Like Kevin Burwick from MovieWeb says, let’s just ease down on the rhetoric when claiming that there’s a reboot of The Howling on the table as of yet. Andres Muschietti did say that he’d like to take on the project, but he’s said nothing about actually doing it yet. Though considering what he’s done with the second chapter of IT there’s nothing to say that such a reboot wouldn’t be flat out terrifying and a great way to bring back a classic. The general idea is that The Howling is classic enough that it probably shouldn’t be messed with, but with Andres it would seem that worrying about the source material getting the proper attention wouldn’t be a huge issue. He’s already shown that he can stick close to the story and give it a new and exciting look at the same time, which is rare for a lot of directors who want to push their own vision and make a reboot into something all their own. With Andres it would seem that this movie might actually have a chance to come back into the modern era and make itself known again in a big way.
As you can imagine there are some lycanthrope fans that are itching at the chance to see another werewolf movie come to the big screen since in recent years it would seem that the desire for such a movie has been waning in the face of other movie monsters, particularly those that might flatten a werewolf into a fur pancake with one good stomp. But The Howling is one of those movies that is hard to forget since it held to the old legends concerning werewolves that we all grew up with. While there are a good number of particulars that differ between one telling and the next The Howling is one that seems to stick to what a lot of people believe is common knowledge. If you’re bitten you tend to turn into one, if you become a werewolf there’s really nothing you can do to quell your urges but let it happen and go out and feed. And the only way to kill one is with a silver bullet. That legend has been tested over the years as some movies have made it necessary for the werewolf that bit an individual to die before an individual can be cured, while some are just about unstoppable since they have the ability to become hybrids, half-lycans and half-vampires. But The Howling is a return to a legend that’s more along the lines of the old legend that the classic Wolfman movies adhered to. Remember those, when Lon Chaney Jr. was still up and making his mark in the monster movies?
The Howling is most definitely one of the more classic lycanthrope movies, when such films were still largely dominated by werewolves and nothing else. If you’ve watched the current Hellboy you might start think that lycanthropes are about to change a bit if the idea really catches on, since a were-leopard would be interesting to be honest, but it would certainly be a lot different than a werewolf in many ways. If The Howling is to be remade it does need to stick to the old legend and keep the monsters definitively canine in appearance and manner. The Howling actually did suffer a rather ill-fated attempt at a reboot back in 2011, as Mike Thompson from The Escapist reminded us at the time, but since people haven’t been talking about it since you can easily imagine that it didn’t go over that well. That’s the thing about monster movies, if they’re great then people are going to be talking about them for weeks and even months on end, perhaps even into the next year. But if they’re less than what’s expected then it’s possible that people are wanting to forget about them the moment they’re out of the theater or when they get up from the couch.
It’s a testament to this movie that people are still able to remember it at this point, though when you look back at it now you can kind of laugh at certain points in the movie that are still as cheesy as can be and plagued by the somewhat limited technology and weird camera angles that were used back then. Still, for all that you can enjoy the movie since the story on its own was something pretty chilling and the idea of a colony of werewolves masquerading as a retreat is kind of ingenious. If Andres could make that happen again, and there’s no reason to think that he couldn’t, it would make the movie work even better. Even with the inclusion of technology after all there are still plenty of spots in the world where people go to get away from it all, secluded spots that might still get cell service, but are remote enough that they would serve perfectly as the spawning grounds of another classic werewolf movie.
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