- Adaptation Displacement: The movie is more known than the book.
- Award Snub: How was Gerry Fisher's cinematography not nominated for an Oscar?
- Awesome Music: James Horner provided the score.
- Originally Craig Safan recorded an equally nightmarish score (which in a manner channels or was something of an early copy of the horror film score works by fellow movie composers Michael Kamen and Don Davis) that was later rejected.
- Older Than They Think: The film has the wolves using thermographic vision throughout the film. Come 1983's Blue Thunder and 1987's RoboCop with Predator borrowing a similar look for their titulars' POV.
- Referenced by…: Explicitly referenced by the Mooninites in Aqua Teen Hunger Force.Ignignokt: Our god is an Indian that turns into a wolf.Err: Yeah, that's Wolfen, man.Ignignokt: Well...the Wolfen will come for you with his razor.
- Retroactive Recognition: Hey, that's Edward James Olmos! And that's his dick!
- Unintentional Period Piece: Like many other projects produced before The '90s New York is showcased as a Place Worse Than Death with a significant chunk of Queens being a derelict mess (and the filming location of the Wolven's den is now a neighborhood), the super-tech task force to find the killer is in a room full almost to the point of bursting with reel-to-reel computers and Billions of Buttons, the "Götterdammerung" terrorist group that is the Red Herring (and a conversation early on about how various other active groups have a signature method to kill people that does not fits to what the Wolfen are doing) is notably Eastern European and inspired by the IRA, the Native American Red Herring sub-plot is based on the "Red Power" movement
, and Dewey noticeably requires phone booths to keep in touch (the very last public pay phone in New York was removed in 2022). - Unintentionally Unsympathetic: So our protagonists are okay with the Wolfen eating drug addicts and vagrants?
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Ymmv/Wolfen
Go To
