Details For Unmade ‘An American Werewolf in London’ Sequel Revealed

An American Werewolf in London is considered one of the best horror movies ever made. That’s pretty much known by movie fans everywhere. What you might not know, however, is that we almost got a sequel to the film back in 1991, and director John Landis has revealed some pretty interesting details of the project that never actually happened.

In an interview with Digital Spy, Landis revealed:

“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. 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 went on:

“The movie was about the girl that the boys talk about at the beginning of [An American Werewolf in London], 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. 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.

She tracks down Dr Hirsch, who tells her that Alex now lives in Paris because she was so traumatized 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. 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. It was pretty wild. The script had everybody in it from the first movie – including all the dead people!”

So what exactly happened?

“…[he] 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.”

There you have it. We could have had a sequel, but it just wasn’t meant to happen. We were instead given An American Werewolf in Paris in 1997, which was an absolutely terrible movie, as Landis said so himself in a recent interview:

“I advised him not to do it. I think he’s putting himself in a bad position. My son is brilliant, he really is, and he wants to do it. So what am I going to say? No? I know it won’t be as bad as ‘An American Werewolf In Paris,’ which was shit. So, I don’t know.”

If a movie as bad as that one was made, it really makes you wonder why they wouldn’t have let Landis do his own thing. If anything, it couldn’t have been worse than the one we got in ’97.

What do you think? Do you wish we would have gotten Landis’s idea for a sequel back in the early 90’s? Be sure to tell us your thoughts in the comment section!