SOMETHING TOMOWL ABOUT

DIRECTOR JOE DANTE EXPLAINS HOW THE HOWLING DEFIED EXPECTATIONS TO BECOME ONE OF THE CLASSIC WEREWOLF MOVIES

- OLIVER PFEIFFER

WE DIDN'T WANT TO ADVERTISE it like a werewolf picture, so we disguised it to make it look more like a slasher movie,” director Joe Dante says about his 1981 lycanthrope horror classic The Howling. “The beginning looks like a slasher movie, and the idea was to get the audience into the story and interested in the characters before we make them buy into the supernatural stuff.”

The Howling commences with a suspenseful opening in which television news reporter Karen White (Dee Wallace) agrees to confront her stalker, serial killer “Eddie the Mangler” (Robert Picardo), in a sleazy porno theatre in a heroic plot to apprehend him. Following the subsequent killing of the monstrous perpetrator, the amnesiac Karen becomes traumatised by the ordeal and is sent by her therapist (Patrick Macnee) to an isolated coastal colony to recuperate.

However, she learns that her horrors have only begun after she hears strange howls in the middle of the night. “If you walk into the middle of The Exorcist, you will basically see a lot of standard horror movie effects,” continues Dante. “However, if you go in at the beginning, you watch all these upsetting, subtle dark things that go on with this little girl that you care about, so by the time the head starts spinning and the vomit etc, you completely buy into it. We thought we'd do The Howling the same way.”

HUNGRY LIKE THE WOLF

Based on horror author Gary Brandner’s 1977 novel of the same name,