Digital Spy reports the details of a sequel to An American Werewolf in London which he, sadly, was never able to make. Instead, we had a somewhat sequel in 1997 called An American Werewolf in Paris from director Anthony Waller (Mute Witness, The Guilty).
When speaking about the sequel he wrote in the ‘90s, Landis said:
“The movie was about the girl that the boys talk about at the beginning of [An American Werewolf in London], 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 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.
He tracks down Dr Hirsch, who tells her that Alex now lives in Paris because she was so traumatised by what happened. 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!”
So there you have it, imagine we had that sequel with everybody from the first film in it! It would have been pretty fantastic and it’s a shame it never saw the light of day. But, why? What happened? Landis said that Polygram’s Michael Kuhn hated what he’d written:
“[He] was actually pretty insulting about it. And that was the end of that. Clearly he would have hated the script for the first movie, because like that, it was funny and scary – and if anything, a little wackier.”
How disappointing! How do we get this film made now!?
Words: Jessy Williams (@JessyCritical)