Trivia / An American Werewolf in London

• Awesome, Dear Boy: John Landis invited three hundred members of London's Metropolitan Police to a screening of The Blues Brothers to provoke this reaction and persuade them to allow filming in Piccadilly Circus. It worked, and An American Werewolf in London was the first film to be shot there in fifteen years.
• California Doubling: The moors were filmed around the Black Mountains in Wales. And the interiors of The Slaughtered Lamb were done in Surrey.
• Contractual Purity: David Naughton had previously been promoting Dr Pepper for four years in commercials. The company ended their association with him after he appeared naked in this film. Ironically, David was cast after John Landis reportedly saw one of these Dr Pepper commercials.
• Creator Breakdown: Griffin Dunne recalls becoming very upset and distressed the first time he saw himself in the undead make-up. He found it extremely hard to play The Pollyanna after he'd seen what he would look like as a rotting corpse.
• Creator Couple: Deborah Nadoolman, the film's costume designer, was John Landis's wife.
• Creator In-Joke: Alex reads A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court to David while he's in hospital. This is because John Landis was a huge fan of the book and had unsuccessfully tried to get an adaptation made.
• Creative Differences: Rick Baker and John Landis had several disagreements over what the design of the werewolf should be. Baker wanted it to be a two-legged werewolf saying he thought of werewolves as being bipedal, while Landis wanted a "four-legged hound from hell".
• Creator Backlash: John Landis regretted having to cut some things down to get an R-rating in the US; notably the sex scene between Alex and David had to be made less explicit, as well as a shot of undead!Jack trying to eat a piece of toast that falls out of his torn throat.
• Creator's Favorite Episode: John Landis regarded this as his masterpiece.
• The Danza: David Naughton as David Kessler.
• Dawson Casting: David Naughton was 30 and Griffin Dunne was 26. While their ages are never stated, their characters are referred to as "boys" and appear to be college kids in their early 20s.
• Defictionalization: The Slaughtered Lamb Pub. Except it's not anywhere in England, it's in Greenwich Village in New York City. Unfortunately, it has since closed due to not paying its taxes.
• Deleted Scene: A scene where the tramps get killed in junkyard was cut. This was allegedly because test audiences reacted negatively to it.
• Dueling Movies: Both this and The Howling came out the same year and both feature a detailed, painful-looking Transformation Trauma sequence. However, the way the werewolves are depicted differs in other areas (for starters, the werewolves of The Howling can transform at will and retain their minds when transformed, making them a lot more actively malicious compared to the ones in An American Werewolf in London).
• Enforced Method Acting:
  • A favorite ploy of John Landis. Extras in the zoo scene were told only that David Naughton was going to say a few words to them.
  • And that blade the dream Nazi zombie is holding up to David's neck was a real knife, held by an actor in a mask that seriously hampered his vision. Most of the fear was probably real there.
  • Rick Baker recalled with amusement doing this to Griffin Dunne. For the attack on Jack, Baker worked the werewolf head and had told Griffin about the fragility of the prop. During the first take, Griffin grabbed the prop's face and accidentally ripped the skin off.
    Rick Baker: So, I had to glue the foam back together, get it back on there. So, it's like "Okay, is that you wanna play it, Griffin, huh?" So, I just beat the crap out of him when we did the next shot. And he's, like, screamin' like a madman like he's supposed to, and we got some really good stuff.
  • All the people gathered around the porno theater at the end really thought there was a wild animal inside the theater. Landis didn't tell any of them that it was fake to get the right reaction out of everyone, so when it bursts out of the theater some of the screams were genuine.
• Follow the Leader: The film's success likely kickstarted the slew of SFX heavy Horror-Comedies throughout the '80s such as Gremlins, Ghostbusters (1984), Fright Night (1985), The Return of the Living Dead, The Monster Squad, The Lost Boys, Evil Dead 2 and Beetlejuice just to name a few.
• Looping Lines: David's famous line "I'm a fucking werewolf, for God's sake!" had to be dubbed over with "I'm a famous werewolf" for the TV airing.
• Playing Against Type: Directing version. John Landis had become known as a comedy director, and many audiences assumed that the film was a straight-up comedy (especially when it was advertised as being from the director of Animal House) - and a number of audience members ran out of the cinemas when discovering it was a horror. While it is a comedic horror, it's firmly in the middle when it comes to the Sliding Scale of Comedy and Horror.
• Production Posse: The inhabitants of "The Slaughtered Lamb" were described by Griffin Dunne as "half the cast, practically, of Nicholas Nickleby" (the 1980 RSC play adaptation) — notably Lila Kaye (Gladys) played Mrs. Squeers and Mrs. Crummles and John Woodvine (Dr. Hirsch) played Ralph Nickleby.
• Real Song Theme Tune:
  • "Bluuuue Mooooooon..."
  • All the soundtrack songs deal with the moon: "Blue Moon," "Moondance," "Bad Moon Rising."
• Romance on the Set: Averted. In the actors' commentary for the film, David Naughton notes sadly how he made tentative advances towards Jenny Agutter, only to be summarily shot down.
• Saved from Development Hell: John Landis first wrote the script in the late '60s, but shelved it for over a decade. He hadn't directed at the time, and it wasn't until he became established in Hollywood through Animal House, The Blues Brothers and his cult hit Schlock that he was able to get financing for it.
• Shoot the Money: John Landis later said that the transformation sequence probably should have been cut down a bit, but he was so impressed with Rick Baker's special effects that he spent more time on the scene than he normally would have.
• Stillborn Franchise: There was to be a sequel involving Debbie Klein trying to track down David and having nightmares about Nazi mutants. Eventually, she would have found David's nurse Alex, who had also somehow been turned into a werewolf and is dating David (whose soul is trapped on Earth for some reason).
• Throw It In!:
  • Griffin Dunne and David Naughton improvised saying goodbye to the sheep at the beginning.
  • When David and Jack are walking at the beginning, Griffin Dunne's nose was running in the cold weather. So for one take, David Naughton started Corpsing at the sight of Griffin wiping his nose, and he in turn laughed when responding to David's next line. John Landis liked the spontaneity and left it in.
  • The little strip of skin flapping about on Griffin Dunne's face when the undead Jack visits David in the hospital was kept intact in the final cut when it was found to have made Dunne's appearance far more convincing.
  • Dunne improvised the line "What kind of ad is that for a pub".
• Tuckerization: David's sister is called Rachel, and his brother Max, after John Landis's children.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Universal wanted Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi to play the leads, but John Landis refused as he wanted to use new faces and because they were busy working on Neighbors (1981) which they wanted Landis to direct.
  • In its earliest incarnation, Landis had wanted Donald Sutherland for his lead. Landis had worked with Sutherland on the set of Kelly's Heroes, which is where he got the idea for a werewolf movie in the first place.
  • Landis originally wanted three other songs to add to the soundtrack: Cat Stevens wouldn't allow "Moonshadow" to be used, because he had stopped allowing his secular music to be licensed for films following his conversion to Islam. Bob Dylan wouldn't allow his version of "Blue Moon" to be used in an R-rated film, as he had just begun his brief conversion to Christianity. Elvis Presley's version of "Blue Moon" proved unavailable, due to the ongoing lawsuits involving his estate.
  • Landis tried to land Albert R. Broccoli as producer, after he made some uncredited re-writes on The Spy Who Loved Me. It turned out to be a non-starter. When Broccoli read the script, he told Landis, "Hell no, it's weird!" As a small consolation, the bus driver, for the Piccadilly Circus scene, in this movie, was Vic Armstrong, who would later be employed as the Stunt Coordinator in James Bond movies.
  • Elmer Bernstein wrote and recorded music intended for the transformation scene, which would have given the scene a more traditional horror vibe. Landis opted to use Sam Cooke's version of "Blue Moon" instead; Bernstein's music was later released separately as "Metamorphosis".
  • Griffin Dunne was almost declined a work permit to star in the film, as the British Actors' Equity protested that the role of Jack could easily go to a number of American actors living in the UK. John Landis threatened to rewrite the script and set the movie in Paris (yes, really) - and Griffin was given his permit.
  • David was supposed to have Male Frontal Nudity during both dream sequences and the transformation. But David Naughton revealed that he was not circumcised, so John Landis carefully avoided showing anything full frontal.
  • The porno theatre was actually meant to be one that showed old cartoons, as the script was first written in The '60s. By the time of filming in 1981, the cartoon theatres in London had been replaced with porn theatres, and the script was updated accordingly.
  • Jenny Agutter almost turned down the role of Alex, as she was reluctant to do a horror film. She's glad she didn't, and is proud of how beloved it's been over the years.

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