25 Best Werewolf Movies Ever Made

Trust a comedy director to make one of the all time great scary movies.

John Landis had no real horror experience before making An American Werewolf In London. He came into the project off the back of making Animal House and Blues Brothers and the marketing for American Werewolf played up its comedy pedigree.

And it is a very funny film, sharply written and packed with memorably odd minor characters and quotable exchanges. But dwelling on its comic elements takes away from the fact that American Werewolf is hugely effective as a straight up horror film. In fact, one of the reasons why the film initially struggled for financing was because of the impression that it was too scary to work as a comedy.

The humour serves to humanise American backpacker hero David, the latest movie protagonist to survive what seems to be an animal attack only to turn into a deadly beast himself under the full moon. But rather than play out like a comedy, that just gives David's clearly doomed fate some additional pathos.

And when it comes to the gruesome and traumatic business, this is a movie that absolutely does not hold back. David's bizarre nightmare of American suburban bliss torn apart by monstrous Nazi stormtroopers is a narrative non-sequitur but the stuff that inspires actual nightmares in the real world. And the extended and horrific transformation that he goes through to become the wolf is a feat of practical effects work that has not been matched four decades on.

Scary, funny and poignant, American Werewolf isn't just the best werewolf movie of all time, it would make a play at being the best horror of any kind.