THE HOWLING on DVD
© 2001 MGM Home Entertainment

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THE HOWLING

The Howling is a strange piece of cinematic history now, part of a slew of werewolf movies that tumbled into mainstream horror in the early '80s. Most horror trends have some social reason for happening: the gothic period championed by Corman in America and Hammer horror in Britain seems to have been a roughly fifteen-year meditation on sexual upheaval and the death of science as a savior, followed by an infatuation with the occult in the seventies that seems to have echoed a grasp for meaning in the American middle class. The '80s, though, were all over the map, marked by, as far as I can make out, two major trends: hydraulic gore and dead teenagers. It's hard to imagine that in 1979 we knew neither Jason Voorhees of Friday the 13th nor The Howling, and by 1981 we knew both. Hydraulic gore, with its bloody goop and glop, was made for werewolf movies, so Wolfen and An American Werewolf in London would both come the following year, making for a strange sudden eruption of jugular spurts and self-conscious use of the word "lycanthropy."

The Howling has a good story going for it, though: in about 90 minutes we get the tale of Karen (Dee Wallace-Stone), a roving newswoman who runs afoul of a sex maniac, played by Robert Picardo, who also happens to be a werewolf. After Karen has a run-in with Picardo, her suave and trendy psychiatrist sends her and her husband off to "The Colony," a sort of R&R resort on the California coast. The locals at the colony, though, are more than they seem, each of them not just werewolves but apparently werewolves in genuine need of psychiatric treatment. (One is a drunk, one is a nymphomaniac, etc.)

I'm not sure what any of this really means; it might be John Sayles' clever way of saying that pop psychology barely scrapes the bestiality that lies within, or something. The main point, really, is the transformation sequences.

When Robert Picardo finally "wolfs out" before Dee Wallace-Stone, Rob Bottin's makeup becomes the focal point and we watch the transformation slowly. You may remember this stuff, if not from The Howling than from countless others who licensed or aped the technology, such as the short-lived (yet somehow widely remembered) TV series Manimal. Here it is for the first time: Wallace-Stone is screaming and Picardo's face begins to pulsate. She's screaming and his arms elongate. She's now just sort of staring in wonder as Picardo's head produces long ears from its top, his jaw and nose stretch and deform. She's still just standing there, not running or anything, as gelatinous muck runs all over Picardo's head, more random bits of flesh pump and throb, hair grows, eyes roll back, and on, and on, for three minutes. Three minutes of screen time is a long time to do anything, much less stand there watching the doctor from Voyager turn into a wolf.

Much has been made of Sayles' script, with its modern sensibility and tongue-in-cheek air. Granted, this is fine work; Sayles is at his best when he tries to elevate genre. But tongue-in-cheek scripts often bother me because they mock the audience too much. In The Howling, for instance, Dennis Dugan plays the husband of one of Karen's friends. The husband and wife team investigate werewolves a bit before chasing after Karen, separately of course so that the wife can be gruesomely killed. What troubles me about the script is that, if it's clever enough to punctuate those things that might seem ridiculous with one-liners and other humor, why isn't it clever enough to take note of tragedy? The husband barely seems to register in the film that his wife is dead; this is a woman this guy's clearly had a great relationship with. We've seen them joking and laughing for half the film, and now she's dead and the husband barely notices. I appreciate tongue-in-cheek humor, but not when I sense that the humor of a script is being used to camouflage laziness. Joss Whedon's Buffy the Vampire Slayer balances pithy humor and raw emotion in every episode.

Then the humor just crashes at the end, as we get a character reading the punch line of the whole film - basically a joking "welcome to the end of the world" - into the camera and doing everything short of winking at us to remind us, I guess, that it's only a movie. Why? At the end of Cronenberg's Shivers we get the sinking feeling that the sex-starved alien parasite zombies are going to take over the earth, and the movie is relentless - even amidst it's grimly humorous edge - in driving the point home; why the sudden cheese from Dante and Sayles at the end of The Howling? Is this their way of saying they're above the material? "We were really just here to show you the neat hydraulic heads we built for the wolf sequences, but we don't really care about casting any sort of narrative spell."

We get the joke, but we'd get it better if The Howling could be as smart as it is clever. Death and monsters can be funny and scary at once, and the more complicated, the better. Do I recommend it? Sure. It's better than most werewolf movies of the last twenty years, and has some effective chills around the colony on the coast. (Rarely have redwoods seemed so primal.) But I'd be much more pleased if The Howling had a better sense of where it stands in regards to its own story.