Before he decided that there was more money to be made as a low rent L. Ron Hubbard, Whitley Strieber wrote a couple of enjoyable, pulpy horror novels. While The Hunger is probably better known because of a) vampires and b) lesbians, and the obligatory merging of those two ideas, I think the film and novel of Wolfen are more interesting. The ground is less well trod than sexy female vampires and the themes resonate a little more broadly.
It’s a shame that it’s necessary to spoil the plot here, but after nearly thirty years it’s fair game, because the build-up and mystery over what, exactly, has been killing people in New York, and why, is handled very nicely. An international developer, his wife and their bodyguard are brutally murdered in Battery Park, the corpses dismembered and apparently partially eaten. Suspicion falls on unnamed terrorist groups, largely at the suggestion of a representative of a private security firm which hunts down terrorists on behalf of wealthy clients. While officially authorities investigate communist groups looking for a scapegoat for the killings, the coroner’s office is unable to find any traces of a weapon on the bodies and, further complicating matters, finds animal hairs that link the deaths to the deaths of street people in an area of urban blight that the dead industrialist is planning to gentrify.
Now, maybe this was an early sign that Strieber was going to go a little woo happy in later years, but it’s at this point in the film that Albert Finney as the rationalist, curmudgeonly, implied to be trigger happy-if not outright corrupt-cop decides that, on the basis of this evidence, that the most likely suspect in the killings is: a Native American shape-shifter. It’s an interesting red herring, as there have been some curious quick shots of Indians being spiritual within an urban environment and hating on The Man. But when all your evidence is pointing to “animal” and the skeptical character is leaning towards a supernatural explanation for events, something has maybe gone off the rails a little bit. And I think it really does come down to the aforesaid woo-ish tendencies of Strieber. Because, you see, this whole Native American/shape-shifter thing comes down to the fact that our red brothers are more in touch with the natural world, maaan, dig it. It’s that weirdly paternalistic attitude about “wise, noble savages” that so many Americans are inflicted with used as a plot element in a horror film. Even though the film gives itself an out, that Finney is just being messed with and the Indians are feeding him a load of bull because he’s a borderline fascist, we’re still left with the suggestion that all Native Americans have super mystical senses.
Eventually, the truth comes out, that the real threat is wolves. Not just any wolves, super-intelligent wolves that have lived hidden in American cities for centuries, picking off people who won’t be missed (thinning the herd, as it were), and only now making their presence felt because Euro-trash real estate developers are tearing down the slums and urban squalor that the live and hunt in. And this actually rings true to me. People have a weird relationship to the natural world. They want to appreciate it at a distance, they feel guilty for destroying it, but all the same they don’t want it intruding on their world. I live in Southern California. I know people who freak out at even the barest suggestion that maybe there are coyotes or mountain lions living in the hills behind their houses, even though statistics and the exercise of common sense means they are all almost never going to have an encounter with one or the other. We feel guilty over destroying the land that these animals used, but we don’t want them around all the same. So, actually, maybe that Native American connection wasn’t quite so ham-fisted after all.
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If memory serves, when I read the novel, it all took place in the then ruins of the South Bronx, where I was raised, so the novel was especially cool for me.
I know people who freak out at even the barest suggestion that maybe there are coyotes or mountain lions living in the hills behind their houses
Really? That is sad. I’d be the guy sitting in his backyard at night, hoping for a glimpse.
Oops. Also meant to say, loving the recent string of horror reviews.