Trivia

As fans of John Landis' film, both Stern and Burns were acutely aware of the big shoes they were looking to fill. "'An American Werewolf in London' is really ground zero for that combination of comedy and horror," Burns said. "There are very few cases where people have put them together so well without one destroying the other. It's not like a Mel Brooks spoof of a horror film, and it's not like a horror movie where one character's funny - it's a truly funny, entertaining, witty movie where the horror still works, and the horror's still real." In addition to maintaining the tone of the Landis film, Stern said they worked to ensure the characters kept the same accessibility and believability that helped anchor 'London'. "We had to capture a wit, and there had to be an awareness," he said. "The characters had to be smart and funny and aware of their predicament like they were in the first one." Both Stern and Burns were keen to carry on Landis' use of music - as both a source of humour and a means of setting the tone of the film. "Luckily there's a lot of songs about the moon," Stern said. "Tim and I were both big music fans, so that was the fun part - you know, looking at what songs we could use. When we wrote it, there was no Internet, there was no 'Googling'; it would have been five seconds of work now," Burns said. "But back then I remember going down to the record store and grabbing this big yellow-paged six-inch thick catalogue of song titles and just making lists of everything that had moon in it or wolf in it or anything that seemed kind of relatable." The script, as Burns and Stern envisioned it, began with the classic Pink Floyd track 'Brain Damage' featuring the key lyric 'I'll see you on the dark side of the moon" as the camera slowly drifts down from the sky to the streets of Paris, where an American academic is pursued (and ultimately seriously injured) by an unseen force. "The song seemed like a really good, bold way to start the film - because it's so iconic. It's such an atmospheric song that it would set the mood in a really cool way," Stern said. "I knew that would be very expensive because it's like the top-selling album of all time, but I thought, hey, why not? We're just writing a script. It doesn't cost me anything to type those words on the page." See more