.
I noticed a lot of good choices here.
For starters, David and Jack were a lot goofier than I remember them being. And when Jack gets killed, I learned a valuable lesson. Which is that, these days, characters are goofy just to be goofy. But here, the goofiness and the jokiness serves a purpose. Which is that Jack’s shocking death hits you harder because of the fact that these two were such good friends. And that friendship was built in just 10 minutes by having these two be very comfortable and jokey around each other. In other words, the choice to make them jokey, was 100% story motivated.
Same thing for Jack’s transformation into a wolf. Of course I remember the actual transformation as a kid. But what I didn’t remember was how much pain Jack was in while it was happening. That’s what stayed with me this time. He was in immense pain as it was happening. And they really draw the transformation out so the pain we feel is extended. Again, it’s a STORY and CHARACTER related reason why the scene hits us so hard. Not just amazing special effects.
I also thought they did a great job with the exposition. I’m working on the exposition section of my dialogue book at the moment so this hit me especially hard. But every single exposition scene takes place when dead Jack comes back to explain to David how the werewolf thing works. The thing is, we’re so focused on the amazing special effects of Dead David (he becomes more disgusting with each visit) that we have no clue that massive exposition is being thrown at us.
And kudos to Landis because he created the biggest distraction of all for the biggest exposition scene of all – that being the porn movie where David and Jack talk in the back of the theater and Jack introduces David to all of his dead victims from last night. I can’t remember anything as creative as that to hide exposition.
Granted, this is more of a writer-director trick since it wouldn’t have worked as well on the page (we can’t see special effects on the page). But it was still genius.
The only thing that perplexed me was the structure. David stays in the hospital all the way until page 35. He doesn’t turn into the wolf until 60 pages in! They just wouldn’t do that today.
And I was really thrown by it because I didn’t think it was necessary. Every movie can benefit from urgency. Urgency keeps the plot zipping along. So why did Landis turn his back on urgency??
Finally, I realized what was going on. They didn’t have any choice but to wait an entire month. Obviously, on the day David and Jack were attacked, it had to be a full moon. So we were going to have to wait another month until the next full moon turned David into a werewolf.
That’s why the movie doesn’t seem interested in pushing anything forward. David has these bizarre extended, ultimately silly, nightmares while he’s in the hospital. When he gets back to the nurse’s place, there’s an entire day where he has nothing to do so he just hangs out. Typically, you want to avoid this in screenwriting. Your hero should never be in a position where they have nothing to do.
Ironically, the movie works in spite of this. And I think it’s because they had such a large carrot dangling in front of the audience (the coming full moon) that we didn’t care that we had to wait. We were so locked in by the suspense, that time didn’t really exist (that’s what good suspense does, by the way – eliminate time).
It seems as if Landis wasn’t ignorant to David’s lack of purpose. When one has a protagonist without a goal, it’s important that someone else in the story does have a goal. At least that way, we can cut back to them occasionally, to give the story some forward momentum. That character came in the package of Dr. Hirsch. He’s the one who starts getting concerned about David. Therefore, he goes out to the Yorkshire pub to see if he can get more answers. He’s the one who grabs Nurse Alex to head back to the city in an attempt to find David before he can hurt people.
That’s a little tip for you if you ever find yourself with an unmotivated main character. Make sure at least one other key character in the story is motivated with a strong goal.
I just thought this was a really good film. It still holds up today. Yes, there are some goofy parts (I could do without the killer Nazi ghosts and ghouls nightmares). But the core of the story works. We care about the main character. We like all the supporting characters. We want to see what happens to our hero. That’s really the only rule that matters in writing: The audience needs to want to see what happens to your hero. If you have that, you have a movie. If you don’t, you have Bros.
Movie is free to watch on Amazon Prime!
Screenplay Link: An American Werewolf In London
[ ] What the hell did I just watch?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the stream
[x] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Intense suspense. If you can’t have the urgency, replace it with VERY STRONG SUSPENSE. It can’t be rinky-dinky suspense. It’s got to be intense suspense, like the impending full moon in An American Werewolf in London.
