Some cinematic achievements change the future of movies. For many filmmakers, the groundbreaking “man to wolf” transformation in John Landis’s An American Werewolf in London is one such scene. This August, BBC reporter Gregory Wakeman set out to celebrate the magic and long-lasting impact of that scene—and he asked Ringling film faculty Hector Sotomayor to lend his academic insights.
The iconic horror-comedy movie, made in 1981, portrays an American tourist in England who’s bitten by a strange creature and later transforms—painfully—into a man/wolf hybrid. Notably, the transformation was depicted without CGI or AI and instead relied on a cinematic combination of make-up, hair, and sound effects. The film later earned special effects creator Rick Baker the first-ever Oscar for make-up and hair styling.
“It made this huge earthquake in horror films,” Sotomayor told Wakeman in their interview. “There was a renaissance of make-up effects in the 1980s and that really begins with An American Werewolf in London. It established make-up as a legitimate movie art form.”
Sotomayor had previously spoken about the film during an October 2025 screening at the historic Tampa Theatre. He later summarized the lasting impact of the metamorphosis and its significance not just as a visual effect, but as a storytelling tool: “Importantly, in terms of narrative, it is an extraordinary emotional scene that incorporates a super-high level of realism in which the character suffers horrific pain (with bones cracking, skin stretching, and of course body hair) in his transformation.“
“The sequence took monster movies to graphic new extremes,” Wakeman wrote in the story, which first appeared on the BBC website Aug. 27. (The full article is available here.)
Hector Sotomayor teaches film studies in the Liberal Arts Department at Ringling College of Art and Design and organizes the College’s ongoing film screening series.
Read the article on the BBC website.
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