An american werewolf in london

The ultimate transformation.

Before John Landis unleashed An American Werewolf In London in 1981, films featuring carnivorous lunar activities achieved their money-shot transformations by having actors sit stock still while more and more clumps of hair were pasted in place. Dissolves did the rest. “I want to capture how painful the entire process would be – and make it painful to watch,” growled Landis.

And so An American Werewolf was to be make-up maestro Rick Baker’s moment in the spotlight – literally, given Landis told his old pal (Baker designed the gorilla suit on the director’s 1973 debut, Schlock) he must achieve

the SFX showcase in a brightly lit apartment, with no resort to “horror lighting”.

The vividly violent, howlingly funny sequence was shot after the movie’s wrap party, with just a skeletal crew (“Someone for lights, a camera operator, and a grip or two,” recalls Baker) staying on to film the scene, along with Landis, lead actor David Naughton and a bunch of 19-year-old fanboys – sorry, technicians – who slobbered in excitement as they helped Baker realise his vision. Carefully storyboarded, the scene took six days to shoot, though Baker estimates only 30 minutes of footage was filmed, with 10 hours a day spent plastering make-up onto Naughton.

Fingers, palm, face, body… All elongate before our widened, blood-rimmed eyes, without a pixel in sight, courtesy of Baker building plasticised casts (he called them ‘Change-o-head’, ‘Change-o-back’, ‘Changeo-hand’ and so on) equipped with inbuilt mechanisms to burst through the surface. Strands of hair were pulled into rubber flesh only for the footage to be reversed to fake rapid growth. And the full-body shot of the “fourlegged hound from hell”, as Landis called it, was a prosthetic torso topped by Naughton’s head poking through a hole in the floor.

“I cringe looking at some of the stuff in the transformation,” says Baker, nearly 40 years on. The rest of us remain over the moon. JG