An American Werewolf in London Analysis: What John Landis Wrote in 1969 and What Reached the Screen in 1981

The argument

The film that announces its own ending

Two American kids climb out of a truck full of sheep. A pub called The Slaughtered Lamb turns them out into the night with a warning. One of them dies on the moors, and the other spends the rest of the film being told, by his dead friend and eventually by a whole row of his own victims, exactly what he is and exactly when it will happen. John Landis said as much himself: they are dead from the first frame, and the sheep are not subtle.

Rules first, then the hope

That is the structural wager of An American Werewolf in London. Most horror films withhold the rules. This one hands them over in Act One, then spends eighty minutes making you want the rules to be wrong. The comedy is not relief from the horror; it is the sound of a person refusing to believe what he has been plainly told. This analysis reads the shooting draft, an undated script circulated as the August 1980 revision, against the finished film and finds that nearly every change Landis made on the way to the screen sharpens that one idea.

Act One, 7m–11m

The Slaughtered Lamb: the whole film in one pub

The script sets the pub up as a place that has been “modernized” badly, all greasy stainless steel, and describes the regulars as lean, sullen, and inbred. The film keeps the staging and drops the sneer. Brian Glover’s chess player is not a yokel; he is a man who tells a very good joke and then has to decide whether to let two strangers die. Landis said he likes characters who tell jokes because a joke is never about the joke, it is about how it is told, and Glover’s telling is the point. The Alamo joke lands, the room roars, and then Jack asks about the star on the wall and a dart hits the plaster.

The pentangle, per Universal Studios

Watch what the script does with the pentangle. Jack identifies it out loud, and the reference he reaches for is not folklore but Universal Studios: he tells David that Lon Chaney Jr. and the studio maintain it is the mark of the wolf man. That line is doing two jobs. It is a genre joke, and it is the first of the film’s rules delivered in plain English to a character who treats it as trivia. David’s reply in the script is that the owners might be from Texas. The film keeps both lines.

The exit line is the thesis

The three parting instructions are stacked deliberately: stay on the road, keep clear of the moors, and, from the chess player, “Beware the moon, lads.” The boys will break all three within four minutes of screen time, and the script makes the breaking a punchline: they recite the warnings to each other in the dark, look down, and realize they have wandered off the road. The film adds a single word after the recitation, a small “oops” that turns the moment from ominous to funny, which is exactly the temperature Landis wanted the whole picture to run at.

Two production facts explain why the pub feels like one room when it was two. Its exterior sits in a Welsh village; the interior is the Black Swan, a pub in Surrey. That five-pointed star was not there when the crew arrived; one member of the art department has said he drew it on the wall himself. The night moors, for the record, are not the moors at all: Landis has said the attack was shot in Windsor Great Park in weather so cold the rain rig froze.

Act One turn, 33m–36m

Jack’s warning: a horror film that tells you the ending

Jack comes back to warn David, and the warning is complete. In the script he lays out the entire mythology in four beats: they were attacked by a lycanthrope; Jack was murdered and walks the earth in limbo until the curse is lifted; the wolf’s bloodline must be severed; the last remaining werewolf must be destroyed. Then the turn: “It’s you, David.” Next the clock: the full moon, two days away. And then the only exit the story will ever offer, which is that David should take his own life.

This is the film’s inciting revelation, its rulebook, and its ending, delivered at the thirty-three-minute mark by a corpse eating toast. What makes it playable is that David spends the scene talking back. In the script he calls Jack a hamburger and a meat loaf, tells him he is talking like Boris Karloff, and shouts for a nurse. The film keeps the meat loaf and drops the hamburger, and adds a line that is not on the page: David asking, twice, whether he is asleep or awake. That small addition matters, because the film has just spent ten minutes teaching the audience that they cannot tell either.

Why the warning has to be funny

Landis traced the origin of the scene to something he saw in Yugoslavia in 1969, working as a gofer on Kelly’s Heroes: a roadside burial at a crossroads where a man was interred feet-first, wrapped in canvas and garlic and rosaries, so that he would not get up. What stayed with him was not the ritual but his own reaction to it. He and the driver he was with would have been completely unequipped to deal with the dead getting up, and the way people deal with what they cannot process is to make jokes. Jack asking for a piece of toast is that idea, staged.

The scene ends with David kissing Alex and telling her, quietly, that he is a werewolf. She asks whether he means the visits from dead friends or the becoming-a-monster part, and he concedes he was probably dreaming. The audience has now been told the truth twice and watched it dismissed twice. The next section counts how many more times that happens.

Act One, 31m–32m

The dream within a dream

The script’s version of this scene is a straight horror interruption. David’s family is at home in New York, his brother and sister watching The Muppet Show, when four things the script calls loathsome, bestial demons dressed as Storm Troopers break in with machine guns and kill everyone, David last. He wakes in the hospital, decides not to disturb the sleeping Alex, and reaches for her book. That is the whole beat on the page. It is not the draft’s only nightmare: the script also gives David two forest dreams, one in which he runs down a fawn and one in which he finds a hospital bed in a clearing, pulls back the covers, and meets his own corpse as it opens yellow eyes and bares fangs. The film keeps both, and the second is the image most people remember from the hospital act.

The second waking

The film keeps the massacre and then does something the script does not: David wakes, a nurse tells him she has just the thing for a nightmare, opens the curtains, and one of the demons is behind them with a knife. Then he wakes again. Landis has said he lifted the dream-within-a-dream device directly from Buñuel’s The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie and turned it around into a scare; Jenny Agutter has described the stabbing as a moment she played with her body jerking on each withdrawal of the blade, which shocked even the director.

Why Nazis, and why here

Landis’s explanation for the demons’ uniforms is character logic rather than shock value. David is afraid he is losing his mind, so his dreams have to reach into his own experience, and the safest place he knows is his family; the most frightening thing a Jewish American kid of his generation could imagine invading that place is a Nazi. Rick Baker recalled that the script said only “Nazi demons” and that the creatures were designed from that phrase outward, the first one with a helmet.

Structurally, the double dream is the film’s way of paying for Jack’s breakfast visit, which follows almost immediately. Having just been fooled twice about what is real, the audience cannot dismiss Jack as a dream any more confidently than David can. On the page, Jack’s visit had to carry that ambiguity alone. The film builds it a foundation first.

Act Two, 42m–46m

Undead Jack and the Wolf Man rule

Jack’s second appearance, in the bathroom mirror of Alex’s flat, is the one the script flags in a parenthetical as a big scare. On the page, the exchange that follows is a repeat of the breakfast argument with the volume down: Jack insists the fangs will be real, David refuses to accept it, and Alex wakes up to find David alone. The film adds a beat where Jack picks up one of Alex’s things and does a voice, which Griffin Dunne plays as a corpse trying to lighten the mood, and swaps the script’s insult for a Yiddish one. Both versions end the same way: David triumphant, insisting it was just him.

The scene that is not on the page

What happens next is the most consequential addition Landis made between August 1980 and release. In the script, Alex wakes, David says it was just him, and the scene cuts to Dr. Hirsch driving to East Proctor. In the film, they go back to bed and David asks whether she has ever seen The Wolf Man. She wonders if he means the Oliver Reed one; he means the old one, and he walks her through it: Lugosi bites Chaney, Chaney becomes the wolf, and Claude Rains, playing the father, is the one who kills him. Then David states the rule he has drawn from it: he thinks a werewolf can only be killed by someone who loves it.

Two rulebooks

Alex asks what he is talking about, and he admits he does not know. But the audience has now been handed a second rulebook, and it contradicts the first. Jack’s rule is that the bloodline must be severed and that David must do it himself. David’s rule, borrowed from Universal in 1941, is that love does the killing. The film will test the second rule in its final ninety seconds, and the outcome is the subject of the American Werewolf in London ending explained below.

Landis has talked about Curt Siodmak’s Larry Talbot as one of the great tragic figures, a man who spends four films trying to die and cannot manage it, and the addition of this scene reads as his way of putting that lineage on the record. Alex’s reply, that she is torn between pitying him and finding him attractive, is also new to the film, and it is the truest line either of them says about the relationship.

Act Two midpoint, 57m–59m

The transformation: written in 1969, built in 1981

The script’s transformation is a page and a half of prose, and it reads like a dare. Bone and muscle bend and reform; the flesh visibly moves; the mouth bleeds as fangs emerge; the jaw extends and the skull changes shape; the fingers curl back as claws burst forward. The scene direction is precise about one thing above all, which is that the change is agony, and the dialogue is precise about one other: David’s apology, mid-scream, for having called Jack a meat loaf.

Landis has said the sequence was conceived in 1969 with three conditions attached: it would be shown in bright, harsh light; there would be no cutaways; and it would hurt. He had the music picked out at the same time. He gave Rick Baker the script in 1971, while the two were making Schlock, and asked him to solve it. Baker’s own account is that the problem sat with him for a decade, that he had begun designing a transformation for Joe Dante’s The Howling when Landis called with financing, and that the argument between the two of them about who had the idea first is now part of the film’s folklore.

What the sequence is about

Landis is direct about the metaphor: the change is puberty, the body doing weird, frightening things without permission, and he has called it, more bluntly, an erection metaphor. That reading explains the staging choices that otherwise look like showing off. The living room is lit like a bathroom. David is naked before the change begins. The camera stays on the hand as it lengthens rather than cutting to a reaction. The audience is asked to share physical agony rather than watch a trick, and Baker’s crew have described the shoot as roughly a week, one or two shots a day, with David Naughton in makeup for hours and, for the body shots, set into a hole in a raised floor so that puppeteers could work from beneath him.

The music is the last piece of the design, and it is a script-to-screen story of its own. On the page, the main title was to be Cat Stevens’s “Moon Shadow.” Stevens refused, and by the production’s account Bob Dylan declined to license his “Blue Moon” recording for religious reasons as well. What survived was the idea Landis had from the start, a doo-wop standard under a scene of bodily horror, and “Blue Moon” ended up used three times across the film, including under the change itself. Elmer Bernstein, who scored the rest of the picture, had wanted to write for the metamorphosis; Landis told him the song was already spoken for.

Act Two, 65m–66m

The tube station

The kills on the night of the first full moon are written as three short movements, each with a different tone. Harry and Judith in the park are a couple sneaking round the back of a friend’s flat to give him a scare, killed mid-prank. The three derelicts at the trash fire are comedy right up to the moment their dog runs. The commuter, named in the script and in the film as Gerald Bringsley, gets the only full sequence, and it is built on the pursuit grammar of the moors: a sound, a denial, a glimpse, a run.

The escalator shot

The script plays it almost exactly as shot, down to the chocolate bar from the vending machine and the line about reporting this. What the page cannot convey is scale, and that is what the escalator shot is for. Bringsley falls, bloodies his nose, sits defeated on the moving stairs, and the camera looks down the escalator as the wolf walks into the bottom of the frame. Landis has said he became so enamored of Baker’s creature that he showed it too much elsewhere, and that this distant, brief look is the one that works. The stuntman’s account of the fall was that Landis wanted death in his face; the shot delivers it without a close-up of the monster.

Act Two, 67m–71m

Naked at the zoo

The script cuts from the wolf climbing the escalator toward its victim to a tiger roaring in a cage, and then finds David asleep, naked, by the wolves’ enclosure. He picks something from his teeth, notices his fingernails, and does what the script calls a complete Stan Laurel when he realizes where he is. The film, which was shot at the London Zoo before opening hours with the actual wolves, keeps the sequence nearly to the letter, including the famous balloon-thief negotiation with a small boy and the coat stolen from an older couple on a park bench.

The point of all this is not relief. It is dramatic irony run at full speed. The audience has just watched six people die and knows the cabbie’s news before David hears it. Every joke he makes in the raincoat on the bus is a joke made by a murderer who does not yet know it, and the script is explicit that he comes back to Alex euphoric, feeling like an athlete, asking for a quickie. Landis has said that Larry Talbot’s tragedy is that his condition kills everybody but him; David’s version of that tragedy is that it makes him feel wonderful.

From euphoria to the police in ninety seconds

The taxi driver’s line about the murders is the turn, and the film moves it faster than the page. In the script David gets out of the cab, argues with Alex on the pavement, and confronts a policeman with a stream of insults designed to get himself arrested. The film keeps the insults, trims the most extreme one, and adds the beat that changes the last act: David tells Alex he loves her, tells her she has to stay away from him because he is not safe, and runs into traffic. On the page he simply runs. That declaration is what the American Werewolf in London ending answers.

Act Two climax, 79m–84m

The porno cinema: the undead hold a meeting

On the page, the theatre plays a film to be determined, and an earlier scene has Nurse Gallagher say she is off to see an American Mafia picture called See You Next Wednesday, the recurring title Landis plants in his films. By the time he scouted London in 1981, the cinema he had in mind had become a porno house, so the production shot its own short film under the same title and screened that instead. The setting changed from Leicester Square to Piccadilly Circus for the same reason; the script’s dialogue names the square, the film’s names the circus.

The meeting itself is written almost line for line. Jack introduces Gerald Bringsley, who is kept in shadow because he is a fresh kill; Bringsley says David has widowed his wife and orphaned his children and must die; Harry Berman, Judith Browns, and the three derelicts are introduced by name. Then the brainstorm. The script gives sleeping pills, hanging, and a gun, with the derelicts heckling. The film adds a rapid-fire list on top, a knife, an electric shock, a car crash, the tube, drowning, so that David’s transformation arrives as an interruption to a conversation that has gotten out of hand.

David’s last joke

His contribution to his own execution planning is to ask whether he needs a silver bullet or something. It is the fifth warning and the fifth deflection, and it is also the last time the script lets him be funny. From here he speaks only in pain and, in the film, only to tell children to run. Griffin Dunne has said he learned during production that Jack in this scene would be a puppet rather than himself under makeup, and was hurt by it; Rick Baker’s design for the third-stage Jack took the skull outward from a life cast rather than building bulk on top, which is why the character looks thinner as he rots rather than bigger.

Act Three, 85m–88m

Piccadilly Circus

The page is economical here. The wolf bursts through the cinema doors, savages the inspector, runs into traffic, a cab swerves and plows into pedestrians, one goes through a shop window, and the police chase the animal into a cul-de-sac. Landis has said the Metropolitan Police had not permitted a shoot in Piccadilly Circus for something like fifteen years, that the production got two nights, and, by the production designer’s account, that a partial street was built at a disused airfield near Weybridge so the crashes could be rehearsed and repeated. What reads as a stunt reel on screen is the script’s one sentence about mass confusion, taken literally.

What the sequence does for the story is remove the last private space. Every earlier attack was in the dark and out of sight; the moors, the park, the tube. This one happens in front of a crowd, the police, Hirsch, and Alex, and it gives Inspector Villiers, who closed the case in Act One, the death the script reserves for him. The film changes one name in the aftermath: on the page, Hirsch learns of the disturbance from Nurse Hobbs; in the film, she is Sister Hobbs, a small Anglicization that runs through the whole shooting draft.

Act Three, 89m–90m

An American Werewolf in London ending explained: why “I love you” does not work

The American Werewolf in London ending explained on the page first. Here is the script’s final scene. Alex dodges a policeman, walks into the alley, and asks: “David? Is it you? Is it true, David?” The wolf rears up. In that instant she realizes it will kill her. The officer says fire, the guns blaze, the wolf falls, and the police, Hirsch, and Sergeant McManus find David naked and riddled with bullets. Alex weeps. Fade to black, and the fifties rock version of “Blue Moon” over the credits.

The film keeps every one of those beats and adds three lines. Alex tells him the police are going to kill him. She asks him to let her help. Then, with the wolf already rising, she says she loves him. Jenny Agutter has said she was puzzled about what exactly she was doing in that moment, addressing a person she had spent the film believing in while facing a hairy puppet; Landis’s view is that the film works because she and John Woodvine believe it, and so the audience does.

Three rulebooks, one answer

The addition is not only sentiment. It answers a hope the film planted at the forty-five-minute mark. David told Alex that he thinks a werewolf can only be killed by someone who loves it, an idea he drew from the 1941 film and admitted he did not understand; the Universal picture actually ends with a father and a silver-headed cane, not with love as such. Then, on the pavement after the police refuse to arrest him, he told her he loved her and that she had to stay away. Now she says it back, in the alley, and the film has to decide what her declaration is worth.

The plain reading, and the other one

On the plainest reading, Jack’s rule wins. Love does not stop the wolf; it lunges anyway, and it is the police who sever the bloodline, which was always the only exit the myth allowed. The declaration does not save David and it does not save Alex. What it does is give him a witness: someone at the end of the alley who is there for him rather than for the wolf, which the script had not provided.

There is a second reading, and the film leaves room for it. In the 1941 picture the person who loves the wolf is present when it is destroyed, and that is exactly the shape of the alley: Alex does not fire, but her walking in is what makes the wolf rear and the rifles go off. On that reading David’s half-understood rule is fulfilled rather than refused, and the ending is a Universal ending with the cane swapped for a police line. Jenny Agutter has said she was puzzled about what she was doing in the moment and that Landis asked her to see David, not the puppet. The film does not adjudicate between the two readings, and it does not need to; both leave David dead and Alex the only person who knew whom the police had killed.

The third Blue Moon

This is why the cut to the credits song lands as a joke and a wound at once. The script specified it; the film had used the same standard twice already, once under the title and once under the change. The third time is the eulogy for a character who was given the answer in a pub in the first ten minutes and spent the rest of the picture making jokes about it.

The August 1980 draft against the release

Script vs screen: what changed

The draft on file is undated; it circulates as the August 1980 revision, and it is close to the finished film: scene order, set pieces, and most dialogue survive intact. The changes cluster in three places, and each one pushes the same direction.

Additions that build the ending

The Wolf Man conversation in bed, David’s declaration on the pavement, and Alex’s declaration in the alley are all absent from the page. So is the beat in Alex’s flat where she tells him she is not in the habit of bringing home stray Americans, gives him the count of her previous lovers, and says she finds him attractive and a little sad. Taken together these four additions are the whole love story; the script has the affair but not the reasons, and without them the American Werewolf in London ending would be a shooting, not a scene.

Additions that build the dread

The dream within a dream is new. So is the scene after Hirsch leaves the Slaughtered Lamb, where the barmaid follows him out into the rain to say that letting the boy leave was a mistake, that the one who lives is the one in danger, and that others will be too, before she is cut off. On the page Hirsch’s visit ends with an offer of chess, and the village keeps its silence; on screen the village breaks it, which is why Hirsch’s later speech to Alex about mass neurosis plays as a man arguing himself out of what he has already heard. The film also swaps the flat’s television from two football matches to a newspaper advertisement and adds Creedence’s “Bad Moon Rising” under the pacing, which the script does not mention.

Trims and substitutions

David’s coma is two weeks on the page and three on screen. Debbie Klein finds solace with a Rudy Levine in the script and a Mark Levine in the film. Jack’s hamburger line goes; the meat loaf stays. Jack’s first visit loses the explicit invitation to join him in death and keeps the instruction to kill himself before he kills others. Their brainstorm in the cinema gains five methods. That cinema moves from Leicester Square to Piccadilly Circus and its programme changes from an unspecified feature to the production’s own See You Next Wednesday. The main-title song changes from “Moon Shadow” to “Blue Moon.” One insult in the police-baiting speech, a line about the Queen Mother, is cut. Sergeant McManus, who reaches the alley with Hirsch on the page, does not on screen.

Landis has said he cut one scene after previews, following the Nazi dream, because audiences were talking through its exposition after the scare, and that he regrets it; he also removed a gag in which a piece of toast fell through the wound in Jack’s throat at the ratings board’s request. Neither cut is recoverable from the draft on file, which predates both.

Timed to the minute

Beat sheet with timestamps

Minute markers are rounded up to the whole minute from the cue nearest each beat, so a beat that starts at 15:35 is listed at 16m. The structure is a clean three-act shape with an unusually early lock-in: Jack’s rules are complete by 36m, and everything the film adds after that, the Wolf Man conversation and the two declarations, is hope set against those rules, not a revision of them.

Act One: the warning

Two friends, a pub, a moor, and a death. The act ends not with the attack but with the dead friend’s return, because the attack is only the event; the warning is the premise.

Act Two: the countdown

The love story, the second warning, the doctor’s investigation, and the change. The midpoint is the transformation, and the second half of the act is the night and morning that follow it.

Act Three: the vote and the alley

David stops running from the rules and goes to sit with the people they have already claimed. The moon rises before the meeting can conclude.

Production history

The making of: Beware the Moon

The short version of the eleven-year gap between page and screen, as Landis tells it: the script got him work, because it was funny and scary on the page, and got him no financing, because every reader concluded it was either too funny to be scary or too scary to be funny. The Kentucky Fried Movie, Animal House, and The Blues Brothers changed the arithmetic. PolyGram, then run by Jon Peters and Peter Guber, put up a ten-million-dollar negative pickup, and the picture was made as a British film with a British crew under the Eady levy, which is why the cast around the two American leads is British and why Landis had to argue for casting two Americans who were not stars.

The previews

The preview story explains the film’s reputation as much as its content does. Its first preview, in the Chicago suburbs, was advertised on the marquee as the new comedy from the director of Animal House; a large part of the audience walked out when Jack was killed and kept leaving through the hospital scenes. A night later, on Long Island, Landis introduced the film himself, told a rowdy Saturday crowd that it was a horror picture with a lot of gore and a lot of sex, and it played, in his words, like a million bucks. What he took from it is the same lesson the film’s structure teaches: tell people what it is before it happens to them.

Recognition and the censors

Rick Baker received an Academy Award for the makeup, an award he has described as a shock because a proper category barely existed at the time. The censors, by the producers’ account, were more troubled by the nudity than by the violence. Landis, for his part, has said more than once that he showed the wolf too much and that the shot he is proudest of is the one where you barely see it.

An American Werewolf in London analysis

Frequently asked questions

Story and ending

Jack’s warning

Script and production