YMMV / The Howling (1981)

• Awesome Music: That eerie tune by Pino Donaggio that plays during Karen's nightmares.
• Best Known for the Fanservice: For some, Marsha (Elisabeth Brook)'s full-frontal nude scene was the most memorable thing about the film.
• Complete Monster: Eddie Quist, dubbed "Eddie The Mangler" by the press, is a particularly sadistic werewolf who terrorizes the city of Los Angeles as a Serial Killer and Serial Rapist. Unlike most of the other werewolves in the colony he hails from, who are generally friendly if left alone, Eddie actively hunts and kills people for his sadistic pleasure. In his introduction, Eddie meets with investigation reporter Karen and forces her to watch a video of a woman being raped, revealing she was killed, before attempting to do the same to Karen. After being seemingly killed by police, Karen's friend Chris and his girlfriend Terry do some investigation on Eddie and his connection to the colony Karen and her husband are sent to. As Terry uncovers the truth, Eddie viciously murders her. Upon his return to the colony, Eddie tries to intimidate and kill Karen once again, and when he confronts Chris, he plays a recording of Terry's murder to him, commenting on her "sexy voice". Eddie, planning to transform and kill Chris, spends his last moments goading Chris into shooting him.
• Genre Turning Point: The movie set a new visual standard for werewolves in Hollywood films from the 1980s onward; they largely stopped looking like apes and more convincingly like bipedal wolves, at least concerning the head area.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: A woman being stalked by a creepy, possessive, supernatural monster named Edward?
• One-Scene Wonder: Dick Miller as the unscrupulous bookseller who provides an Info Dump about werewolf lore in the most entertaining way imaginable, then admits he doesn't believe in a single word of it. He has just a few minutes of screen-time but is often listed as one of the "stars" of the movie because he's so memorable.
• Signature Scene:
  • The (in)famous werewolf sex scene, which goes from from amorous (especially thanks to Marsha's lack of clothing) to horrifying Fan Disservice as Marsha and Bill start to transform.
  • Eddie's full on-screen transformation at the start of the third act as Karen looks on in terror; at the time this was one of the most advanced and realistic makeup effects audiences had ever seen in a horror movie and it's still regarded as one of the most impressive and terrifying werewolf transformations in film.
• Special Effect Failure: While the sequels are infamous for bad special effects, even the first movie isn't immune to this, despite the majority of the effects generally being well-regarded. There are two moments that stand out:
  • The first is when Bill and Marsha transform after having sex, which is seen from a distance and represented by two animated silhouettes that morph into wolf shapes, which are composited in front of the campfire rather crudely.
  • The second is a brief shot of a crowd of werewolves depicted using stop-motion near the end. Although the stop-motion is good, it sticks out like a sore thumb from the animatronic and creature suit effects used elsewhere. There were originally more stop-motion scenes, but they were removed following test screenings because while they weren't bad, the stop-motion werewolves just looked too different from the puppets to be convincing.
• Ugly Cute: Werewolf-Karen's final form resembles an adorable terrier. This was requested by Dee Wallace herself as she didn't want her last appearance in the film to be a hideous monster, the closeups of this "Bambi-Werewolf" were among the last scenes filmed for the picture. Rob Bottin later stated this fitted the character, with the far less threatening-looking wolf form symbolising Karen's resistance to being a monster like the others.
• Visual Effects of Awesome: Rob Bottin's effects still stand out as some of the best werewolf transformations of all time; the werewolves themselves (depicted using puppets and animatronics) are also highly convincing in close-up.

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