'Emotion, pain and torture': The grisly American Werewolf in London scene that took horror to new extremes

John Landis's horror-comedy classic was released 45 years ago, but its key sequence still astonishes – and its make-up maestro, Rick Baker, won the first Oscar in a new category.

In the history of horror cinema, there are few scenes quite as jaw-dropping as the centrepiece of John Landis's An American Werewolf in London. The 1981 classic tells the story of a hapless young US tourist, David (David Naughton), who is bitten by some sort of animal while trekking across England's North York Moors. Recovering in London, he is seen transforming into the titular wolfman – and the sequence took monster movies to graphic new extremes. 

Alone in his girlfriend's apartment as the full moon blooms, David suddenly screams that he is "burning up", falls to his knees in agony, and rips his clothes off. His hands elongate, his body gets hairier, his teeth and nails sharpen, and his face twists and warps. The soundtrack is vital: David's screaming, his bones crunching, Sam Cooke singing Blue Moon. But the scene depends on the practical effects masterminded by Rick Baker, which still chill the blood and boggle the mind, 45 years after Landis's horror comedy was released in August 1981.

"It made this huge earthquake in horror films," Hector Sotomayor, professor of film studies at Ringling College of Art & Design in Sarasota, Florida tells the BBC. "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." 

It's such a groundbreaking scene that Baker won the first ever Academy Award in a new category, best make-up and hairstyling, in 1982. Some historians even argue that the film was partly responsible for the award's creation. The Exorcist, Star Wars, and The Elephant Man had increased calls for the Academy to recognize the skills and imagination that went into hair and make-up design, says Paul Davis, author of Beware the Moon: The Story of An American Werewolf in London. "By the time An American Werewolf came along, the Academy thought, we cannot ignore this anymore."

Baker and Landis began plotting how to make an innovative transformation sequence when they were working on Landis's first film as a writer-director, 1973's Schlock, a low-budget horror comedy about a 20-million-year-old ape-man going on a rampage in southern California.

Quickly recognizing a fellow horror and monster-movie obsessive, Landis gave Baker the script for An American Werewolf in London and told him, "I want to do a transformation in bright fluorescent lighting where you see the body change. It has to be emotional and painful," says Davis.

In earlier werewolf films, whenever characters like Larry Talbot (Lon Chaney Jr) in 1941's The Wolf Man became beasts, noticeable techniques like stop-trick photography – where........

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