People watch this one on repeat for the transformation scene alone, but there's so much more to John Landis' horror-comedy than just Rick Baker's sterling lycanthropic effects. For one, American Werewolf is one of the most genuinely successful mashups of horror and comedy, being laugh-out-loud funny as well as intensely frightening. The nightmare sequence, in which David (David Naughton) has his throat slit by Nazi soldiers wearing face-masks of monsters, is in two minutes more shocking than most horror movies manage to be in their entire run-time. The dark humour is where most would imagine Landis would shine, what with the director having made his name in comedy, and Griffin Dunne's rapidly decomposing spirit friend of David's brings most of the grisly laughs. But it's in those gruesomely realised scenes of attack during the full moon that An American Werewolf In London rightly earns its reputation as a horror classic.
Lover of film, writer of words, pretentious beyond belief. Thinks Scorsese and Kubrick are the kings of cinema, but PT Anderson and David Fincher are the dashing young princes. Follow Brogan on twitter if you can take shameless self-promotion: @BroganMorris1
