Had things panned out differently, An American Werewolf in London would’ve spawned a sequel.
And we’re not talking about An American Werewolf in Paris-type situation, but a true follow-up from writer-director John Landis, who was initially approached by PolyGram back in ’91 about the possibility of revisiting his horror gem.
As revealed in the newly-published Beware The Moon: The Story of An American Werewolf In London by Paul Davis (with a tip of the hat to Digital Spy), Landis’ super-secret pitch focused on a relatively minor character from the first film: Debbie Klein.
The movie was about the girl that the boys talk about at the beginning of the movie, Debbie Klein. She gets a job in London as a literary agent and while she’s there, starts privately investigating the circumstances surrounding the deaths of Jack and David. The conceit was that during the time in the first film where Jenny (Agutter) goes to work and David is pacing around the apartment, he actually wrote Debbie Klein a letter. It was all to do with this big secret that David had never told Jack that he had a thing with her.
With Klein at the crux, John Landis’ follow-up to An American Werewolf in London then circled back to many of the key locations that appeared in the 1981 horror-comedy, including the by-now famous Slaughtered Lamb.
She went back to the Slaughtered Lamb and everyone is still there! I think the only changes were a portrait of Charles and Diana where the five-pointed star used to be and darts arcade game instead of a board. It’s then when she speaks to Sgt McManus, the cop from the first movie who didn’t die, that she finds out that Jenny is still in London. She calls her and leaves an answer phone message, which we then reveal is being listened to by the skeletal corpses of Jack and David, watching TV in Alex’s apartment! The big surprise at the end was that Alex was the werewolf. It was pretty wild. The script had everybody in it from the first movie – including all the dead people!
Pretty cool, huh? Sadly, those tentative sequel plans never materialized and fans were left poring over An American Werewolf in Paris 16 years after the fact.
But that doesn’t necessarily mean that the Werewolf IP is completely dormant; John Landis’ son, Max, has been trying to get a reboot off the ground for years, and it’ll purportedly reunite many of the original cast members.