Landis: An American Werewolf In London (1981)

Released at the height of the early 80s werewolf craze, An American Werewolf In London is John Landis’ tribute to the Universal horror cycle of the 30s and 40s. Although the Universal films were shot in Hollywood, they were often set in England, particularly when they turned on werewolves or lycanthropy. In part, that was because some of their stories were English in origin or tradition, but it was also because the stiff upper lip of English legend offered a good venue for the series’ fascination with repression, as well as a safe distance to contemplate its own repression at the hands of the Hays Code. To watch a Universal film set in England is to feel the full force of all the cinematic, circumambient possibilities that its pressure chambers and sound stages are designed to repress - and that’s the point of departure for Landis’ loving tribute, which rediscovers in British tabloid culture a similar balance between censorship and creativity, repression and the return of the repressed. In fact, for the most part, the film could play as a tabloid headline – Amerian backpacker turned into werewolf on Yorkshire moors returns to London to sex up the nurse who helped restore him from his coma – as Landis converges his gross-out tendencies with Universal camp to create a surreal, startling comic tone. Sublime, too, since Landis’ considerably greater latitude with respect to what he can include opens up the sound-stages of Universal horror to the vast circumambience that surrounds them, even or especially when his motivations are crudest – the more gross the film becomes, the more expansive it feels; the more juvenile its ambitions, the more it taps into the vast, mystical spectacle of those opening Yorkshire moors. And as the werewolf ravages London by night, he leaves a trail of tabloid tidbits and stark, moorland melancholy in his wake, in Landis’ most lyrical paean to trash culture, and most memorable trashing of cinematic lyricism.