Updating the age-old werewolf myth to 1980s California, The Howling traces a chilling journey through the seedy streets of Hollywood to the backwoods of a secluded health retreat, where Los Angeles television anchor Karen White (Dee Wallace) is sent following a traumatizing brush with a serial killer. As Karen and her husband attempt to settle into the insular and secluded community of the “Colony," they discover a dark secret sheltered deep within the forest and its misfit inhabitants.
Tense and increasingly foreboding as Karen’s nightmare
becomes more and more rooted in reality, The Howling arrives at a horrific apex
with the visual reveal of the film’s central monster. Standing upright with
spindly limbs and elongated, rabbit-like ears, there is something not quite
human or wolf to the preternatural werewolves of Dante’s movie. Produced by
special effects wizard Rob Bottin, the pre-CGI
human-to-werewolf transformations are gruesomely fascinating stand-out
moments that utilize a complex series of body and feature modulations. Captured
in real time by an attentive and unwavering camera, these include elongating
teeth and appendages, pulsating skin (achieved through the use of air pockets),
and an accompanying soundtrack of stretching bone-and-sinew special effects for
maximum stomach-turning impact. Originally an assistant to The Howling’s first
special effects artist Rick Baker, Bottin assumed full control of the film’s
effects duties when Baker left to work on 1981’s other werewolf hit An American
Werewolf in London. Joe Dante recalled his experience with Bottin and the
painstaking process of the werewolf transformations, recalling,
“Rob is one of the few geniuses that I’ve worked with in
this business - maybe Jerry Goldsmith might be the other one - and he wasn’t
just innovative, he was a perfectionist. And the first day that Rob Piccardo
had to put on his makeup and do his transformation, Rob started at five o’clock
in the morning. five o’clock in the afternoon he still wasn’t done. Eight
o’clock at night he still wasn’t done. Rob Riccardo had to stay there that
night in the makeup, and came back the next morning and we shot, because it
just wasn’t ready. And he was right, because he wanted it to be great. He told
me that he felt that this was his big break.”
Despite the impressive results of Bottin’s work, some of
the film’s special effects are less successful onscreen, as in the case of a
late night werewolf intercourse scene where a longshot reveals the two
silhouettes to be quite clearly animated. Another more subtle example of this
somewhat jarring discrepancy between close-up and full figure representation
occurs in a multi-werewolf fade out toward the end of the film. Dante addressed
this notable issue in the movie, contributed to the production by stop-motion
animator Dave Allen:
“We ran the rough cut for people and they would say ‘Wow,
that’s really interesting, what movie did that come from?’ And it was apparent
that what Dave had done was not working in terms of the reality of the rest of
the stuff we had shot. And so there’s only - I think - two little pieces of what he did and I think
one of them is like in the middle of the dissolve. And it's because, basically, we didn’t have a
werewolf suit from top to bottom that we could show, and so one of the few
times in the movie that you see an entire werewolf is in this dissolve at the
end of the movie where we see that there are three werewolves together, which
is another thing we couldn’t afford because we only had one werewolf suit. When
you look at that scene in the car where they’re being attacked it looks like
there’s a lot of werewolves - one werewolf suit, that’s all we had. And it’s all about editing.”
Ever essential to a great horror movie is a great horror
soundtrack, and The Howling features one that is spectacularly and effectively
in step with the tone of the film. Scored by the great Pino Donaggio, the film's music strikes a measured balance between lightness and weighted
tension in a movie that combines traditional horror and knowing humor. As Dante
elaborated,
“[Donaggio] had access to this church organ from some
church somewhere in Italy, and he based the score around that. And also, it’s
kind of an unusual score in The Howling because it’s got sort of a country feel
to it and it’s not the sort of portentious kind of scoring this kind of movie
usually has.”
Dante and Donaggio had met several years earlier during
production on Dante’s 1978 film Piranha. The director was surprised to find the
reputed Donaggio, who had previously worked on the Nicholas Roeg helmed horror
film Don’t Look Now, willing to work on the feature. Although neither director
nor composer was able to speak the other’s language, the former found an
Italian-speaking friend willing to work as an intermediary. Dante described a
process in which he would "run the movie for Pino and they would talk to
each other and translate into Italian…and so Pino would go away and he would
send the stuff, and it would be all numbered to put it into the film.”
Although after The Howling Dante formed a long-term
professional relationship with composer Jerry Goldsmith (the two would work
together on the Gremlins films as well as The ‘Burbs and Small Soldiers), the
director made it clear that a future collaboration with Donaggio is both likely
and welcome:
“I never had
occasion to go back to Pino, but now that I’m doing movies that are probably
largely financed from overseas, I’m sure I’m gonna ask him to work for me again.”
Peppered generously with in-jokes and star cameos from
the likes of Roger Corman and John Sayles, it’s easy to see why The Howling has
achieved a healthy cult status and a trail of sequels to prove it. Suspenseful,
dark, and horrifying in a visceral, stomach-knotting way unique to the best of
horror cinema, The Howling also has moments of surprising humor and
self-awareness. Tonally, the film spends much of its running time swinging
between horror thriller and satire, a combination that strikes a uniquely
seamless balance. Commenting on the potential marketability concerns of this
mixed message filmmaking, Dante states:
“Bob Rainey, who was running the company who I knew since
he used to work for Roger Corman, was the head of Avco Embassy and he was a
nice guy. The great thing about him was he had a very short attention span, and
he’d come in and say ‘How are things going?’ and you’d start to tell him, he’d
say ‘Great’ and he’d go away. My kind of executive. And so on the first day of
the dailies it was the bookstore, and we’re sitting in the room watching the
dailies and he says ‘Is this a horror picture or a comedy?’ And I said ‘Well,
that’s the point Bob, it could be one, could be the other,’ but I think each
one supports the other, it’s like you know, audiences go to these movies
because it’s a thrill ride and they want to have fun, and if you give them fun
in the place where their supposed to have fun, then they won’t laugh at the
really silly absurd things that their expected to buy in order to enjoy a
horror film. And as it turned out, it worked out fine.”
As legions of horror fans would likely agree, The Howling
is a film that ranks significantly better than fine. Rather it places among the
most chilling, technically cunning, and flat-out enjoyable cinema released
during that strange and utterly memorable decade for terror flicks - the
Eighties.