Sympathy for the Wolfman

Rob wanders ever closer to Halloween, but will he remember to stay on the road, and beware the moon?

What is the difference, do you think, between a horror film and a thriller? Is, for example, The Silence of the Lambs a horror film? It sure looks like one, with all that blood and shadows and people going "Agh! My face!", and the narrative arc is very faithful to the genre, culminating with a lone female confronting the monster in darkness. But there's something about it, isn't there, which stops us putting it away in the 'horror' section of our meticulously organised DVD collection. We stand, proudly naked after an enjoyable evening's viewing, and slip the DVD where it belongs - under 'thriller'.

Quentin Tarantino says the difference is simple: a thriller could happen, a horror could not. Now, knowing Tarantino he probably stole this idea from someone else, but nevertheless, I quite like it. Horror has to have some kind of supernatural bent, some form of monster that is incongrous to our notions of the real world. If you meet Michael Myers, you are in a horror film. You can tell this because if you shoot him repeatedly in the eyes, shouting 'Please will you just die you bastard', he just keeps walking towards you, all smug. If, on the other hand, you go up to creepy hotelier and mother-lover Norman Bates and stick a pencil in his eye, he will simply shriek theatrically and drop down dead. They are both knife-wielding psychos, but only one is supernaturally endowed.

And so to tonight's film - An American Werewolf in London (John Landis, 1981). Now, there is no doubt whatsoever that this is a horror film. It is about werewolves and zombies and ghosts and a world of magic. However, what makes it special is the way it plays with its genre.

I have watched American Werewolf many, many times. It was on BBC1 shortly after the introduction to my house of a Betamax VCR (as detailed in last week's exciting exploration of The Evil Dead) and we taped it. I then watched it repeatedly, until every line and every shot became burned into my teenage brain. Here are some reasons I love it.

1. Jenny Agutter

Sigh. Yum. Ahhh. Jenny Agutter. Hmmm.

When our eponymous protagonist David is attacked by a werewolf, he finds himself in a London hospital. This, it turns out, is the best hospital in the world, because you get Jenny Agutter as a nurse. Not only is she intelligent, confident and fun to be with, she is also - crucially - happy to take David back to her house and do a special naked shower dance with him. Now that's a nurse.

Nakedness aside, there is a brilliance to Agutter's portrayal of Nurse Alex Price that is key to the film's success. In a film where the moon turns men into giant wolves and zombies watch porn in cinemas, Alex feels very much like a real person. She is not some stereotypical girl-in-peril, there to be threatened by the monsters. She is a believable character with a normal life and small, beautiful quirks, played with convinction by Jenny "I-am-lovely" Agutter. She doesn't feel like she belongs in a horror film, she feels like she could just walk of the screen and join our world.

Gosh, that would be nice.

Sigh.

2. Remember the Alamo

Many American directors have tried to represent England on film. It is almost always entirely rubbish. You know the sort of thing. Everyone is basically Hugh Grant, we all live in a castle, you can drive from London to Yorkshire simply by going through a big field, that kind of thing. Well ha ha ha America. You bunch of obese cowboys with houses that grow out of the side of hills. Or something.

John Landis is American, and so are his protagonists, Jack and David. The England represented here is quite definitely and deliberately from an American perspective, and is thus populated by a number of peculiar and eccentric characters. The joy of it, however, is that these people all seem quite plausible. From Brian Glover's grumpy chess playing Yorkshireman to Paul Kember's clumsy and inept police sergeant, everyone here tastes real. The characters and situations are all at least a little familiar and resonate with an England that really exists.

Take for example David's first day alone on London, where he flicks through all of three television channels, finding nothing but snooker and adverts for tabloid sleaze. Or the polite conversation he makes as he waits, naked but for a woman's red coat, at a bus stop after his first night of carnivorous lunar activity. This is a real and believable England.

3. Stay on the Road

Landis has made a real world with real characters, but this is, of course, not a story about reality. It is about unreal monsters, impossible transformations and supernatural consequences. And this is why the film is great: not only does Landis acknowledge that this is a werewolf film, not only do we the audience know that this is a werewolf film; the characters all know it too.

Shortly after being bitten, David is visited in hospital by his friend Jack. This is a nice enough thing for any friend to do, made all the more impressive in this instance by the fact that Jack is dead, killed by the same werewolf that bit David. Jack appears from nowhere, all bitten up and stuff, and fills David in on the situation: get bitten by a werewolf, become a werewolf. Turn all hairy at full moon. Bite others. Jack himself is in limbo until David dies.

David, of course, reacts with some disbelief. Werewolves just exist in films, right? And Landis has lots of fun referencing these films, both in dialogue (David's knowledge of Hollywood horror is, thankfully, encyclopaedic) and in cinematographic nods to previous werewolf films. And this is genius. Because now the tension between this very-real world we are watching and this very-unreal world that the story presents works to the benefit of the film rather than against it.

Let's take a different example: The Nightmare on Elm Street series. Part one is really good: unsettling, imaginative and properly spooky. Part two is much less so, and so on. The law of diminishing returns applies and by parts five and six we are watching utter, unscary nonsense. But why? Well, because the world of the Elm Street films became more self referential and thus less and less believable. Freddy started to literally wink at the camera and the film became too keen on playing postmodern games of 'look at me, I'm a horror film'. The blurry boundary between waking and dreaming that makes the first film creepy is lost.

American Werewolf sticks to the road: it never takes its eyes off the fact that it is a horror film, where deaths matter and rules apply. It still manages to get away with intertextual playfulness like David asking if he needs a silver bullet to kill himself. But what makes it great is that the supernatural world seems to exist just behind the veneer of reality. Jack pops up out of nowhere, his increasingly decayed appearance at odds with the mundane surroundings, and of course David himself knows that the monstrous side of himself is ready to surface, uncontrollable and unstoppable.

So, there we are. Go watch. The films also has ground breaking special effects that still look amazing now, a great soundtrack, lots of laughs and a number of really effective shock moments. And, of course, Jenny Agutter. In a shower.

Just don't go anywhere near American Werewolf in Paris. Complete crap.