Any word of a new Joe Dante project gets the Pink Smoke abuzz with excitement, and the announcement that he'll be filming The Man with the Kaleidoscope Eyes, about Roger Corman making The Trip (although he'll apparently direct something called Burying the Ex first) has inspired us to launch a series examining everything Dante's ever directed. You can mark this down as the most inevitable series in the history of the 'Smoke: we love us some Joe Dante, and here's a couple reasons why...

"The trick is, this picture takes place in the same world we live in now, where people have seen horror films. But we know the monsters are real." - Joe Dante, on The Howling

Joe Dante likes monsters. Joe Dante wants to see monsters, the same kind that terrorized the screen of the Saturday matinees he obsessively haunted growing up in Morristown, New Jersey. And he knows we want to see monsters, whether we admit it or not, that even the most prudish audience member is fascinated by the idea of invading supernatural forces, like the giggling nuns who sneak a peak into Dick Miller's occult bookshop. So every film Dante's made is a creature feature; the creatures may have gotten more abstract and less directly-threatening over the years (the Klopeks, the Mant, the Commando Elite) but remain classic movie monsters at their core. The Howling, Dante's first collaboration with longtime producer Michael Finnell, gave him a chance to not only play in the sandbox of a horror subgenre he obviously cared a great deal about, but to resurrect it for a new generation, one with an acute awareness of the mythos of monster movies and all the various cliches. Instead of facing this as a problem, like how to make Piranha into something more than a blatant Jaws xerox, Dante made a film that focuses on what modern audiences know about movie monsters and how that, married to the film viewing experience, satisfies the audience's compulsion to see movie monsters.

By 1980 there hadn't been a notable American werewolf picture since the Golden Age of Universal horror movies, and the studio's most successful and enduring title of that era, 1941's The Wolf Man, is wholly cinematic. The full moon, silver bullets, even the famous verse recited by Maria Ouspenskaya in the clip Dante selected to feature in The Howling ("Even a man who is pure in heart...") comes from Curt Siodmak's Wolf Man script rather than ancient mythology. Unlike Dracula or Frankenstein, The Wolf Man was an original screenstory with roots in popular fiction, yet not derived from a specific literary source. Director George Waggner allows cinematic tools to seep into the narrative; for instance, he leads Lon Chaney, Jr. to his hairy fate by having him spy a beautiful girl with a telescope that frames the town within the diaphragm of a movie camera, people moving silently across the iris like the subjects of an old film. The transformation of man into beast is itself cinematic, and would be forever ingrained into the public consciousness by the iconic Lon Chaney makeup and lap dissolve camera effects, again rather than descriptions found in a famous book.

Dante similarly constructed his movie within the confines of Hollywood: even though The Howling came from the book of the same name by Gary Bradner, Dante's Piranha collaborator John Sayles threw out almost the entire novel when he sat down to write his draft. Dante completely appropriated the book for the screen, even replacing character names with those of the directors of werewolf movies,* and has subsequently never adapted a movie from a book. The mythology of Dante's monster movies are entirely celluloid-based: unlike John Landis' An American Werewolf in London, which creates its own werewolf lore, or Neil Jordan's The Company of Wolves, sourced from fairy tales, Howling stays tightly under the shadow of The Wolf Man. The previous film is glanced on TV and pervades over Dante's movie, his characters using their knowledge of Siodmak's werewolf regulations to uncover the Colony conspiracy and insightfully arm themselves with silver bullets. Before The Howling, movie characters typically scoffed at the idea of supernatural incursion into the real world as being the stuff of legend or based in superstition (or they ate too much candy) - Dante's mythology comes directly from cinema, and these days modern film characters blame hysterical victims of ghosts and vampires as having just seen too many movies.

Which is approriate, since The Howling is all about the act of watching, and the conflict that comes from channeling what's seen into any semblance of reality. The first scene has Dee Wallace's Karen watching a movie then forgetting what it was she witnessed in the viewing booth, and the film ends with everyone watching Karen turn into a werewolf on TV but not believing it really happened. Karen represents both ends of the spectrum: she doesn't want to see the monsters or be seen by them, a revulsion reflected by her body position in the dark porno booth, facing the screen with her back to serial killer Eddie so neither can see each other. She can stomach a real-life horror of the grisly snuff film rape on the flickering screen** (the book opens with an actual rape, by a non-werewolf), she'll fearlessly agree to meet with a rampant serial killer and even seems relieved when she mistakes a sleazy ogler in an alley for Eddie, but won't let herself acknowledge the werewolf transformation taking place behind her. (It's fitting that this first scene is set within a gritty urban expanse that recalls old 42nd Street, where adult films and B-movies played next door to each other - except, of course it's L.A., home to Hollywood, a case of East Coast Dante bringing 42nd Street to the glossy pretense of California).

The show-stopping transformation later in the film is the ultimate pay-off to what's only hinted at in the first scene, and Karen is forced to experience it from beginning to end. Until then, we pick up pieces of the transformation through senses that represent a movie coming together: sitting in the theater of the porno shop, the sound of howling recorded on a Nagra-like devise (the movie's title is itself an auditory definiton), the sketches that look like they could have come from Rob Bottin's storyboards of the transformation - all cinematic preludes to the actual transformation scene. Like Eddie morphing into a monster the werewolf aspect slowly takes over the film like a developing photograph or the flashes of images in Wallace's progressively graphic dreams, changing from psycho killer thriller to monster movie over the course of the running time. Dante mentions on the DVD commentary that the idea was to keep the werewolf aspect secret when the film was originally released, and that's exactly how it plays out: to bring the audience into the cognizance of experiencing a full-blown monster movie, Dante has to gently pull them out of any assurance of reality, which is exactly what Karen herself is desperately trying to hold onto.

Karen, and subsequently the film, is haunted by the ubiquitious Smiley Face sticker that first turns up in the phone booth and on the door of the porno film cubicle. The ambiguously threatening facade recurs throughout the movie, again in sticker form but also in John Carradine's sinister smirk during the hunt, Eddie's gruesome "smile" as he transforms and John Sayles' recounting the story of Stu Walker, his morgue co-worker whose body was brought in "smilin' up at me, leakin' seawater out of his ears" (urban legends within the narrative are another devise of Dante's to turn his characters into active filmmakers, like Kate's tale of her father's festive demise in Gremlins and Art's story of Skip the soda jerk in The 'burbs). More importantly, Dante makes visual connections between the Smiley Face and cinematic tools: the colorful effusion to the projector in the porno shop and its circular, leering face to the camera lens in the news studio that causes Karen to freeze as she flashes back to the night of Eddie's assault. The position of the sticker inside the phone booth is approximately the same place the camera would be placed in the reverse shot, and its proximity to actual filmmakers who appear on-camera (Roger Corman outside the phone booth, set designer/Mongrel director Robert A. Burns in the porno shop) seems to substantiate Smiley's position as surrogate cameraman. If the director is guilty of mischievously introducing a monster movie to the exisiting narrative, it's the rookie cop shooting out the sticker's "eye" that stops this from happening in the very first scene.

The Smiley Face motif was Dante's idea, although he clearly chose it in relation to John Sayles' concept of malevolent forces hiding behind friendly exteriors and "have a nice day" icons. Sayles clearly created the Colony as a satire of the then-popular Self Help movement, a hold-over from the rebellious 60's that had been wholly commercialized by the early 80's (following Sayles' theme of radical "flower power" concepts being watered down and depreciated over the years that also informed his 1980 directorial debut Return of the Secaucus 7). While it's a funny idea to have a community of grumpy werewolves who reluctantly submit to hippy psychiatry to help stave off hunger for human flesh, and one that the film fully sustains, Dante only half-commits to an agenda of Self Help satire. Dante's political subtexts (which we'll get more into later in the series) are sharp, but almost always secondary to his incorporation of film and media culture. As such, Dante's depiction of the Colony is to present them like a bunch of Hollywood phonies: cliquey, incestuous meat eaters who are into trendy New Age bullshit and congregate near cliffs decorated with giant shadows that give the impression of a fancy screening party.

Unwittingly into this crowd walks Karen, a famous news anchor recognized so readily and fawned over so obsessively she could be an international film star, which may be Dante's intention: how often does a murderous John Hinckley type target a news reporter?*** So let's say Karen is a stand-in for a popular glamorous actress, wooed away from her cozy if unrewarding job working for schlock TV personality Kevin MccCarthy by hot shot producer Patrick Macnee, a man trying to hide his inner monster and get fellow creatures to fight against their ravenous nature - one who certainly doesn't want werewolves in the popular consciousness under any circumstances. Several characters in The Howling find themselves unwittingly framed - in a television set, in a barn door and, for Karen, in the window of her isolated cabin in the wilderness of the Colony.

Karen the Movie Star, thinking she's escaped her role in a degrading monster movie by refusing to perform for the (TV) camera in L.A., hasn't prevented herself from being "seen" in a monster movie, or the monsters from appearing of their own accord. Doesn't she know werewolves have mass appeal and don't want to be relegated to the minority? The monsters, particularly proud she-wolf Marsha Quist, want to be seen and to perceive themselves as the star of their own creature feature. No one, not Karen, the man who shoots him or even the audience, really sees Eddie - spreader of the Smiley sticker - when he's "killed" in the first scene, but his bullet-wound third eye gives him all the perception he needs to finally pull Karen into his monster movie. When he does transform fully in front of her, Eddie's wolf form hogs practically the entire screen and, unlike the movie werewolves that came before, doesn't look at all human - there's no mistaking wolf-Eddie for the monster that he is. And in the course of his resurrection, he's left John Sayles & company gaping into the empty cold chamber of the morgue: yet another set of unsuspecting characters framed within Dante's frame:

Self Help is all about looking inside, and Dante suggests that you should be looking out, preferably at (or through) a screen or a camera lens. The very first and very final (post-credit) shots of the film are of a television; different TVs appear in the second scene in which Eddie watches Karen on the news and the penultimate montage of the world witnessing Karen's transformation. Although her motive is to expose the existence of werewolves, bringing monsters back to the public consciousness - even if nobody buys it - is exactly what the creatures, and Dante, intended all along. Why else would Marsha show up smiling at the bar, even if it makes no narrative sense? Karen's climactic transformation into the "poodle wolf" with all its Network-like sensationalism is Karen the Movie Star's surrender: she's not only acknowleding the monsters, she's making sure everyone else sees them - by seeing her - as well. But this is Dante's world: the TV viewers know all about werewolf pictures assume it's a gag, or a late night monster movie, with the exception of one surly drunk who insists that just because it happened on TV "doesn't mean it isn't real." Dante has reintroduced werewolves to the people of The Howling, but brilliantly it's still just werewolves on TV, in a movie - the new mythology of Joe Dante's monsters is that they exist as cinematic representations of themselves. No sensible person would look for monsters anywhere but on a screen, and that's where Dante knows that they belong.

If you don't give people humor, then they won't find it. Because you've got absurd situations and, no matter how seriously you take them, there's no doubt about it, that it's not real. - Joe Dante, on The Howling

Dante sympathizes with his monsters, even the man-eating piranhas and malicious werewolves, because he loves them. That may explain the wholesome feeling of a Joe Dante movie, their satisfying middle ground between phony Spielbergian sentimentality and mocking Landisish misandry. Dante's monsters may terrorize and even kill, but there's always an implied sense that their rampage doesn't result in any permanent damage (the return of Murray and Sheila Futterman in Gremlins 2 certainly seems to back that up). Part of this is pure practicality - monsters are found only in movies and therefore can't actually harm anybody - but it mostly has to do with Dante's sense of humor and love of cartoons (again, something we'll get into more later). Although the acid-melted faces and disembowelments of The Howling wouldn't become the norm for Dante movies, he still manages to water it down by having Belinda Balaski's boyfriend view Ub Iwerks' Little Boy Blue cartoon at the same time she's being brutally mauled to death by a giant werewolf. Moments like this never seen overplayed, mainly because Dante has Dee Wallace and Christopher Stone (the B-movie Tom Skerritt) play their parts absolutely straight, Wallace in particular turning in a great performance that never once betrays the film's irreverent playfulness.

It's the more apparent humor that have become traits of Dante's work - clips from old movies, in-jokes, naming characters after genre directors and filling the cast with character actors, in this case Kevin McCarthy, John Carradine, Kenneth Tobey, Slim Pickens and Dick Miller (playing a character named Walter Paisley), who bring with them the assurance of their classic B-movie roles - and built the director's familiarity with monster movies into the framework of his films. For Dante, it's more than just reference; the mere presence of McCarthy at the beginning of The Howling, in a role not pivotal to the plot, provides a climate of Body Snatchers-level paranoia that lasts the entire film (even the Roger Corman cameo, an homage to the William Castle appearance in Rosemary's Baby, allows Dee Wallace to tap into Mia Farrow's anxiety). The Wolf Man clip introduces the film's precarious paradox: monsters are made up, therefore they can't exist, but then how do we know anything about them? The mythological world of monster movies is what The Howling's heroes reject - Eddie Quist can't possibly be a werewolf, a fictional creature from an old Lon Chaney, Jr. movie - but also what gives them the tools to survive. The monsters themselves want to be recognized for what they are: Macnee's old-fashioned werewolf walks to his death almost in appreciation that somebody took the care to bring real silver bullets to the werewolf party (his dying words are "They're real...thank god.") At the same time, Macnee's noble end functions as a reference to Larry Talbot's own death wish: Macnee, his character named after Wolf Man's director, alludes to a tragic movie character even as he expresses joy at the prospect of monsters being legitimized in his reality... which is a movie.

Howling's monster movie lore is provided by Dick Miller, who would later supply the gremlins with their titular name and vague origins and deliver the small soliders to Winslow Corners; obviously, Miller is the licensed curator of Dante's "new mythology." Applied to werewolves, it's not entirely faithful to Curt Siodmak's lycanthropic clauses: they can transform at will without the help of a full moon, even during the day, and function more like vampires, seducing victims into their immortal clique who turn evil upon becoming infected (like Karen's husband). Same as Sayles' satirical subtext: Dante doesn't hold his monsters to consistent rules that could in any way be construed as "realistic" (see for example the lampooning of the etiquette for maintaining mogwai in Gremlins 2). Dante wants to keep the concept of his monsters purely cinematic, even if it means mashing up his werewolves with vampires or any other creature found in the same pages of Forry Ackerman's Famous Monsters of Filmland the director pored over as a kid (Ackerman appears in Howling carrying issues of his magazine around in Miller's occult book shop, the real source of the Howling's lore). To make those monsters live and howl and wreak havoc on the screen, Dante argues that the filmmaker, and preferably the audience, must have seen them before and want to see them again.