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Howling, TheHorror movies often arrive in packs, as if filmmakers simultaneously experience the same collective nightmares. In the early 1980s, the werewolf returned from obscurity and a new breed of lycanthropes made the most out of contemporary advances in special effects. Joe Dante's The Howling was arguably the leader of the pack, arriving in 1981, closely followed by its more famous cousin An American Werewolf In London (1981) and a slew of other wolf movies: Full Moon High (1981), Silver Bullet, Michael Jackson's 'Thriller' video (1983), Teen Wolf (1985), and several others.
Co-written by John Sayles (with whom Dante had previously collaborated on Piranha), The Howling is loosely based on a 1977 bestseller by Gary Brander. After a bizarre encounter with a lupine serial killer (Picardo), TV reporter Karen White (Wallace-Stone) retires to a Californian therapy centre known as 'The Colony'. There she discovers Patrick Macnee's leftfield psychotherapist Dr George Waggner, who presides over a group of patients with a secret. They're all neurotic werewolves struggling to cope with life as lycanthropes in the modern world. Among them is a renegade group led by Crazy Erle (veteran horror B-movie star John Carradine), who think "adjusting" should take second place to running wild. "You can't tame what's meant to be wild, doc. It ain't natural."
Less interested in being faithful to the book than in fashioning a werewolf movie in the jokey vein of Piranha, Sayles cooks up a string of tongue-in-cheek gags that let Dante indulge in his favourite pastime - making nostalgic reference to the horror movies of the past. Affectionate pastiche is the order of the day as Sayles and Dante turn into the genre's equivalent of trainspotters. There are cult cameos (Roger Corman appears as a sinister figure scrabbling for change in a phone booth); in-joke character names (almost everyone's moniker is a reference to a director of werewolf movies, from George Waggner to Terrence Fisher, Freddie Francis to Jerry Warren); and old movie clips (a sequence from The Wolf Man accompanies the final credits).
The centrepiece of the film is the human-wolf transformation in which Picardo's serial killer reveals his bestial nature, shape-shifting before our eyes in a triumph of special effects technology. The process employed an 'air-bladder technique' in order to show teeth growing, hair sprouting and the body contorting into inhuman postures. It marked quite a change from the traditional lap dissolve sequence that accompanied Lon Chaney Jnr's transformation in The Wolf Man and it quickly became an industry standard, driving the werewolf movie's 1980s renaissance. Best of all, it also gives this jokey horror movie some necessary bite, balancing the laughs and knowing nods with a genuinely frightening metamorphosis that will keep horror aficionados more than happy. It was a delicate balancing trick that the parade of lesser Howling sequels (six between 1981 and 1995) never quite managed to imitate.
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