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Jenny Agutter's happy memories of a werewolf that refuses to die
Some movies emerge as classics, even before the end credits have finished rolling.
An American Werewolf in London fits squarely into that bracket – a combination of effective horror, doomed romance and black comedy that makes it one of the key films of the 1980s.
For Jenny Agutter, the film is as much a defining moment in her life as either Walkabout or The Railway Children, both considered "signature" roles in a film career stretching back to 1964.
She was a reluctant horror queen but, 30 years after Werewolf's release, she accepts that sometimes long-cherished dream projects are the ones that offer the most possibilities.
Now 57, Agutter was living in Los Angeles when she was offered the role of Alex Price, a twenty-something nurse working in London who is tasked with caring for David Kessler, a young American backpacker hospitalised following an horrific attack on a bleak Yorkshire moor. David was mauled and left for dead; his friend Jack was killed.
From the outset, Agutter recognised something special in the script. Werewolf, she recalls, was more than just another horror flick.
"All the characters were very, very well-drawn," she says. "(In] horror movies, they're not. You're normally there to run around and scream; there's not very much character stuff in it. These were well-drawn characters and there was something happening. The nurse was a great character to play.
"If it hadn't been (director) John Landis, I would have really worried about how it would work because there was a real mixture of the comedy and it being scary. I knew that he was a huge movie fan – he absolutely loved his Hammer horrors. I felt that his knowledge of movie-making, his exuberance and all of that would carry him to the film."
Agutter's proximity to the gruesome effects that propelled the movie toward cult status was limited. She only saw key scenes – co-star David Naughton's eye-popping transformation from man to lycanthrope; Griffin Dunne's gradual deterioration from gooey corpse to desiccated walking cadaver – at the premiere. Her memories revolve around laughter.
"I spent a lot of time with Griffin sitting in make-up next to me," she smiles. "It was gross! I'd arrive in the morning at seven o'clock and he'd been there an hour and looked absolutely revolting, as they were putting this torn flesh across his face.
"It would get worse every day as the whole thing progressed. You certainly didn't want to have breakfast with him. He was a very lonely person!
"David was good fun. I remember him getting quite drunk in the scene in bed to feel more comfortable about the whole thing. Scenes like that are really not very comfortable to do. They're not the slightest bit romantic or sexy. There's just a camera crew and you're under a sheet. David felt his best way to relax was to get quite drunk which kind of adds its own element to it, I guess."
Landis was sufficiently confident in his film to want to show it off to its best advantage. For the premiere in 1981 he persuaded his cast and crew to eschew the glamour of the official venue for a low-grade alternative in the New York suburbs. Agutter remembers it well.
"We all went downtown to a cinema which looked a bit grimy. We arrived in our limos and all the people were looking at us. The air-conditioning had broken down, it was very, very hot and people started to get very restless. They were shouting and getting quite abusive. I thought we were going to get lynched.
"Then the film started and they got caught up with it. When the werewolf attacked, they all screamed! John Landis set it up so that people laughed at their own reactions to it. He always maintained that it was a film to be seen with an audience."
The film has been re-released in time for Hallowe'en by Universal which recently gave John Carpenter's The Thing the same reverential treatment. Agutter remains proud of the film and her part in it, and is intrigued that it has become such a perennial hit on the cult circuit.
"I suppose there was a good feeling about the film but you don't really know how it's going to capture people's imaginations – that it has an afterlife.
"It's not actually a favourite genre for me, to tell the truth. As a movie-goer I'm not that keen on science-fiction and fantasy. I've done a few of them, and often they fall into the trap (of] you ending up being the woman running and screaming down corridors.
"I'd look at the horror movies for the roles. It's not easy sometimes to make choices. Horror movies, because of the nature of them, are the ones that are most exploitable and people have a tendency to cut out the dialogue scenes.
"There are masses of films I went after and didn't get. There are some in there – classic movies that one would have liked to have done, like Alien – which I don't think I was even considered for. I don't think Sigourney Weaver and I are the same sort
of person!"
n An American Werewolf in London (15) is on re-release at selected cinemas.
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