An American Werewolf in London (1981)

"It's a marvellous night for a moondance..."

“Beware the Moon, lads…”

With May Day just around the corner, it’s a Folk-Horror Double Bill on Luke Honey’s WEEKEND FLICKS. Cinema for Grown Ups. First up is John Landis’ An American Werewolf in London (1981)— a comedy-horror with cult status. And deservedly so. ‘Cos, it’s bloody good fun; and witty too. It’s about paranoia. You know how it starts. Two squeaky-clean (annoying) American college kids (David Naughton and Griffin Dunne) seek refuge in The Slaughtered Lamb, an amusing public house buried away in the desolate Yorkshire Moors (Surrey, actually). It’s classic. Brian Glover leads a motley congregation of scary, pint-swilling yokels (“that’s the stuff which puts hairs on your chest”), including a youthful Rik Mayall with a punky hair-do. It’s all very brown; there are cock-fighting prints and a five-pointed pentacle drawn on the wall. And then— spoiler alert— an American is bitten by a werewolf. Well. Not exactly bitten, more ravaged in the most gory way— and as you will remember, by time honoured rustic tradition, once bitten by a werewolf— always a werewolf.

‘The Slaughtered Lamb: Surrey, actually…’

This urbanites’ fear of the countryside is what Folk-Horror’s all about, I think. Somethin’ nasty in the woodshed. Think Lolly Willowes (1926), in which a maiden aunt abandons London for witchcraft and the Chilterns; Stella Gibbon’s satire, Cold Comfort Farm (1932), with Flora, the bossy metropolitan sophisticate, reinventing her dysfunctional rural cousins; John Boorman’s hick horror, Deliverance (1972)— “squeal, piggy, piggy, squeal!"— the obvious contender, The Wicker Man (1973), and more recently, Tom Stourton’s perceptive All My Friends Hate Me (2022)— although, admittedly, by the era of the iffy Lesbian Vampire Killers (2009), the joke, perhaps, had worn a bit thin. In An American Werewolf in London, it’s mirrored by the paranoia of an American in London and the further paranoia of a Jewish American in London (the film makes this clear).

“I'm certain if there were a monster roaming around Northern England, we'd have seen it on the telly…”