An American Werewolf in London Sequel We Never Got!

Max Landis, son of director John Landis, is currently working on a re-make of his father’s most beloved film An American Werewolf in London, and he’s got some big shoes to fill.

Whilst An American Werewolf in London is one of the best werewolf movies ever made, it’s 1997 sequel, An American Werewolf in Paris, is Widely panned as being pretty awful. With terrible CGI effects and a terrible script, Paris failed to ignite the originals flame. But what is little known, is that John Landis actual wrote a script for a true sequel to his film.

“He called me and said that they were interested in making a sequel!”

Digital Spy got an exclusive look at a new book that delves into the making of John Landis classic werewolf film.  As revealed in the book Beware the Moon: The Story of An American Werewolf in London, Landis was asked to write a script by the studio, after the huge success of his comedy horror. Landis Explained

“I was asked to do a sequel by PolyGram in 1991. The company, under Jon Peters and Peter Guber, made something like 10 or 12 movies, and the only one that made money was American Werewolf.

They then left the company and were replaced by a guy called Michael Kuhn. He called me and said that they were interested in making a sequel. I entertained the idea for a little bit and then came up with something that I liked and wrote a first draft of the script.”

Landis outlines the script,

“The movie was about the girl that the boys talk about at the beginning of the movie, Debbie Klein. She gets a job in London as a literary agent and while she’s there, starts privately investigating the circumstances surrounding the deaths of Jack and David.”

He then highlights the fate of Jenny Agutter’s character Nurse Alex Price.

“The conceit was that during the time in the first film where Jenny goes to work and David is pacing around the apartment, he actually wrote Debbie Klein a letter. It was all to do with this big secret that David had never told Jack that he had a thing with her.”

The film would have also visited some of the more prominent sets from the original.

“She tracks down Dr Hirsch, who tells her that Alex now lives in Paris because she was so traumatised by what happened. She went back to the Slaughtered Lamb and everyone is still there! I think the only changes were a portrait of Charles and Diana where the five-pointed star used to be and darts arcade game instead of a board.”

And of course there’s a twist at the end.

“It’s then when she speaks to Sgt McManus, the cop from the first movie who didn’t die, that she finds out that Jenny is still in London. She calls her and leaves an answer phone message, which we then reveal is being listened to by the skeletal corpses of Jack and David, watching TV in Alex’s apartment!

The big surprise at the end was that Alex was the werewolf.”

Landis was clearly happy with the results, but the studio heads did not.

“It was pretty wild. The script had everybody in it from the first movie – including all the dead people! I gave the script to Michael Kuhn and he loathed it! He absolutely hated it and was actually pretty insulting about it. Clearly he would have hated the script for the first movie, because like that, it was funny and scary – and if anything, a little wackier.”

The entire project sounded amazing, and it’s a real shame that it never made it past the paper work. Let’s face it, anything would have been better than the awful mess that was An American Werewolf in Paris. Will Max Landis fare any better, only time will tell.

Beware the Moon: The Story of An American Werewolf is out soon and you can pre order it HERE.