Day Three: The Howling (1981)
Joe Dante’s The Howling is a special object of nostalgia for me, as it was the first R-rated film I saw as a child (I almost said Jaws but then I remembered that somehow got away with a PG). The Howling was also my very first encounter with full frontal nudity, and its one of the most simulataneously arousing and terrifying bits of sexual business not featured in a movie by David Lynch.
Joe Dante is appreciated by the nerds, but it seems the more vaunted critics never really gave him a fair shake*, which is typical but too bad. Dante’s films, at their best, have wonderfully unhinged tones: part screwball comedy, part in joke, and part jolting malevolence. Watch Gremlins again, before the ending that was probably written by exec. producer Steven Spielberg (and the ending is fine), the film is one of the most subversive, unhinged so called children’s movies of the 1980s.
The Howling, a werewolf movie largely set in a bizarre backwoods rehab center, is another film that continually blindsinds you with tonal corkscrews. The film is truly goofy in places (there are even more werewolf puns here than the more obvious An American Werewolf in London), affectionate in others, and, at times, quite horrific.
The Howling doesn’t use its sense of humor as a license to not give a shit though. One of the cliches of the genre is that humor enhances fright, and The Howling is a lesser known Exhibit Z in support of that theory. The opening attempted murder scene that sets the story into motion is sleazy and claustrophobic, and the more explicit wolfiness that ensues at the rehab center is as impressive and weird as you’d hope from the f/x guy behind John Carpenter’s The Thing.
Dee Wallace Stone and Christopher Stone (married in real life) root the film in something a bit more tangible than what your usual scream queen would bring to the role. Dee Wallace always seemed very vulnerable, and just a little bit off, spacy, to me. You want to protect her but there’s an edge there that’s a bit of a mystery. She could be one of those housewives’ whose keeps their husband in the back freezer. This intangible domestic frustration served her well in Cujo and E.T. and it serves her even better in The Howling, which is her best personal showcase.
Christopher Stone (oh, how I miss when people in movies were allowed to look like normal, cool, middle aged people) plays off his real life wife well here, and he convincingly sells his frustration with his Dee’s growing remoteness. He betrays her early on here (a bit reminiscent of Cassavetes in Rosemary’s Baby) and both Dante and Stone know precisely how to undersell it so it lingers among the more obvious thrills.
As is normally the case with Dante, the remote rehab center is seemingly populated with a cast of nearly anyone who appeared in a horror film during a certain twenty year period of Dante’s adolescence. But, again, and this should really be stressed because so many filmmakers today don’t seem to get it, THIS DOES NOT DISTRACT FROM THE NARRATIVE.
The injokes, the background players, these add an element of appreciation, of tradition, of fun, of history, but they are never used in place of a story that wouldn’t work just as well without all of that. It should be noted that the script was written by acclaimed filmmaker John Sayles, and that he imbues the thing with a bit of the flakiness that can be found in his cameo appearance here as a morgue attendant.
I feel like I’m spinning my wheels here. I haven’t gotten to the bottom of why this film works so well, there’s something light, airy, eerie about it, a very specific sensual tone (its more than a little empathetic to the creatures and that helps) that carries on after the terrific effects have maybe worn off a little. Something about the dislocation of the rehab center, deep in the woods. The Howling, regardless of your appreciation or dedication, should also be seen for that priceless ending alone, which plays like Network as re-written by Stephen King.
*I say that having done little to no research in the matter.
