Strangers on a Train

HOWL (2015)

Similar to DOG SOLDIERS, HOWL benefits from a

contemporary setting and practical creature FX.

PAUL Hyett - more famous his special makeups for THE DESCENT and EDEN LAKE - directs this low budget but polished horror which pits hybrid werewolves against occupants of a stranded late night train (much better than snakes on a plane). London guard Joe (Ed Speelers), unsuccessful for a promotion, and trolley hostess Ellen (Holly Western), are working on the last Alpha Trax out of the capital. The passengers are a motley selection, which includes high-flying alpha male Adrian (Elliot Cowan), professional single mother Kate (Shauna Macdonald), annoying adolescent Nina (Rosie Day), football yob Paul (Calvin Dean) and an elderly couple (Ged (Duncan Preston) and Jenny (Ania Marson)). When the carriages hit a deer and the driver (Sean Pertwee) goes to investigate but never returns, Joe must rise up and protect the commuters from a menace attacking out of the dense forest.

HOWL is widely regarded as the best werewolf picture since AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON. Whereas Universal stumbled with their retro-fitted 2010 reboot THE WOLFMAN, Hyett's film doesn't suffer from the American picture's insistence with their outdated monster design: here, the lean and refreshingly non-hairy werewolves are portrayed more like mutations, impressively vicious and sleek when moving in on their prey. On the human side, the characters are stereotypes but well written and played, and in the best horror film tradition not always interacting successfully as the tensions mount. Consequently, HOWL follows in the tradition of the John Wyndham short story Confidence Trick, where an underground train journey to hell explores the effects of belief on the part of the travellers.

Widespread in European folklore, the werewolf concept chiefly developed during the Middle Ages.

Britain has several outlandish "real" werewolf stories. One of the most famous emanates from Cannock Chase in Staffordshire, where there have been sightings since a notorious incident in 1975: a boy claimed to have promised his soul to the devil through a Ouija board, gaining power to transform into a wolf (then stabbed himself to death). Another colourful tale originates from 1920's Lincolnshire, when a local archaeologist discovered a human skeleton with a wolf's head; after he took his find home, his house was besieged by a werewolf. The Buxton, Derbyshire werewolf is more abstract, as it is unclear whether the creature is a physical entity or a supernatural beast (the nearby village of Wormhill claims to be the location where the last wolf in England was killed in the sixteenth century). And on a broader scale, the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides allegedly once hosted an entire colony of wolf men.

Marshall Law

DOG SOLDIERS (2002)
THE DESCENT (2005)

DOG SOLDIERS returns to the kind of lycanthrope comedy-horror that hasn't been seen since AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON.

WITH their seven foot tall werewolves and cave-dwelling people eaters, Neil Marshall’s DOG SOLDIERS and THE DESCENT gleefully tore open the heart of the British horror movie. What Marshall lacks in budget and satiric savvy, he recoups through razor-sharp shooting in low-light and as much blood as he can spill; DOG SOLDIERS takes all of two minutes to dismember its first pair of victims, while THE DESCENT wait’s a full three to skewer a father and young daughter. Both pictures are barebone survivalist shockers, but the Newcastle-born auteur - in the great tradition of the B movie - gets a lot out of nothing, the dark in particular.

Portrayed well, the werewolf is the most sympathetic of monsters. David Kessler, the lead character in AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON, embodied the creature as a near-tragic figure, while GINGER SNAPS drew comparisons between lycanthropy and the onset of menstruation for the Buffy generation. This horror of transformation is at the heart of the werewolf condition, a fact disappointingly ignored by DOG SOLDIERS; rather than a werewolf movie, it is a soldiers-under-siege picture reminiscent of James Cameron. The first glimpses of the towering beasts are effective enough: silhouetted for a few frames between trees, and shards of cold illumination backlight the swirling fog akin to Ridley Scott, but there are far too many inconsistencies. Why, for example, would the werewolves conceive an elaborate trap which turns their home into a battlefield rather than simply devour their prey in the wild?

Exaggerating the usual horror movie gambit (pretty girls in danger), THE DESCENT invites you to reconsider your generic expectations. As the girls play all the variously gendered roles, they’re as aggressive, selfish, mean, and courageous as any male characters have been in similar situations.

Far more polished is Marshall’s second feature. Both a commercial and critical success, THE DESCENT is the story of female friends on an ill-fated caving trip in the Appalachian Mountains. As the group journeys deeper underground, repressed antagonisms return - particularly those between Sarah (Shauna Macdonald) and Juno (Natalie Mendoza) - and freakish, cannibalistic creatures shadow their every move. Taking forty-five minutes to introduce its albino monsters, Marshall keeps the suspense high enough beforehand with its exploration scenes of cave-ins and bone-crunching falls. Red flares, green glow sticks and yellow torches all penetrate the natural dark, and atmospheric use is made of the ghoulish grey-greens of a video camera’s infrared. The orcesque, chattering “crawlers” are satisfyingly repulsive, recalling the figurative hillbillies of American Gothic and the Morlocks from H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine. These humanoids, admittedly, are blind reductions of us, hunting, feeding and inbreeding in their own nuclear “family.”