It is no coincidence that the first transformation is also a sex scene, a combination of pleasure and pain. It is an embrace of the freedom of the animal nature and a release from repression. For the Quists in particular, becoming a wolf is not a curse, but a pleasure. The film pits the id of Eddie ( Robert Picardo) and Marcia Quist ( Elisabeth Brooks) against the civilized superego Waggner imposes.
Waggner ( Patrick Macnee), preaches the dangers of repression, but practices it himself and forces it upon the other members of his commune of modern werewolves.
From there, he layered in commentary on contemporary trends of self-help, pop psychology, and the gurus and hucksters that peddled it. Sayles saw the werewolf as a metaphor for the id, Freud’s term for the instinctive and animalistic part of the mind. Winkless, Sayles created a completely new story, retaining only the title and monster from the novel by Gary Brandner. Along with the film’s first writer Terence H. But beneath the humor and horror is a hard edged political and social cynicism, largely due to co-writer John Sayles. Many have commented that horror and humor are two sides of the same coin few filmmakers have ever combined the two as deftly and consistently as director Joe Dante. The Howling is at its heart a satire of early 80’s life. All three play into the expectations of the genre and then subvert them in their own unique ways. The third is a cult gem that twists the tropes of both the werewolf legend and the detective story. Two are 80’s classics that revolutionized practical make-up effects and the horror-comedy. Each of the three takes a very different look at the mythic creature, focusing on various aspects and twisting them in new and creative ways. Then, twenty years later not just one, but three new variations on the classic monster burst onto the scene.
The world had not seen a major werewolf film since Hammer’s Curse of the Werewolf in 1961.
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