directed by Michael Wadleigh, 1981, 115 minutes.

When an influential businessman is killed in New York’s Battery Park with his wife and chauffeur, detective Dewey Wilson (Albert Finney) is assigned to investigate. He works with criminal psychologist and terrorism expert Rebecca Neff (Diane Venora) to explore a political motive for the deaths, but the unconventional nature of the killings leads Wilson to suspect that the killers may not be human.

In 1981, as riots tore through British cities, assassins targeted the Pope and the US President. Cinemagoers had the choice of three lupine thrillers that summer and must have felt that the wolves were indeed howling at the gates. Alongside the muscle-stretching, eye-popping transformations, and raucous humour of Joe Dante’s ‘The Howling’ and John Landis’ ‘An American Werewolf in London’ Michael Wadleigh’s ‘Wolfen’, with its austere images of urban decay and air of political discontent provided a sharp jolt of social realism but critical response was lukewarm, and it struggled at the box office. Returning to ‘Wolfen’ in the twenty-first century proves a sobering but rewarding experience. Michael Wadleigh and David Eyre’s thematically complex screenplay with its unusual approach to the werewolf myth imbues their film with a sense of gravitas missing from the rest of the pack.

The werewolf is normally a solitary outcast but real wolves hunt in packs and ‘Wolfen’ is more concerned with social structures. Strieber contrasts the byzantine politics and moral compromises of city life with the stark certainties of pack mentality. Wadleigh underlines this theme by suggesting that the Wolfen share a symbiotic relationship with Native Americans, both tribal communities displaced by modern civilization and forced to subsist on its fringes and leftovers. Wadleigh’s film has sharper socio-political teeth than Strieber’s novel and acknowledges the corporatisation of social institutions that escalated during the eighties. It is particularly telling that he made ‘Wolfen’ only eleven years after ‘Woodstock’, which celebrates a generation that yearned for social change. ‘Wolfen’ reflects the disillusionment of a man who had seen the idealism of the sixties founder in the face of relentless free-market dogma.  He portrays late 20^th Century capitalism as a scourge, like the ‘manifest destiny’ that obliterated indigenous cultures on the western frontier. The Wolfen, once apex predators in their ‘natural’ habitat must now compete for their niche in a world reshaped by corporate man. The detectives seeking a motive for Van der Veer’s murder need look no further than his rapacious exploitation of global business opportunities.

Wadleigh and Eyre further politicize Strieber’s narrative by transplanting the strategies of anti-corporate terrorism so prevalent in Europe in the sixties and seventies to the United States homeland. ‘Wolfen’ is set in 1983, then the near future, executives are targeted for kidnapping or execution by radical left- and right-wing groups as private defence companies deploy advanced technology to protect their wealthy clients. This nexus between terrorism and technology has become a staple of twenty-first century thrillers but was more unusual in 1981 and both ‘Wolfen’, alongside ‘Nighthawks’ (Bruce Malmuth) released in the same year, looks forward to our complex and threatening post 9-11 world. The poignant presence of the Twin Towers on the New York skyline provides a constant reminder of how far the reach and scale of terrorism has developed since 1981 but Neff’s catalogue of politically motivated mutilations is a reminder that such tactics are not a new phenomenon.

The terrorist group Götterdämmerung portrayed in ‘Wolfen’ demands the death of society “by wolves”, recalling Fenrir, the god-wolf of Norse mythology who is associated with apocalypse. Their Wagnerian designation suggests other, more recent cultural echoes. Jon Spira and others have discussed how Curt Siodmak’s screenplay for ‘Wolfman’ (George Waggner, 1941) and John Landis’ ‘American Werewolf’ (1981) subvert the anti-Semitic trappings that haunt the Germanic werewolf myth and mock Nazism’s penchant for lupine imagery. Hitler likened his troops to ravening wolves and the post-war Nazi resistance group that opposed allied occupation were known as ‘Werewolves’. The ravening Alsatians in Adrian Panek’s ‘Werewolf’ (2019) tap into a similar vein of imagery and play on our fear of the beast as a metaphor for political oppression. The Wolfen of the novel are an evolved form of the common wolf with hand-like paws and less bestial, more human faces. Strieber, like Wadleigh, shows us the world through their eyes but he also gives them anthropomorphic character and motivation. Wadleigh’s more naturalistic depiction makes the Wolfen appear less ambiguous. He reminds us that wolves have been mercilessly hunted as a danger to livestock (and humans) and for sport. The Wolfen may deliver a grim measure of poetic justice for our pillage of the natural world, but their choice of prey makes them seem, however unwittingly, complicit with human authority. Wadleigh draws attention to a more nebulous form of fascism which thrives on apathy and despair: When society measures the value its members solely in economic terms there must always be an element of wastage. Social Darwinists and populist demagogues might find the idea of a ‘natural’ (and low-cost) social cleansing programme that discretely removes the sick and other ‘unproductive’ social elements an attractive proposition. ‘Wolfen’ posits a new frontier, an urban wilderness where predators feed at leisure on the weakest members of a society that doesn’t care. Seen from the perspective of an economic depression that has created unacceptable levels of homelessness and deprivation ‘Wolfen’ bites uncomfortably close to the bone.

Those of us who believe that human society must aspire to more than the rule of predator over the prey may be left feeling uneasy by ‘Wolfen’ but there is still much to savour: Gerry Fisher’s photography is superb: The human world is shot in drab tones aside from a few significant splashes of colour but the wolfen see in vivid psychedelic colour and the prowling camera runs with the pack. These sequences remain thrilling despite their familiarity from ‘Predator’ (John McTiernan, 1987) and its sequels. Fisher captures New York City in all its squalid magnificence before urban renewal reshaped its streets. This cityscape is laden with symbol: Wadleigh sets the opulence of Van der Veer’s offices against the decay of the South Bronx and its ruined church, the dead heart of a lost community. Unable to compete with Mammon, the Almighty has left the building to the new gods of the wasteland. The film begins in Battery Park where a display of windmills highlight’s Van der Veer’s ancestors’ role in creating the city as well as providing a neat summary of the city’s foundational myths. In the Central Park Zoo nursery animals mark time on the ornamental clock whilst predators chafe in their cages and the Wolfen become wolves of Wall Street as they prowl around the heart of the City’s financial district.

Reliable Albert Finney delivers an idiosyncratic, thoughtful performance as damaged detective Wilson as does sombre, intense Diane Venora as Neff. Gregory Hines injects some welcome gallows humour as an irreverent, hip pathologist and there’s a memorable, but all too brief turn from Tom Noonan as a loopy zoologist. Edward J Olmos contributes a physically intense performance as a Native American shapeshifter, Battlestar Galactica (Ronald D Moore and David Eick, 2004-2009) fans will appreciate a rare opportunity to see Commander Adama out of uniform. The film was originally graced by a louche cameo from Tom Waits, but this has been cut from almost all available prints, if you listen very carefully in the first bar scene you can catch a snippet of his distinctive vocals.

‘Wolfen’ may have failed because it confounded audience expectations: It’s not a conventional werewolf film but is tonally closer to ecological guilt trips like John Frankenheimer’s dismal ‘Prophecy’ (1979) or J T Petty’s superb ‘The Burrowers’ (2008). Although marketed as a horror film ‘Wolfen’ has few conventional scares; the most chilling aspect of the film is its pervading sense of social defeat. ‘Wolfen’ argues that we must all reach an accommodation with the beast, turn away as it feeds and hope to avoid the same fate. This is easier when we depersonalise the victims; Finney portrays Wilson’s horror at the choice that he must make at the end of the film when he has losses of his own to prick his conscience. In retrospect Wadleigh’s apocalyptic depiction of urban decay proved premature. After New York’s banks ‘saved’ the city from bankruptcy in 1975 the inexorable rise of property prices meant that urban space was simply too precious to be left derelict. The streets of the south Bronx were eventually rebuilt and are now home to a thriving human population. Gentrification and property inflation reclaimed slum neighbourhoods and property tycoon Donald Trump made a different kind of killing. The human animal, whether we like it or not, is tenacious, and the most dangerous predators still have two rather than four legs.

Quotes:

“Nature works. We don’t. The basic unit’s flawed”                 Ferguson (Tom Noonan)

Their world is older. More finished, more complete.              Old Indian (Dehl Berti)

Connections:

Film

‘Woodstock’ directed by Michael Wadleigh (1970)

‘The Last Wave’ directed by Peter Weir (1977)

‘Alligator’ directed by Lewis Teague (1980)

‘Mimic’ directed by Guillermo Del Toro (1997)

‘Ravenous’ directed by Antonia Bird (1999)

‘The Corporation’ directed by Jennifer Abbott and Mark Achbar (2004)

‘The Burrowers’ directed by J T Petty (2008)

‘Cosmopolis’ directed by David Cronenberg (2012)

‘Hold the Dark’ directed by Jeremy Saulnier (2018)

‘Werewolf’ directed by Arian Panek (2018)

Reading

Whitley Strieber, Wolfen, Coronet, 1978, ISBN 0340241675

Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man, Penguin, 1977, ISBN 0141007575

Richard Sennett, Flesh and Stone, Penguin, 1994, ISBN 0141007591

Clive Barker, Sacrament, HarperCollins, 1996, ISBN 0002235617

Music

Tom Waits, Small Change (1976), Elektra/Asylum, 7559-60612-2