by Steve Brennan

Created on: March 22, 2009

It's not too unfair to say that once you've seen one werewolf movie, you've seen them all. Let's face it, the whole concept is pretty silly, and most movies stick pretty rigidly to a set formula: Man gets bitten by wolf, man grows hair and fangs during a full moon, various police / boffin types look baffled as they examine eviscerated corpses, man goes on final rampage and meets the wrong end of a silver bullet. Roll credits. Any werewolf film worth its salt followed this framework up until the early 80's, at which point a clutch of stylish new takes on the horror genre appeared and put some intriguing new spins on established formulas.

There was Tony Scott's erotically charged re-working of the vampire myth with the exceptional The Hunger, starring one of the most pulchritudinous casts ever in David Bowie, Susan Sarandon and Catherine Deneuve. There was Joe Dante's bizarre The Howling, first to the punch in taking on the werewolf legend, and a highly entertaining cheap thrill it is too, followed closely by Wolfen. But probably the best of these was An American Werewolf In London, directed by John Landis. This proved to be a useful experience for Landis, as he would later direct someone else undergoing some horrifying physical transformations, in Michael Jackson's Thriller video - and he turned into a werewolf too (ba-dum cha).

Seriously though, this is really one of the best werewolf movies out there, mainly because of the frequent doses of sick humour peppered throughout which lets us know that this is not a film which is taking its subject matter too seriously, even though it delivers on the fear factor and show-stopping set pieces. The opening 20 minutes neatly sets the scene and is a good summation of the film's approach. Two young American backpackers (David McNaughton and Griffin Dunne) are trekking around the bleak Yorkshire moors in the North of England, bantering about old girlfriends and telling bad jokes. Cold and irritable, Jack and David eventually arrive at a rustic pub called, invitingly, The Slaughtered Lamb.

This is a ramshackle boozer inhabited by a gaggle of unfriendly country yokels who stop talking the minute they come in, like a scene from an Eastwood western - we know Something's Up. It's a tremendously funny scene: There is the established concept of the "strangers in a strange village" motif, frequently used in the Hammer horror films of the 50's and 60's, usually when a group of daft westerners arrive in a Transylvanian settlement. Here,

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