Joe Dante’s 1981 film *The Howling* is a certified werewolf classic, famous for its groundbreaking and terrifying transformation scene. But what secrets lie behind the production? In a recent interview, Dante looked back on the making of the film, revealing how they disguised it as a slasher, the studio’s strange demands, and the one question a kid asked that still haunts him.
🔪 A Slasher in Wolf’s Clothing
Dante admitted that the marketing for *The Howling* was deliberately misleading. “We didn’t want to advertise it like a werewolf picture, so we disguised it to make it look more like a slasher movie,” he explained. The film’s opening, which sees a news reporter confront a serial killer in a porno theater, was designed to trick the audience. The idea was to get viewers invested in the characters and the suspenseful story *before* introducing the supernatural werewolf elements.
🎬 The Transformation That Was Too Long
The film’s most iconic sequence is Eddie’s painful, drawn-out metamorphosis into a werewolf, a masterpiece of practical effects by a 21-year-old Rob Bottin. However, Dante revealed that the studio forced him to make the scene longer than he wanted. After a successful preview screening, the studio gave them more money to improve the effects but insisted the transformation be elongated. This led to a funny but valid criticism during a test screening with kids. “One of them said, ‘Why don’t she run away?’” Dante recalled. “Of course, why doesn’t she run away? Well, she can’t because we’ve been told it had to be this long – that’s why!”.
🐺 The Year of the Werewolf
Dante was aware that John Landis was making *An American Werewolf in London* at the same time, leading to a friendly rivalry over special effects artists Rick Baker and Rob Bottin. What he didn’t expect was even more competition. In 1981, two other werewolf films, *Wolfen* and *Full Moon High*, were also released. “None of these projects were copies of each other,” Dante said. “Suddenly it was the year of the werewolf!”. Despite the competition, *The Howling*’s unique blend of satire and horror ensured its place in cinema history.
Bibliography:
Pfeiffer, Oliver. “Something to Howl About.” SFX, issue 394, Future plc, August 2025, pp. 64-67.
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