An American Werewolf in London (1981) - Part 4: The Kessler Wolf

Continued from the Part 3 article on An American Werewolf in London which focused on the famous transformation sequence.

The werewolf was always going to be an important element of American Werewolf, and Landis was firm that he didn't just want another actor in a makeup imitating Jack Pierce's Wolf Man work. 'I always envisaged it to be four-legged. I wanted it to be a great big beast!'

This caused a minor disagreement between him and Baker, who had pushed for a more traditional two-legged werewolf. 'I wanted it to be a biped and I was actually hoping for something a little more on the 'man' side as well. I thought it would be interesting, that kind of combination of animal and person. But John said, four-legged hound from hell!'

Landis may have had an ulterior motive in avoiding a two-legged werewolf; to ward off further comparisons with The Howling. As a cocky Landis said to Fangoria, 'I know from stills I've seen that our wolf is certainly very different from (Howling's). Theirs looks like Wile E. Coyote; it's a two-legged thing. Ours is much more of a wolf, a hound, a beast, a four-legged animal. It's not a guy in a wolf suit, it's not a puppet, it's not a mechanical thing, it's not a human. It's not anything you've ever seen. It's a big four-legged beast from Hell and it's wonderful.'

The initial Kessler Wolf sculpture.

Baker sculpted the werewolf's head, giving it a fierce expression ad bared teeth. Landis said about the head, 'It has big scary teeth that are going to tear you up, but it's also sculpted in a very angular way. The brows are very angular, and there are 45-degree angles all through it. There is something scary about 45-degree angles.'

There was also practical reasons for the Kessler Wolf's permanent snarl; the monster itself would not be seen in the film much, so what footage was used would have to count.

'That’s one reason he’s sculpted with an extreme kind of expression to begin with. I was worried that if we rely totally on the mechanism to make the expression that they would use a part when it isn’t really making an expression — you know, we’d shoot something but they’d cut in before or after when it was (emoting) so I thought if it’s only going to be this long, let’s make it look scary. No matter, even if we’re not pulling any cables or doing anything.'

An early, unused sculpt by Craig Reardon.

Steve Johnson with a Kessler Wolf head

The EFX team built three Kessler Wolf heads; a hero animatronic head (with cable controlled mechanisms to control its expressions and move the jaws), and two static stunt heads.

The attack scenes used the stunt heads, which were fitted with either hard acrylic teeth, or soft rubber teeth for the actors safety. These stunt heads were held like a glove puppet by Baker, who was concealed by a shaggy fur 'pelt' as the scenes were shot.

One important scene for the stunt heads was when Griffin Dunne's character is mauled to death by an unknown werewolf on the moors. Dunne, who had already frustrated Baker with his sour reaction to the undead makeups, was about to anger him even more.

'First take, he grabs hold of the (stunt) wolf and rips the foam face right off the skull (...) I was none too pleased about it (...) I was thinking, ‘OK, if that’s how he’s going to play, let’s put the hard teeth in.’ I didn’t put the hard teeth in, but when John said ‘action’ I was just like beating the crap out of Griffin with this head. It was just like I took my anger out on Griffin and I was just hitting him with this damn thing. I think it made the scene that much better. I was like, ‘if you’re going to play rough, I’m going to play rough too.'

The hero wolf head's understructure.

Obviously, the Kessler Wolf had to be furred, especially around the neck which could hide the seams of the suit. Baker found inspiration in his pet keeshond Bosco.

'I had a keeshond (...) which was this hairier dog and kind of almost wolf-like. A lot of times I’d look in the mirror and I’d make faces and kind of like be working on sculptures and it looks like me and my dog was there so I was like — okay. He’s kind of like a wolf, you know, he’s got four legs, he had this big mane of hair which the wolf kind of had. So yeah, (Kessler Wolf) was very much based on my dog Bosco.'

The main challenge of the Kessler Wolf was how it would be realized, as how could a four-legged animal be realized without being a static prop? The idea of using a dog in a costume was immediately shot down, as was the idea of a man in a costume walking in all fours.

Baker eventually found the answer, after several days and nights of brainstorming how to solve the problem. 'Late one night, I was sitting in my living room and it came to me. I thought of a wheelbarrow race. So I stretched out with my legs over the edge of a chair and my arms out in front, testing the balance, seeing if I could shift around while still holding my weight. Then I thought, 'What if we had a flat surface to support the weight - like a diving board with wheels - where we could move it around and vary the height?'

The Kessler Wolf rig was sculpted and constructed in California, to be ready in time for the location filming in England. The wolf suit was built roughly the same time that Baker was also constructing the alien puppets for Steven Spielberg's unmade scifi film Night Skies.

American Werewolf may have played a role in ending Baker's time on Night Skies. Night Skies had originally started off as a horror film, but Spielberg suddenly now wanted it redone as a more light-hearted film, which meant Baker would now have to start from scratch.

Spielberg didn't take it well when Baker rebuked the idea. 'I told Spielberg that this was like starting all over again and it was going to affect my work on American Werewolf. He got mad and said that he was going to lock up (the workshop) and call Carlo Rambaldi. I was shocked.'

Spielberg's new vision for Night Skies would eventually become E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, with that film's alien indeed realized by Carlo Rambaldi. The sudden closure of the workshop meant the EFX crew had to quickly relocate, taking the partly completed werewolf rig with them.

Bill Sturgeon remembered how that fateful day went. 'We heard a commotion in Rick's room and then Rick came in with the sunglasses on, which was usually not a good sign, and said, "Pack everything up. We're going to my garage". We had the werewolf body started, but we threw everything into my truck. We drove away with the werewolf in the back.'

Tom Hester also remembered the sudden move. 'We just had to pick up and disappear. It was very strange. We had to make ourselves scarce. The shop was only a large couple rooms, but we had to move all that stuff out and just hightailed it over to Rick's house.'

The sculpted head, hands and limbs on the 'wheelbarrow' rig.

The werewolf 'rig' was a combination of a puppet and costume. The 'body' of the wolf had a jointed waist that allowed it to bend from side to side, giving it a more natural movement. The performer inside wore the wolf's front legs on their arms as they lay down on the board.

The wolf's back legs were rod-puppeteered from the crewmember who also pushed the rig on wheels. The suit was worn by Kevin Brennan in the EFX shop, but for several of the scenes shot in England the werewolf was played by trained dancer Brendan Hughes.

An American Werewolf in London was released in August, 1981, to a mixed critical response. If there was one thing the critics all agreed on, it was praise for the effects, with even Roger Ebert's less than impressed review calling Rick Baker 'the offscreen star of the film'.

At the time that American Werewolf was released, makeup effects was drawing more attention as an artform. The previous year alone had seen the release of two important films in makeup effects history; Ken Russell's Altered States and David Lynch's The Elephant Man.

It was because of Elephant Man that the Academy established an award for 'Best Makeup and Hairstyling'; while the film was nominated for several Academy Awards, there was no category for makeup and so Christopher Tucker's impressive work went unacknowledged.

Rick Baker would earn the first Academy Award for Best Makeup thanks to his work on American Werewolf. He wasn't the only success story to come from the film; many EFX team members, such as Steve Johnson, would go on to be major players in makeup effects.

Baker himself knew that American Werewolf was going to be a game-changer, as he regularly told the EFX team during its making. 'I told them, You guys are so lucky that you're coming into your first job, and it's the biggest thing I've ever done. This may be the only time in your life that you can do these things. In a way, you're lucky, and in a way, you're not; you have nothing to look forward to, because your first job is the coolest thing you'll ever do.'

Baker's EFX crew with their handiwork. 

 

Much of American Werewolf's masks, suits and puppets still survive today, including the main Kessler Wolf suit, which was renamed 'Oscar' for its role in earning Baker an Academy Award.

The Kessler Wolf suit was restored by Tom Spina and his team. You can read up about it on his website, as well as a lot more photos of the suits before and after!

Sources: 

• 'Beware the Moon: Remembering An American Werewolf in London' (2009)
• Cinefex #16
• Rick Baker: Metamorphosis - Volume 1: 1950 - 1989

An American Werewolf in London (1981) - Part 3: Kessler's Transformation

Continued from the Part 2 article on An American Werewolf in London which focused on the zombie makeups on Griffin Dunne.

When the script for American Werewolf was first completed in 1969, Universal's The Wolf Man was still seen as the gold standard of werewolves in film. Other werewolf movies, such as AIP's I Was a Teenage Werewolf, were often cheesy and low-budget productions.

These other werewolf movies didn't do anything new in terms of effects either; their makeup designs were basically copies of Jack Pierce's Wolf Man makeup on Lon Chaney Jr. and they still used time-lapse dissolve technique for the on-screen transformations.

John Landis was especially tired with the time-lapse dissolves, as he felt they didn't convey any sort of tension or realism. Rick Baker remembered that Landis was fixated on how to do a new kind of werewolf transformation even during the making of Schlock in 1971.

'When I was doing Schlock (...) John had already written American Werewolf. He said it made no sense to him that if you were going to change into a wolf, that you would sit in a chair and be really still until you finished changing. He said it would be a painful experience for your body to be transforming, with the bones and muscles changing.'

It was during their time on Schlock that Baker and Landis discussed how there could be a way to do a more visceral, horrific transformation in real-time, without relying on too many lighting tricks or time-lapse dissolves. In fact, Landis was hopeful that computer technology could help out! 'In the script, I had this idea of the metamorphosis taking place in real time, in bright light. I thought that if Rick could sculpt the first, and then the forth, the tenth, and the fifteenth moments of metamorphosis, a computer should be able to generate and map the difference.'

Computers were quickly rejected as a viable option, but Landis and Baker liked the idea of a transformation achieved with a series of differently sculpted heads, aided by clever editing. There was to be a new obstacle down the line however: a little film called The Howling.

As stated in the first section, ten years had passed since Baker and Landis made Schlock, and the American Werewolf script had still not been accepted by any studio. So when Baker got a call from the producers of another werewolf movie, he gladly took the offer.

That other werewolf film was The Howling, and its director Joe Dante was similarly dissatisfied with the state of the werewolf genre and wanted something new. Dante, who had already worked with Baker's protege Rob Bottin, remembered how the meeting with Baker went.

'We had dinner and Rick said, "John has been talking to me about making his werewolf picture for years. I've got a lot of ideas, but he's never made the movie and he's never come up with the money. So maybe I can use the ideas on your picture."'

Baker got to work on Howling alongside Rob Bottin, but felt a little bad that he was giving away the techniques he originally planned for American Werewolf. Baker said in an interview, 'Rob and I had sat down and, in hopes of getting a bigger effects budget, we'd decided to do a test effects reel of the transformation scene. We kicked around a lot of ideas, but at that point I started thinking, Well, Rick, you're kind of cutting your own throat here; you're telling Rob all this stuff and what are you going to do with American Werewolf?'

Things got more complicated when, just as Baker had signed on to Howling, American Werewolf was finally greenlit for production, thanks to the success of Animal House and Blues Brothers. As Baker remembered, '(...) As soon as I said yes to The Howling, maybe a few weeks later, John calls up and says, 'Good news. We're going to make American Werewolf!'. I said, "I just took another werewolf movie!", "You FUCKER!" he starts yelling at me, but I calmed him down by saying, "I'll sort it out, I'll figure out a way to make this work."'

Thanks to Landis' tantrum, Baker dropped out of Howling and left its makeup effects in the hands of Bottin. Years later, Landis defended his spoilt brat behavior. 'What I was upset about was that Rick had already figured out the change-o-heads and told them about it. I asked Rick, 'You didn't show 'em the change-o-heads?' He said, 'Well...' That's why I was so mad. We'd been talking about American Werewolf in London for ten years'.

'Change-o-heads' was the term Baker coined for the special effects heads he would use to depict the transformation in close-up for American Werewolf, and he had indeed given the idea to Bottin during his time on The Howling. 'John wasn't real happy that I'd already told (Bottin) a bunch of cool ideas for the transformation', Baker would later say.

To make matters worse, The Howling was released in March of 1981, just as American Werewolf had almost wrapped up filming. Baker was impressed with Bottin's work, while acknowledging that it made American Werewolf a more daunting task.

'Naturally it's not exactly what I would have done; Rob took my ideas and added his own. In general, I think he did a better job than I thought he would, all of which made my job on American Werewolf that much more difficult. In retrospect, I feel sharing as much information was a big mistake on my part and will lessen the impact of my transformation scene. It may seem like we're copying what Rob did. John Landis was pretty pissed off by it and has a right to be. I'm pissed at myself.'

Baker's initial sculpture for The Howling's werewolves. 

However, Landis and Baker still felt they could have the edge over Howling's transformation sequence. Howling's scene was shot in moody dark lighting, with many cutaway shots to Dee Wallace staring in terror. American Werewolf's own transformation scene, meanwhile, was to be shot in bright light, with every shot lingering on Kessler's body as it transforms.

The sequence was sketched out as storyboards drawn by John Bruno before filming. Baker originally wanted the transformation shown in one single take; 'I was pushing to have it all in one shot. I thought that would be really spectacular. But John pointed out that he didn't think it would be as dramatic. It would be better filmmaking to do it in cuts, to show different (body parts) in close-up. And as it turns out, that was the only way we really could do it!'

By this stage in the film's production, Baker had been very busy; not only had he just abandoned The Howling, but he had also worked hard on the alien effects of Night Skies, which to his frustration was cancelled by Steven Spielberg. He still hadn't completed American Werewolf's transformation effects by the time they had to shoot the scenes in England.

'All of a sudden it was time to ship stuff (from California) to England, and we weren't totally ready. We had a workshop in England, in Richmond which is near Twickenham (Studios). It was an old schoolhouse, and was where we finished the change-o-heads there, punching hair in them. John was smart, cos I said the makeups take a while so we can't do a lot in a day, so he figured the transformations would be a post-production thing.'

The transformation starts with a shot of Kessler's hand elongating into a wolf paw before his eyes; the hand was the first of the many 'change-o-parts' created for the sequence. Baker described the change-o-parts internal mechanisms;

'Basically if you have a syringe, with the plunger out, connected to a plastic tube going into another syringe with the plunger in, you push the plunger in on this syringe, the other plunger goes out. A basic pneumatic ram! It's basically a plastic piece with four syringes in it, and you push the plunger, the hand would stretch out'.

Rick Baker with the first change-o-hand. 

The second change-o-hand was sculpted by Tom Hester to have a more lupine appearance. As opposed to The Howling's 'change-o-hand' transformation, which just showed claws coming out of Quist's fingers, Baker wanted to imply Kessler's entire skeleton itself was changing.

Baker explained how the second change-o-hand was shot. '(...) It was one we had sculpted and stretched out, with the beginnings of a (paw) pad and fingers bent in a wolf-like position. Bill Sturgeon is on the floor holding the rod that the hand was part of, while David's real hand is just held down with his elbow out of frame.'

Hester with the second change-o-hand sculpt. 

The next shot has Kessler's hands fully transformed; this was achieved as prosthetic hand appliances worn by David Naughton. According to Steve Johnson, in a mini-interview for his Rubberhead autobiography, Landis was displeased with the hand appliances;

'John Landis was actually mean to Rick Baker on-set, he was abusive to him. (...) John was like, 'Rick, this is an outrage! This is ridiculous! I can't put these on-screen, these look like Popeye, get them off my set!' '

As he transforms, Kessler gets hairer, but there wasn't enough time to keep applying hair on David Naughton. Instead, Baker opted to have the 'hairier' scenes shot first to save time. 'We do him in the hairiest state first. When we shoot the (story)board before, I'll pull some of the hair off and trim some hair, and we can do that all in one day working backward'.

The shots of Kessler's feet and back transforming were also achieved with 'change-o-parts'. Baker made sure to completely avoid using 'air bladder' prosthetics for American Werewolf, given Bottin had used them so much for Howling's transformation.

The change-o-parts, especially the change-o-heads, were basically mechanical puppets. Baker had became more confident using mechanized masks and puppets ever since his less than positive experience working on the 1977 King Kong.

On that film he had worked with the famous Carlo Rambaldi, who specialized in creating mechanized puppets. 'I had done some self-contained things before (working with) Rambaldi, but they were kind of sloppy. I had always been hesitant about mechanics, because I thought the parts would have to be perfectly machined - that you'd need a mill and a lathe. Then I saw how crude and sloppy Carlo's cable mechanisms looked. But they worked!'

Baker also said about why he now relied on puppet effects, 'The thing that's so attractive about puppets and mechanized creatures is that you're no longer limited to the human structure or what a man can wear. It gets you into more interesting and creative designs.'

All of the change-o-parts, especially the back and the heads, were homemade pneumatic mechanisms coated in rubber 'skin'. The pneumatics were home-made air rams; two syringes - one to operate, and one to change the puppet's shape - were faced against each other, so when the puppeteer pressed the first syringe, it pushed the second syringe out via air pressure. The second syringe was attached to an acrylic piece that had been cut into a shape resembling the outline of the bone underneath, and so would press against the rubber skin.

The change-o-parts' 'skins' were made of a material called 'Smooth-on #724', which was an urethane-elastomer that not only had a fleshy texture, but also was very elastic compared to other foam rubber compounds that couldn't stretch in the desired manner.

The 'change-o-back' was one of the more complicated props used in the sequence; like the other change-o-parts it utilized pneumatic air rams, with small air bladders under the urethane 'skin'. At least ten crewmembers had to operate the change-o-back.

The next few shots after the back changes show Kessler's entire torso is now wolf-like. His face has started to take on a slightly more lupine appearance too. As Baker bluntly said, 'To have David's face, with everything else already closer to a wolf, would have looked dumb.'

Baker also said, That was the goofiest-looking stage which fortunately went by pretty quickly. The face was still relatively human, but it had this thick, dark mane from the neck on back. It sort of reminded me of the ‘goons’ in the old Popeye cartoons. (...) David had the big rib cage and back on, hand appliances that only left him some use of his thumbs, the fur mane, the face and teeth — and that’s how he went to lunch. I have this hysterical memory of him trying to eat fish and chips all through all that and having a hard time of it.'

David Naughton definitely had almost as hard a time as his character did, as not only did he have to wear the heavy prosthetics, but the assorted change-o-parts were based on life-casts of his face. Naughton remembered, 'First, they covered my arms, then my legs. Then, I had to put my body into containers of quick-drying cement. When it came time to do my head with different expressions, it was really claustrophobic. I said, "Have you guys done this before?" and they said, "You, once!" We were doing things that had never been done before.'

The next shot has Kessler rolling over on his back, showing that his entire body has taken on a wolf-like shape. The effect was fairly simple compared to the change-o-heads; it was just Naughton sitting in a hole cut into the set's floor, with his face and arms in prosthetics. He was positioned so that his head seemed attached to a large puppet body.

The dummy body was sculpted by Tom Hester as one piece. Hester recalled; 'My father was an orthppedic surgeon so I've always been interested in anatomy and really enjoyed figuring out how the veins on the surface show up on one spot, and dive down below the surface. Not super monsterish style, but make it realistic in a way'.

Tom Hester with the sculpted torso. 

 

Hester sculpting the torso. 

 

The torso was puppeteered from underneath the set's floor, but Baker was frustrated with the shoot as he didn't find the effect convincing. He only would be further annoyed when shooting finished. 'We finished with it and got David out of the hole, with the body still laying there in place. I started talking to John about something, and suddenly the body started doing great convulsions, the legs moving exactly the way I wanted - only David's not in it! I said, 'What're you doing that's so different, and why the hell weren't you doing it when we were shooting?!''

His response from the crew was blunt: 'We're just trying to pull the fucking rods out!' There was no way to reshoot the scene either, as the werewolf effects had been shot last in the last week of American Werewolf's filming schedule!

One issue that Baker's EFX crew ran into was that, as they were some of the only Americans in a British film crew, and so were unfamiliar with British dialects. This made filming the effects a little more complicated. 'We gave them a list of things that we needed, but they had different names for everything. 'We need an extension cord'. "What's an extension cord?" '.

The sequence's piece de resistance was the close-up shots of Kessler's face elongating into a wolf's muzzle. According to Baker, Landis always intended this as the scene's finale. 'Purposedly, John wanted the head to change last. He didn’t want the head to change very much because he wanted the transformation to basically almost climax with the head change'.

The change-o-heads consisted of a fibreglass understructure resembling the basic shape of a human skull. Pieces were then cut out of the fibreglass skull, with the holes fitted with acrylic pieces carved into the shape of a wolf's jaws, brows and cheekbones.

Baker explained how they made the underskull. 'We took a life cast of David Naughton, and Rick did the sculpture from there. Rick did the mould, and once we did the mould, we core it out to a certain thickness, and end up with the (change-o-head) core that the skin goes over.

At that point, we just cut all the pieces out, and put all the mechanics on and keep working it until it's in exactly the right place to give the effect we were looking for'.

The air-ram pneumetics used for the other change-o-parts was not strong enough to push the acrylic pieces into place, so Baker opted for cable-controlled mechanisms. Extra cable mechanisms were used to let the chane-o-head move and open its jaws.

A diagram of the change-o-head's internal mechanisms. 

Only two change-o-heads ended up in the film, with a third one, made to show the teeth elongating, never being used. Both of the on-screen change-o-heads were based on a life-cast of David Naughton with his eyes closed. Baker didn't want the eyes open (such as with the Quist change-o-heads in The Howling) as it could possibly give away that it was a puppet.

'I was worried about making eyes that look real enough and getting the eye mechanism to work in this head that was gonna be stretching and moving. We purposedly closed the eyes in the Change-O-Head — the eyes were squinting up in pain because I just knew it was gonna be a problem to make the eyes look right.

And we took a life cast of David Naughton doing a pained expression (...) and then sculpted it to look like it was changing enough, so it wasn't just human David'.

Between the shots of the two change-o-heads, there's a brief shot of Kessler, his face almost now fully canid-like, opening his eyes to show they too have changed. This was achieved as David Naughton in a prosthetic appliance based on Baker's sculpt for the second change-o-head, and complemented with contact lenses by Dr. Morton Greenspoon.

Naughton found the makeup application to be an exhausting experience, as he told Fangoria; 'After eight to ten hours in makeup we would finally get out on the set and shoot for 45 minutes. That would be it. One day, I was in makeup for 16 hours. It was the longest day of my life. We shot for three or four hours, different angles, all kinds of moves, so that they would have anything they needed in editing. I was a complete vegetable by the end of that day.'

Baker had aimed for as much realism as possible for each stage of the transformation, and so had studied the differences between human and canine bodies. 'The way I decided to approach the transformation was through comparative anatomy. I didn't have a wolf skeleton in my collection, but I had a dog's and that was close enough. Comparing it to a human, you find that many of the bones are similar: it's just that the proportions are different. I made lists of the differences - what the major changes were, whether this got shorter or that got longer - the figured out how we could get a suit out of this, in the later stages, that made sense.'

This was especially important for the second change-o-head, in which Kessler's face was half wolf, half human. As part of his research, Baker visited the UCLA's Maxillofacial Prosthetic Clinic, which specialized in prosthetics for people with facial and jaw deformities.

Sculpture of the second change-o-head. 

Perhaps influenced by his research at the UCLA's clinic, Baker designed the second change-o-head to be subtly asymmetrical, but this was not apparent in the final cut; 'One side is more human, one side is more wolf-like, and my thinking was you could start shooting on the human side, it would turn and then you’d get more out of the change-o-head. But we found out as we were shooting it, when we turned the head faster — the more movement there was, (the more) you actually didn’t see the stretching-out of the face, which was the kind of big payoff in this whole piece; so we ended up not using it that way with the turning. We ended up with just a straight profile (shot) with it kind of stretching and shaking as it grows out.'

The sequence ends with a brief shot of the fully-fledged werewolf, but with less fur than the actual suit. The 'man-beast', as the crew called it, was as last minute addition. It was mostly entire made up from other sculpts; the torso was cast from Hester's sculpture of the transformed dummy body, and the head from a sculpt of the final werewolf's.

Tom Hester explained, 'We had an additional casting of the (transformation) body (...) so we used that, folded it up into a crouched position and then just fabricated some foam arms and shoulders, and I think there was a head, (which) was another casting from the original wolf mould. I took that and carved it down, shrunk it down a little bit.

It wasn’t meant to be as big as the final werewolf. So it was all just sort of cut and paste polyfoam and then I put latex over the surface of it and laid hair on the body. And that was set up as a rod puppet that we worked from underneath (the set's floor)'.

The transformation was the most intensive part of the entire shoot for the EFX team, who only had six weeks to construct all the change-o-parts and prosthetics in California before the pieces could be transported to England. Bill Sturgeon remembered how tiring it was.

'We were working on the second change-o-head at eleven at night, & they were coming to pick it up at six in the morning to ship it to London. I still hadn't finished the neck mechanism. I completely blanked out; I went into a kind of mechanical fugue, & somehow at six it was done.'

Tom Hester also remembered how stressful it was, even as Baker would reassure him. 'We were putting in extremely long hours but we were very much game for it. I'd be working on something and was pulling my hair out sometimes, and Rick would walk up behind me, pat me on the back and say, 'I know you can do it, Tom', and walk away.'

Yet despite the months of preparation, the entire transformation scene just took a week to film. Baker felt it was a little funny how so much work amounted to a very short screentime.

'The transformation didn't really take all that long to shoot the physical things. John would say 'Action', and the (change o head) would stretch out, and then he'd go 'Cut! We got that!' And it's like, we got that? I spent months working on this thing, and it took you ten seconds to shoot it! (...) But then I went with my crew to see the movie with a real audience, and when that ten seconds happened of the face stretching out, people stood up and cheered!'

Baker's EFX crew with the assorted 'change-o-parts' (and more!). 

Sources: 

• 'Beware the Moon: Remembering An American Werewolf in London' (2009)
• Fangoria #129
• Rick Baker: Metamorphosis - Volume 1: 1950 - 1989
• Cinefex #16

Read more on An American Werewolf in London's special effects in the 'Part 4' article, covering the werewolf itself.