THE HOWLING, The Heroes Of Other Stories, and Fan Fiction Ideas

In the 1981 film The Howling, TV news anchor Karen White (Dee Wallace) discovers a rural California community run by her station's psychiatrist has a dark secret. A very hairy dark secret...although the cover pretty obviously gives away the fact it's a werewolf movie, this isn't confirmed until about an hour into the film.

Although the film is kind of dull (I gave it a grade of C on my blog), the characterization is interesting. Several supporting cast members seem like they could potentially be the heroes of their own stories. Anybody who's a fanfic enthusiast (Archive of Our Own has a lot of Howling fanfic stories) is welcome to give these a spin. I posted about this on Twitter earlier this morning; here is my rambling in more coherent form, with some fact-checking.

Spoilers for a 30-odd year old movie below. I'll post the YouTube clip of the relevant scene that reveals a lot about the lesser characters to further block it off.

Dr. George Waggner (Patrick McNee)-The station psychiatrist and basically the cult guru in charge of "The Colony." He tries to get the werewolves to control their animal nature and live peacefully, but he cannot control the violent Quist siblings--serial killer Eddie, homewrecker Marcia, and creepy little brother T.C. Under California law, he's an accessory after the fact to several murders (possibly with rape to boot), since he knows about Eddie's crimes and seems to have done nothing but try to conceal them by luring the only surviving witness to his commune. If the cops (other than the local sheriff who's a werewolf himself) get involved, he's going to be doing some pretty serious time.

(You don't get the misdemeanor accessory charge for covering for a serial killer and Eddie has committed multiple serious crimes. That jail time piles up real quick, and him trying to plead coercion would involve revealing that he's the guru of a colony of werewolves.)

However, his options to deal with the Quists are rather limited. At the climax of the film, Marcia and one of her friends openly assault him when he tells them he won't let them kill Karen and it seemed to me his bad deeds (largely of omission rather than commission) are basically for damage control purposes. If not for him, many if not most of the werewolves in the community would start hunting and killing people before the government comes in and gives them the Waco treatment. He can't exactly go to the police for help--they wouldn't believe him if he said they were all werewolves and if they did believe it (say if he transformed in front of them), he and his would be hunted down and killed as monsters.

You could depict him as this morally gray version of Charles Xavier making harder and harder "lesser of two evils" choices to the point it's a relief when Karen's colleague Chris Halloran shoots him with a silver bullet. Hell, you could make him a full-on tragic hero. If Macbeth (traitor and murderer of families), Othello (domestic violence), and Hamlet (causes several deaths and the foreign invasion of his kingdom through sheer bumbling) can be tragic heroes, well, Waggner's crimes are much less extreme.

Jerry and Donna Warren (James Murtaugh and Margie Impert)-In this scene here, the werewolves detain Karen after Eddie kills her colleague Terri and she realizes just what's going on. The Warrens seem intent on recruiting Karen for the cult. Although I'd initially thought they'd found The Colony's secret on their own, had been given the choice between accepting "the gift" and being killed, and were desperately hoping Karen would be shown the same mercy, that doesn't seem to be what happened. It sounds like they'd be been bitten earlier and tried to resist the effects rather unsuccessfully, but then found Waggner on their own and Waggner taught them how to deal with it effectively. Just how that played out could be an interesting story, especially if the werewolf who infected them was unaffiliated with Waggner and The Colony. Who else is out there?

Erle Kenton (John Carradine)-He's the one who looks like Willie Nelson and attempts to kill himself when we first meet him. One could write him as someone who wants to follow Dr. Waggner's teachings but finds his struggle against his own nature so difficult that he becomes outright suicidal. When Eddie killing Terri causes a crisis at The Colony, he just says "screw it" and gives in to his animal side. This could be the story of someone with a mental illness suffering a breakdown or someone who's really repressed finally, to quote Elsa from Frozen, "Let[ting] it go." Only he's a bigoted murderous a-hole.

Bill Neil (Christopher Stone)-We see his whole arc on-screen so he's not really the hero of another story, but showing the whole situation from his POV could be interesting. He goes from being a vegetarian and a faithful husband to Karen (he even gets violent with Marcia when she puts the moves on him) to killing and eating animals, cheating on Karen with Marcia, and assaulting Karen when she calls him out on it. And some viewers think he's the one who infected Karen in the climax of the film. What is it like to have your worldview shift so much in less than a week?

Blast from the Past Movie Review: THE HOWLING (1981)

Back in the days of Blockbuster Video, I got my own membership later in high school and could rent any movie I wanted. One film I rented was The Howling, a well-regarded werewolf movie from the early 1980s. October 2022 is werewolf month on the film podcast Myopia Movies and this was one of the films I really wanted to do.

Here's the episode. And now for the review...

The Plot

In 1980s Los Angeles, television anchor Karen White (Dee Wallace) has been getting phone calls from serial killer Eddie Quist (Robert Picardo). In order to catch him, she agrees to meet up with him--with the police close by. As one might expect, this turns violent very quickly and the traumatized Karen can't remember precisely what happened. Dr. George Waggner, (Patrick Macnee), a local psychologist, invites her and her husband Bill Neil (Christopher Stone) to a rural commune called "The Colony" so she can rest and undergo group therapy. They arrive and meet various colorful characters living there, including Marcia Quist (Elisabeth Brooks), who is a little too interested in Bill.

And did I mention that Eddie's corpse has disappeared from the morgue? Karen's colleagues Chris Halloran (Dennis Dugan) and Terri Fisher (Belinda Belaski) investigate that as things get progressively weirder and more dangerous at The Colony.

The Good

*There is some good foreshadowing, like a character early on who specifically wants to commit suicide by fire.

*There're some moments of humor, like when a snoopy character is caught going through a filing cabinet.

*There is also some good development for the supporting cast, like how Karen's boss at the station is depicted as a jackass. He signs off on the scheme to bait serial-killer Eddie never mind that it's putting one of his employees at great risk and a good number of people openly object to it, and when she's clearly upset by the experience, says it's just as likely she could be pregnant (sexism) and casually and profanely butchers the name of an Asian anchor the station could use if she can't handle being on-air (racism). The guy is a real tool, and we get that mostly in one scene almost as an aside.

*I can't go into too much detail for reasons of spoilers, but they do develop the villains as people. Some are content with living in isolation and hunting animals and even peacefully coexisting with ordinary people, but others are more overtly predatory and violent and the former have to resort to increasing concessions to the latter in order to (barely) keep them under control. The politics of it could have been developed more, but they are interesting.

*I liked the side story with Chris and Terri investigating the aftermath of Eddie's attack on Karen and how it ultimately links back up with Karen's stay at the Colony.

The Bad

*After the initial confrontation with Eddie, the movie slows down considerably. Not much happens of note until Karen and Bill arrive at the Colony and Karen starts hearing wolves howling outside. This section of the movie functions more like a mystery than a straight-up horror movie in the vein of Silver Bullet or An American Werewolf in London. If that's what you're into that's fine, but be aware.

*Per the above, the internal politics of the Colony could have come up earlier--perhaps when Terri comes to see Karen, the residents could argue among themselves about this new development.

The Verdict

A bit dull if you go in expecting a full-on monster movie, but if you go in expecting a mystery, it's better. 7.5 out of 10.