Eddie Quist News Today

The Howling franchise is mostly disconnected, but it's best to watch these werewolf horror movies in their release order.

Two movies from 1981 changed the sub-genre of werewolf movie forever with their (at the time) state of the art make-up effects by showing the transformation on-screen and mostly in-camera for the first time. The first to arrive in theaters was Joe Dante’s "The Howling," finally making its domestic UHD debut courtesy of Shout! Factory.

Join You can call it zeitgeist. You can call it ideaspace. You can even call it coincidence. However you label it, there’s occasionally a fundamental alignment where multiple creatives end up working on the same kind of project at the same time. That’s how you can end up with several Wyatt Earp films in the same year or more than one book from the point of view of Jack the Ripper or even several firehouse dramas. Or maybe it’s just the full moon. Forty years ago, in 1981, big Hollywood s...

On the other hand, maybe Ginsberg does have some insight into werewolves. Howl isn’t going to help this reporter unlock the mysteries of The Colony, a forest retreat that appears to be populated by creatures of the night, but this is a poem about aberrant sexuality, the rejection of repressive societal norms and the implicit desire for communities that exist outside the mainstream. Then again, these are actual monsters, people who might imagine themselves to be expressing the primitive desire...