Psychology & Cinema Series: "The Howling"
All right. This blog post is the inaugural entry in a new series exploring psychology and cinema, specifically, movies with strong, important, or intriguing psychological themes. Almost all the films I’ll be covering come from my extra credit assignments that I offer in my undergraduate classes where students pick a movie from a curated list of “psych movies,” watch it, and then write a reflection responding to specific prompts. So, if you’re one of my students, read this carefully 😉
In any case, my goal with this series is to present films you may have already seen, but through a different psychological lens, and also introduce you to titles you might not have considered before. I’ll be diving into themes, theories, and interpretations that aren’t always part of the mainstream conversation with cinema. Just a heads-up: there will be spoilers in these posts. Most of these films are older, but if you haven’t seen the movie and want to go in fresh, you should probably skip the post until you’ve had a chance to watch.
So, with that said, let’s start with a movie that probably doesn’t jump to mind when you think of “psychological cinema.” In fact, I’ve been teased for how much I enjoy this film. But it’s a perfect example to kick things off and demonstrate what we can see when we look at something from a new perspective.
(Even the poster scares me!)
Drumroll…..the first movie is: The Howling (1981)—yes, the werewolf movie! It’s about a group of serial killer werewolves, and it’s pretty amazing. And, I’m not the only one who sees deeper themes in this film. I have to acknowledge that my clinical mentor from grad school, Dr. Whitworth, also loved it, and we had great conversations about its psychological underpinnings. I’ll be sharing some of those insights here.
The Howling came out in 1981, the same year as its more popular, more successful, and more attractive sibling An American Werewolf in London. The latter is widely considered the best werewolf movie ever made, and deservedly so. It has an Oscar-winning transformation scene and essentially launched the special effects category at the Academy Awards.
But The Howling deserves much more credit than it gets. Its transformation scenes are nearly as good and that’s partly because Rick Baker, who created the special effects for American Werewolf, originally started on The Howling before leaving the project to work with John Landis. He left his protégé, Rob Bottin, in charge, and there’s a strong stylistic connection between the effects in the two films.
Anyway, while American Werewolf may be the better movie overall, I’d argue that The Howling is both scarier and thematically deeper. And it’s those deeper psychological themes I want to focus on.
Werewolves of LA
The film is based on a novel by Gary Brandner, actually a trilogy of books, about a town of Satan worshipping werewolves. The books never got much attention, but Joe Dante, who had just finished Piranha (a movie with significantly more monsters and less psychology), took the source material and created a horror masterpiece.
Here’s the basic premise: In Los Angeles, a string of gruesome serial murders has been occurring. The killer has been contacting a popular TV anchor named Karen White. He identifies himself as Eddie and, through a series of phone calls, leads her through the urban, neon jungle of 1980s LA to an adult bookstore. In one of the most uncomfortable scenes I’ve seen in an otherwise cheesy movie, Eddie confesses how “alive” he feels and how we wants to make Karen like him. There’s a confusing confrontation with the police intervening, shooting and (seemingly) killing Eddie. Karen is left in a state of shock and can’t remember what happened.
She begins experiencing dissociation, nightmares, and flashbacks—textbook symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). She struggles to connect with her husband and is clearly traumatized. A psychologist at her news station, Dr. George Waggner, suggests she undergo intensive therapy at his experimental living commune: an alternative lifestyle community in Northern California called “The Colony” , where she can recover.
Karen and her husband Bill travel to the deep woods Colony, where they meet a range of bizarre characters who turn out, unsurprisingly, to be werewolves. Bill’s bitten and becomes a werewolf, Karen’s friends from the news station come to check on her, and then things spiral into a terrifying, violent climax.
A fantastic and scary movie! And I think there are three main psychological themes in the film worth exploring.
Karen’s PTSD
First point, something that’s truly compelling about The Howling is what happens to Karen psychologically. Even if we strip away the supernatural layer, what she experiences is clearly trauma. She survives an assault by a serial killer and then almost immediately is experiencing symptoms of trauma. She has significant memory loss about the event, nightmares and flashbacks, dissociation and depersonalization, and significant intimacy issues with her husband—all symptoms that are common presentations of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). And that’s really important historically, because The Howling came out around the same time as the DSM-III, which was the first edition to formally recognize PTSD as a diagnosis.
In the 1970s, there was growing clinical interest in trauma, particularly in veterans returning from Vietnam. The symptoms we see in Karen match what clinicians were beginning to name and understand at the time. What’s more, the treatment methods shown in the movie (like the group hypnotherapy scene) reflect outdated but once-common approaches to trauma therapy. So, while Karen’s presentation is cliché, it’s a fascinating look at how PTSD was thought of as it was becoming part of mainstream understanding. And, honestly, her symptoms are not that uncommon.
Freud was a werewolf?
Second, Dr. Waggner, the head of the Colony, is another fascinating psych character. While modern viewers might see him as a formulaic movie psychologist, in 1981 he represented the contemporary twist on psychodynamic and Freudian theory. In his TV spot talking about his book The Gift, Waggner discusses the core idea of Freudian theory: the ego defense mechanism of repression, stating that “repression is the father of neurosis, of self-hatred”, which is a very good summary of Freudian psychoanalysis. With repression, we hide and attempt to subdue base and primal urges that make us uncomfortable and frightened. In his TV blurb, Waggner talks about accepting ourselves for who we and accept “the Gift” of life. He also talks about the “noble savage” and “animal magnetism”, which is clearly a cute nod to werewolves, but the language he uses is strikingly proto-Freudian and Jungian. Though you never hear the full speech (you only hear snippets of it on TV throughout the movie), I have grabbed Waggner’s speech from the script and posted it below. Ultimately, Waggner's entire philosophy is rooted in Freud's ideas: repression, the unconscious, and the internal conflicts between different parts of the psyche. His goal is to help werewolves suppress or channel their urges in healthier ways, rather than give in to them entirely. But, if applied to regular (non-werewolf) people, Waggner’s core push is about accepting oneself and balancing between dynamic urges, which is exactly psychodynamic therapy.
A side note, I think Jung would have loved The Howling, but I don’t think Freud could get past the werewolf sex scene.
Evil as a lack of restraint
This brings us to the most psychologically rich theme in the film: the interplay of the id, ego, and superego. According to Freudian theory, the id represents our primal, animalistic drives—pure desire, unchecked by morality or reason. It’s brutal, viciously sexual, and self-destructive. The superego is our conscience, shaped by societal norms, that demands us to behave in certain ways and inflicts feelings of guilt on us. And, finally, our sense of self —-the ego-— tries to mediate between these two forces, and when overwhelmed by the demands of the other two, the ego resorts to defense mechanisms to cope with the stress (i.e., repression or denial). And The Howling leans into this heavily. At the end of the film, Karen comments that this is our nature, we must fight between what is “kind and peaceful in our natures, and what is cruel and violent”, a perfect summary of this interplay.
In the film, Eddie, and his siblings Marsha and TJ represent total surrender to the id. They are pure appetite and violence. Eddie is the serial killer from the opening scene and seeks pleasure through murder and rape. Marsha is depicted as hypersexual and predatory throughout the film, and TJ is basically bestial even when he is in his human form. They have no restraint, no conscience. In Freudian terms, they are monsters not because they are supernatural, but because they have let the id take over completely. Interestingly, psychodynamic perspectives on psychopaths is that they don’t have adequate superegos to contain their violence, maybe there may be something to that. I wonder….
This is what makes the movie so chilling. The real horror isn’t the werewolves; it’s what they symbolize: the dark, repressed urges within all of us. Waggner’s faction tries to balance the id (their werewolf nature) through control and therapy. Eddie’s faction rejects that entirely, disdainful of Waggner’s efforts. In a chilling scene where Eddie confronts Karen’s friend Chris, he chuckles at the brutal, torturous death he just inflicted on Chris’s wife, nonchalantly stating that Karen can be found at the compound where Waggner allows the werewolves to vent some frustration. Laughing, he mocks Waggner: “My God, he’s so repressed”, which is a perfect Freudian dig.
In the climax, faced with destruction due to silver bullets, the entire werewolf colony abandons the balance and gives in to their primal instincts. They stop pretending. They stop hiding. They fully embrace the id—and in doing so, they become terrifying.
Don’t watch any of the sequels
This to me, is what makes The Howling such a powerful psychological film. It’s not just a monster movie. It’s an exploration of trauma, repression, therapy, and the dark core of human nature. It also happens to be genuinely scary. There’s one moment in particular (I won’t spoil it) is , in my opinion, one of the most terrifying scenes in cinema (it’s on several “scariest moments of all time” lists!).
So, for all these reasons, The Howling is one of my all-time favorite movies, and definitely my favorite “psych movie.” Unfortunately, none of my students have chosen it yet, though I do hope every year.
So, if you’re looking to earn some extra credit and make your professor happy, please, for the love of Freud, pick The Howling. If I have to read one more paper on Shutter Island, I may lose my mind.
-Dr. G
DR. WAGGNER’S TV SPEECH IN THE FILM
We’ve all heard people talk about “animal magnetism”, about the “natural man” and the “noble savage”. As if we had lost something valuable in our long evolution into civilized human beings -- and there’s a good reason for this. Man is a combination of the learned and the instinctual, of the sophisticated and the primitive. We should never try to deny the beast, the animal, within us -- only to channel these energies in a positive direction. All of us have a great untapped potential -- a potential for living. What we do with that potential, with that life, depends as much on our attitudes toward our physical desires as it does on the social programming of our minds. The struggle between mind and body is not a necessary one. It produces anger, frustration, the strain of modern-day living in a world that’s moving too quickly toward its own annihilation. Stress results when we fight against our impulses, when we attempt to destroy the natural man or woman within us. Repression is the father of neurosis, of self-hatred. Let me say a few words about my new book, THE GIFT. When we’re born, each of us is given a gift -- the gift of life.....
KAREN’S RETORT AT THE END
From the day we’re born there is a battle we must fight- a struggle between what is kind and peaceful in our natures and what is cruel and violent. This is our birthright as human beings, and the real gift that differentiates us from the animals. But now for some of us, that choice has been taken away. A secret society exists, and is living among all of us. A secret society exists, and is living among all of us. They are neither people nor animals, but something in-between. Monstrous mutations whose violent natures must be satisfied….
