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Wolfen

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  • 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?

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