This is my favorite time of year, second only to Christmas. Autumn has arrived, the weather is cooling down, and, October becomes the month long celebration of scary movies called Shocktober. There are a lot of horror movies out there, but as a genre, horror is still looked down upon by some mainstream critics and moviegoers. It doesn’t help that, admittedly, there are so few quality horror movies made but, like comedy, it’s a very difficult and subjective genre. So, in the days leading up Halloween I’ll be posting some recommendations for scary movies to help you celebrate Shocktober.
Night 2: Werewolves? You mean like in the movies?: The Howling
There had not been a werewolf movie, at least not a
successful one, for years and years before 1981 when both John Landis’s An American Werewolf in London and Joe
Dante’s The Howling were released.
The trailers for The Howling even
played down the fact that it was a werewolf movie; it only hints of something
supernatural and beastly. The movie itself seems to be self-conscious about
being a werewolf movie, too.
Most of the movie focuses on Karen, played by Dee
Wallace, dealing with the post-traumatic stress of being stalked and attacked
by a serial killer. Her doctor recommends that she go to a secluded mountain
resort to recuperate. It’s obvious that something sinister is behind this
resort and a team of reporters are on the case. This movie waits as long as it
can before showing us a werewolf, but once it does it’s a werewolf extravaganza.
The excellent look of the werewolves is thanks to special makeup effects master
Rob Bottin who also worked on Total
Recall, Robocop, and created the
shape-shifting visual horrors of John Carpenter’s The Thing. The Howling
spawned numerous sequels and, like with any franchise, each sequel seems to
undercut the quality of the original and make people shy away from the whole
series. I can’t speak for the sequels, but the original is a thoroughly
entertaining and enjoyable horror movie.
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