Essay: You never forget your first horror movie
'The Howling' still howls 44 years later
I want to keep my short reviews and essays free—like the hot dog chili at 711—but I need your support to continue doing so. $5/$50/$75. Help keep me off the streets and hunched over a computer, writing reviews of sexy Nicole Kidman movies.
The first horror movie I ever saw was a werewolf movie called The Howling.
It is a cheap lurid B-movie, but don’t tell that to my 12-year-old self. Watching The Howling was a profound experience for that little boy—an almost holy one. The God of the Old Testament is fire and disease. His angels are half-human, half-animal, and carry flaming swords. They’re terrifying.
Bible study was terrifying. So was The Howling.
I remember watching it on the family television, a 19-inch Zenith with plastic wood panelling bracketed a curved glass surface, like part of a bubble, that cooked and melted primary colors, and cast a haunting nimbus around faces. I remember bubbling skin, sharp canines, and naked women. Oh, yes, naked women. You have to understand that this was the ’80s. Nude photos were a rare commodity. Little did I know that 30 years later, in the distant future, everyone would be naked.
The movie taught me valuable life lessons. For example, you always need more silver bullets than you think you do. Also, sometimes the things we’re scared of are hiding, and sometimes they’re not.
I watched The Howling behind my parents’ backs. In sixth grade, all children are weird little cat burglars exploring a world ruled by despotic adults who are intent on keeping all the fun chained up in the basement of our modest, split-level ranch house in the endless suburbs of D.C. The movie was released in 1981, but it wasn’t until the summer of 1986 that my parents rented it. In those days, renting a movie was a big deal. An event! It was like going to the movies, only you could eat scrambled eggs.
Our brand-new VCR, a Betamax, was the size of a pizza oven. It sat on top of the television, like a parasite that consumed videotapes, its innards filled with gears, motors, and belts that groaned and clicked as it digested. One press of the play button and it was showtime, after a brief storm of static.
The Betamax transformed the basement. Suddenly, there were nights when the door was closed, and kids were forbidden from going downstairs. The adults were watching R-rated movies. “R” for “Really good, if not better, than any movie 12-year-olds were allowed to see.”
The closest I had ever come to watching an actual R-rated horror movie was when I saw a black-and-white fright fest about giant rubber spiders. Eventually, as I grew up, I would watch aliens explode out of chests and masked maniacs murder horny teenagers with machetes.
***
During dinner, I overheard my folks talk in hushed tones about The Howling. “The special effects are amazing,” they whispered.
“What are you talking about?” I asked.
“Just a scary movie,” my mother said.
I persisted, turning to my dad and asking if he’d been scared. He repeated after my mom. It was “just” a scary movie.
What kind of movie could scare my dad? This was inconceivable to me. We’re talking about a man who threw his hands up in the air on roller coasters. And my mother? She was the moon.
I never knew either of them to express fear. Instead, they were always whispering around me. They’d turn their backs on me and conspire.
They murmured about how to pay the bills. News of an impending hurricane was immediately followed by mumbles about what to do. They huddled in shadows after coming home from the hospital, where my sister was in a coma, the result of a terrible car accident. The night she lost control of her car on the highway, there was a late-night phone call and a closed bedroom door.
I’d ask them what was wrong, and they’d just smile. I shouldn’t worry, they told me.
I knew they were hiding something.
Suddenly, it seemed like the Ark of the Covenant was downstairs — a sacred object of supernatural power that could scare my dad… and they were keeping it a secret.
I had recently seen the adventure movie Raiders of the Lost Ark, a movie deemed appropriate for kids my age, despite multiple scenes of creative violence, such as the Nazi whose face is melted by God's wrath after the mysterious Ark is opened. "Can God melt faces?" I asked. It was a serious theological question.
Raiders had frightened me, but I acted like everything was copacetic, which was one of my dad’s favorite words.
“I want to see it,” I said. My tone was matter-of-fact and bloodless. Almost a command, but I knew better.
My mother laughed and squished my cheeks between her thumb and forefinger. Then, adoration morphed into fierce authoritarianism. “No,” she said, which meant: No, you can’t watch the scary movie, no, you can’t ask if you can watch the scary movie, and no, there aren’t any appeals or petitions.
Luckily, on Mondays, I had an hour and a half after school before my mother finished her work at the church. A window of blessed freedom, my chance to fight the hypocrisy of the Mother-Father-Industrial Complex. I tiptoed through the empty house to my parents’ bedroom. With a cat burglar’s nimble fingers, I diligently lifted the tape cassette from my parents’ dresser, as if the slightest movement would set off hidden poison darts. The cover was the first clue that this movie was something special: claws, a woman screaming, and the words "The Howling" in blood-red letters. I slid the tape from the box. I scurried to the basement and slid the tape into the machine’s rectangular mouth and pressed play.
I was not prepared for what I saw.
***
The Howling was directed by Joe Dante, a protégé of legendary bad movie maestro Roger Corman. Dante would go on to direct the sinister classic Gremlins. That breakout led to bigger Hollywood budgets, rising stars, and, in 1991, the weirdest and most self-aware sequel of all time: Gremlins 2.
His movies often blended comedy and horror, incorporating elements of Looney Tunes and grindhouse.
Dante belongs to a special pantheon of subversive genre filmmakers from the ’80s who, at their best, churned out midnight movies that transcended their own trashiness. I have a soft spot for directors like Dante and his peers, like John Carpenter and David Cronenberg, to name two more favorites of mine.
Carpenter’s The Thing is a claustrophobic, killer-alien picture that remains a shocking, paranoid delight. Cronenberg’s The Fly is a cerebral, gross-out body horror epic. Both films were technically remakes. But under the direction of pop auteurs like Carpenter and Cronenberg, they became something more. Beneath the schlock lay dark stories about 1980s America, which was—and still is—a hostile and suspicious place.
The Howling was more than a werewolf movie, but Dante respected the subgenre nevertheless. And it’s one of my favorites, right behind Fast Zombies and Things That Look Like Spiders.
The themes in werewolf movies are eternal: man versus nature, man versus himself, man versus silver bullets. Werewolves are also better than vampires because they don’t have to wear pants.
A successful werewolf movie should do one thing: transform a man into a dog. That’s it. All men are beasts. And one day, all boys become men.
In fact, 1981 was a banner year for lycanthropes. An American Werewolf in London also came out that year. Like The Howling, it featured a cutting-edge transformation scene that utilized various types of practical special effects. Both movies were more or less tongue-in-cheek.
Most people would probably agree that An American Werewolf in London is the superior wolfman flick. Those people would be wrong.
An American Werewolf in London is full of knowing winks, as if its director, former hotshot John Landis, thought he was too good for the project. But The Howling is what it is. A ridiculous Reagan-era monster movie that exploited the fears of the era. There are serial killers. Bad mustaches. A softcore sex scene between two people who turn into werewolves while humping.
The Howling deserves its cult status. I know now how campy and overwrought it was. But I took the movie deadly seriously as I stared into the old Zenith’s unblinking eye.
The plot of The Howling is simple: A TV anchorwoman traumatized by a serial killer is sent by her therapist to a hippie colony that is actually a pack of free-loving werewolves. The end of the movie offers up two twist zingers. The high point is, of course, a scene where our heroine is cornered by a murderer she thought was dead. Instead of running, she strikes a frozen pose of terror and watches him transform into a giant wolf. His forehead pulses. Canine claws poke through flesh. A wolf’s snout punches through his face.
I remember watching this scene in total awe. I didn’t know at the time that I was watching a preview of adolescence. One day, soon, hair would appear where there had never been hair before.
The Howling was prophecy. A message. God's voice speaking through fangs: "People change."
At one point, during the 90-minute movie, I stopped feeling afraid. I became quiet and still. Invisible. I let The Howling pass through me, as if it were the Holy Spirit.
I sat through the credits and slowly floated upstairs to reflect on what I had just seen and to get a strawberry Pop-Tart. I don’t think I toasted it. I probably nibbled the corners of the processed pastry, then hovered over it like a priest praying over a communion wafer.
That night, I had a dream: I was a werewolf, and my mom didn’t recognize me.
I left the tape in the Betamax. By the time I realized this the next afternoon, my mom had already found the movie in the machine, put it in its box, and returned it to the video store. The Betamax was empty. But I was not in trouble. That night, I spent time in the kitchen reading comic books while my mom prepared dinner.
“How did you sleep last night?” she asked.
“Oh, fine. I slept fine.” That was a lie, of course. Being an adult is all about being afraid, but not letting on that you’re afraid.
“Good,” she said.
New 150 Word Review: ‘Cat On A Hot Tin Roof’ (1958)
Hello, beloved subscribers and followers. I am launching a new newsletter in a few weeks. It will be called Advice For Men. There will be advice and essays about therapy, anxiety, and loneliness. And BBQ? The newsletter will be for men . What is a man? Great question. Here’s the link to the About Page where you can sign up!
Random 150 Word Review: ‘Valkyrie’ (2008)
Something about werewolves must’ve been in the zeitgeist back then. An American Werewolf In London is the one that got me as a small child. I don’t know that I’ve seen a better F/X transformation on screen since, at least not that injected fear and revulsion like that first transformation scene did. I think it was the first time as a child that I thought, “Oh, this movie is too adult for me to watch.”
THIS is why I enjoy reading you so much. With your prose, you put me there, at your side, as you swipe the tape, as you press PLAY on the Betamax, as you experience a rite of passage that all of us have gone thru. Reminds me of the first time I saw a Playboy centerfold...man, I'll never forget that green towel!
I could prattle on about THE EXORCIST, which inflamed all my latent Catholic fears and mightily challenged my nascent atheism when I saw it during its first run; or cheapie horror flix like THEM or THE GIANT GILA MONSTER, which scared the beejeebuzz outta me when I was an impressionable kid.
But the one that did me in? CARNIVAL OF SOULS, a total low-budget fright fest featuring a protagonist who was supposed to be dead, the ghosts that were set on retrieving her, and a spectral, abandoned carousel. I STILL get scared, 58 years later, that I'm gonna see a ghost standing next to me when I look in a mirror.
Yeah, you never forget your first! Thanks, John.