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Howl, howl, howl, howl!
-King Lear, Act V, Scene III
When werewolves come, they come not in single snouts but in battalions. The new movie decade has ushered in a whole pack of lycanthropes, variously dispersed through The Howling, Wolfen, An American Werewolf in London, and (coming soon) Full Moon High, and suddenly Western audiences are reaching for their silver bullets as if timewarped back to the lupine heyday of Lon Chaney.
Miracle advances in special FX wizardry may satisfy some as the reason for this sudden Hour of the Wolf. But it takes more than a chance upsurge of jazzy genius in Hollywood's palpitating-pelt and elastic-nose departments to fully explain why so many screen stars are currently being pursued through woods, zoos, or New York streets by furry ravening mutants or red-eyed hand-held cameras.
If werewolves are loping onto the screen now-plus a fair-to-generous rear-guard sprinkling of apes and Neanderthals and other marauding incarnations of the id-it's not just because maestros with papier-mâche and soluble rubber are suddenly at largeon Sunset Boulevard, it's because the age has suddenly invoked and demanded these ogres.
They're the snout-head of the New American Nightmare.
Paws a pulse-beat to ponder: that currently coinciding with the spate of lycanthropes and ids-in-sheep'sclothing is an oddly belated-looking rash of "conspiracy" movies (Blow Out, Cutter's Way, et al. ) vaguely genuflecting to the bygone rumpus of Watergate; that the American political villain of the last ten years with the most wolf-like features is Richard Nixon; and that a Gothic strain of camouflaged horror-a motif shared by both Watergate and the Vietnam war-runs through recent films as diverse as Altered States, Southern Comfort, The Shining, Wolfen, and Shoot the Moon.
American cinema in the early Eighties, grappling with the injuries and images of a traumatic past twenty years, is in the grip of the most fascinating obsession with split-personality horror themes in its history. Good guys vs. bad guys have long been the staple of popular movies, but in the last two years Good and Evil have become knitted up as never so closely or obsessively before in the same skin. Violence lives thinly disguised by urbanity; still waters run deep with dangers and demons: WASPs become wolves at full moon; virgin Nature...