Werewolves (pt. IV)

Wolf

Silver Bullet

Salutations, my sweet, spooky spirits, and welcome to another horror holiday season double feature. It’s rare that my double feature night falls on a full moon, but whenever this occurs it feels like a sign from the spooky cinematic gods to watch something that fits this magical monthly spectacle. For this full Hunter’s super moon in Aries (the third super moon of the year!) let’s explore some films about one of my favorite supernatural sensations: werewolves. With the enormous fantasy footprint that vampires and witches have left upon horror pop culture, werewolves are often forgotten—or only remembered in their silliest, un-scariest forms. Werewolf movies face far more limitations and barriers when compared to creating other movie monsters. It requires a lot more special effects, makeup, and solid storytelling for a werewolf film to work, and few creators have been able to achieve a level of memorability that reaches the Oscar-winning An American Werewolf in London or the franchise-birthing success of Teen Wolf. That’s why I’ve made a specific effort to do many werewolf double features, especially when a full moon lands on a Thursday, and I’ve been pretty lucky with my lycanthropic selections thus far. Tonight we begin with a film that I’ve actually seen before, though not since I was a child, when I was a mere horror novice. This is Mike Nichols’ 1994 film Wolf, where we open on an anxious Will Randall (Jack Nicholson), who’s struggling to drive down a winding, snowy path in Vermont, until he strikes a black wolf. The wolf isn’t dead or even injured, as Will learns too late when he goes to check on it and is swiftly bitten on the hand. Will somehow makes it safely back from his business trip and walks back into his job as editor-in-chief of a publishing house in New York City, where his underlings (David Hyde Pierce and Eileen Atkins) have heard unsettling rumors that the company is downsizing. After getting his bite checked out and receiving a rabies shot, Will attends a giant party at his big, billionaire boss’ (Christopher Plummer) house, where he plans to beg to keep his job. Will, his wife, and his protégé Stewart (James Spader) all discuss the troubling state of art and literature, and how bleak the 90s are, before Will is pulled away by his boss to be brutally demoted, or if he’d prefer, fired. As if this weren’t bad enough, Will’s protégé Stewart is taking his job, and Will can do nothing about it. That is, until he begins to feel some strange symptoms as a result from his mysterious animal bite. His vitality is increased, his senses are sharpened, and he finds a way to charm his cruel boss’ under-achieving but attractive daughter Laura (Michelle Pfeiffer.) Will is equally intrigued and fearful of his new sense of super-smell and super-hearing, his newfound ability to sleep well, and his surprising chemistry with Laura. He moves very carefully as he adapts to his new senses and charisma, but his luck soon begins to turn in a plethora of ways. Wolf is a rarity among werewolf movies in that it isn’t really a horror movie at all, but a romantic dramadey. Similarly to Only Lovers Left Alive, Wolf is an urban fantasy that places its magic right alongside a tangible realism. The characters are grounded and fascinating, and as with all Mike Nichols films, they all have a cool factor that comes with a natural-born ease and an excellent, quippy vocabulary. It’s so refreshing and cutting edge, even thirty years later, that Wolf’s story is rooted in pragmatism, when it could have easily been a more straightforward monster movie. And this isn’t to say that there isn’t any monstrousness to this werewolf fable, but Mike Nichols very cleverly made Wolf a sexy, sophisticated, funny drama fit for horror buffs and non-horror heads. Only certain flashes and frames of this movie were memorable to me: mostly the odd stylistic choices like the random use of slo-mo, and the chic aesthetic choices like Michelle Pfeiffer’s entire wardrobe. When I was a kid, I never picked up on Michelle Pfeiffer and Jack Nicholson’s fiery chemistry, nor could I comprehend why a cool, rich, young horsegirl like her character would want to get with elderly Jack Nicholson, but now it all makes sense to me. I’d completely forgotten that the king of 90s erotic cinema James Spader was in this, and plays an iconic shithead, but his presence made this movie even sexier, and even scarier—and you’ll have to watch Wolf for yourself to understand what I mean by this. And on top of all of the furry fun that Wolf has to offer, it’s randomly kind of deep and poetic, in true Mike Nichols fashion. Only he could make this stereotypically-silly subgenre have believable, existentialist themes, only he could include a line like, “Maybe there’s happy endings even for those who don’t believe in them” in the midst of big city werewolf hijinks. This film was even better, and even more romantic than my nostalgia had me remember, and it was so much fun revisiting it. A film that felt familiar even though I’d never seen it before was Dan Attia’s 1985 film Silver Bullet. Based off of Stephen King’s novelette, with the screenplay written by King himself, Silver Bullet follows siblings Jane and Marty Coslaw, during the wildest, most dangerous year of their small town’s lives, in the Spring of 1976. One night, the town drunk is shockingly decapitated while working near the train tracks, which is at first written off as a drunken accident somehow, but this is just the first murder in a long line of full moon attacks. Every full moon from that point on, a random townsperson is viciously mauled and killed by some man or beast, and young Marty (Corey Haim) is the first to discover that a werewolf is responsible. Marty is in a wheelchair that his Uncle Red (Gary Busey), another town drunk, has tricked out for him. He’s fashioned this wheelchair into what is basically a motorcycle for this kid, with the words “Silver Bullet’ painted on the side in flames, and Marty loves to speed through town in it. On one of these joyrides, Marty spots the werewolf and manages to injure its eye with a firework. While he is limited by his wheelchair and treated a bit unfairly by his sister, Marty is fearless and determined to catch this werewolf. He just has to find the townsperson walking around with only one eye. In typical Stephen King fashion, a lot of Silver Bullet consists of small town paranoia, kids bullying each other, kids saving the day, adults being drunk and awful, and the antagonist is not exactly what you’d expect. In this case, it’s not a killer clown with magical powers or a kidnapping, obsessive fanatic, but a big, bad, wolf who doesn’t just use his claws but also a baseball bat to attack people… It also would appear that Silver Bullet was released as a TV special just like the original IT, because there are some strange fade-to-black cuts in this movie. It was wild to see Gary Busey play a coherent character, and even more wild to see Terry O’Quinn (Lost), who plays the sheriff, with hair on his head. As with Stand By Me, I could see Silver Bullet being a far more effective film for children. And as with most Stephen King stories, I can just tell that Silver Bullet is freakier to read than it is to make into an impactful, successfully-scary film. Silver Bullet is still an iconic part of werewolf movie history, and I still enjoyed watching it, but it’ll be far down the list of my recommendations for werewolf movies, that’s for sure. Well thanks for reading along this week, my dear freaky reader, I hope you had a howlin’ good time like I did! Tune in next week for more terror, more tingles, and more unsolicited horror movie opinions from your favorite cinematic witch. Toodles!