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AN
AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON
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A pub full of character actors rhubarbing away
on the 'Yorkshire Moors' can only mean bad news for two American
backpackers in Landis's
wildly successful horror comedy, which raised the bar for
werewolf FX.
The moors and the isolated village were not in Yorkshire at
all, but in Wales.
The 'Slaughtered Lamb' was nothing but an empty cottage, so
if you really want to join the surly locals for a pint, you’ll
have to head off to Surrey.
The pub interior was filmed in The
Black Swan, Old Lane at the junction with Ockham
Lane, Martyr’s Green,
about a mile northwest of Effingham Junction (rail: Effingham
Junction), between Guildford and Leatherhead. I felt a slight
letdown to discover a rather traditional country hostelry,
with no scowling yokels and, most disappointingly, no pentagrams
scrawled on the wall.
In London, the hospital where Naughton
recovers from a nasty wolf bite was the Princess Beatrice
Maternity Hospital on Finborough
Road at Lillie Road in Earl’s
Court, SW5. The building is still there, but is
now a hostel for the homeless. I was living in Earls Court
at the time of filming, only a couple of hundred yards away,
but somehow managed to miss getting any photos of the shoot.
The experience of seeing my local neighbourhood up on screen,
though, was one of the seeds of the book.
Coincidentally,
the hostel overlooks one of London's extravagant Victorian
cemeteries, Brompton Cemetery,
Old Brompton Road, the last resting place of
singer Richard Tauber and of suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst.
I was surprised that John
Landis didn't find away to work the graveyard into the
movie, but the grand Gothic background did feature in Iain
Softley's The Wings of the Dove
and little-seen arthouse horror Afraid
of the Dark. In the spy spoof Johnny
English, Rowan Atkinson disrupts a funeral here,
and the
cemetery's chapel became the exterior of the 'Russian' church
in GoldenEye.
A
block east, at 64 Coleherne Road,
SW10, you can see the flat of nurse Jenny
Agutter, where Naughton
does some shape-shifting to Bad Moon Rising (tube:
Earl’s Court).
The dull and belated sequel, An
American Werewolf in Paris, was filmed largely
in Luxembourg.
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