Moonstruck is the greatest secret werewolf movie of all time
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“You can’t see what you are, and I see everything. You’re a wolf.”
There are not as many great werewolf movies as there are vampire movies. The genre started in the 1930s with movies like Werewolf of London (which gave us transmissible lycanthropy) was codified with the rules Curt Siodmak and other writers made up for The Wolf Man and its Universal sequels (lethal silver, the importance of the moon, full or otherwise) but it wasn’t until the 1980s that we got movies that really defined what the genre could do: An American Werewolf in London, The Howling, and Moonstruck.
No, really. Moonstruck. I mean… look, it’s impossible to ignore the werewolf subtext once you see it. So let’s do just that!
Written by the Pulizter Prize-winning Irish-American playwright John Patrick Shanley (who also wrote the deeply eccentric Wild Mountain Thyme a few years back, check that one out) Moonstruck is the story of Loretta Castorini (Cher), a widowed Italian-American woman who gets engaged to her longtime, boring human-potato of a boyfriend Johnny (Danny Aiello).
Johnny goes back to Italy to be by the bedside of his dying mother, asking Loretta to go talk to Johnny’s estranged younger brother, Ronny (Nicholas Cage) and invite him to the wedding.
Loretta immediately falls for Ronny, throwing her life into chaos. Meanwhile, a big full moon looms over the sky for the three nights of the story.
So no, no one turns into a wolf, there is no wolfsbane, no silver bullets, no POV-shots of something pursuing a lone victim over the misty moors.
But the movie is suffused with wolf imagery and discussion of wolves, curses, and bad luck from the very beginning.
Loretta lost her first husband to an accident, and blames this on the fact that they didn’t have a proper wedding, but got married at city hall.
Seeing Johnny off at the airport, she meets an old woman (a crone, maybe?) who announces “I put a curse on that plane, that it’s going to explode, burn on fire, fall into the sea!” because her sister, who stole a man from her fifty years before, just because she could, is on board.
“I don’t believe in curses,” says Loretta, who definitely believes she’s been labouring under bad luck for years.
“Eh, neither do I,” says the old woman.
(The plane does not explode. It would be too simple if the plane exploded.)
Then we get Loretta’s interpretation of Ronny, once they are talking in his apartment above the bakery where he works. (Loretta has cooked for him because I don’t know, who cooks in the kitchen of someone they just met, right? She cooks him a steak. He’s asked for it well done, she gives him rare, and he grudgingly admits it’s good as he eats the red, bloody meat. Werewolf!) But eventually, they talk about how Ronny blames Johnny for the bread-slicer accident that took off a good chunk of his hand years before, causing Ronny’s fiancé to leave him.
Loretta disagrees, and tells him he cut off his own hand on purpose, even if he did it subconsciously.
“You can’t see what you are, and I see everything,” she tells him. “You’re a wolf.”
He cut off his hand like a trapped wolf biting off its own paw, Loretta says.
They argue, he flips over the table, kisses her, and they go to bed. A totally normal romantic comedy!
The wolf imagery recurs a few times after this (“I seen a wolf in everybody I ever met, and I see a wolf in you!” a woman tells her husband in a shop) but for the most part this is now a story about passion and love and death.
Why do men cheat, wonders Loretta’s mother Rose (Olympia Dukakis) wonders, correctly suspecting that her husband Cosmo is having an affair. It’s because they’re afraid of dying, she realizes.
But some people aren’t afraid of death, or of anything.
“Everything seems like nothing to me now, against I want you in my bed,” Ronny tells Loretta as she insists she’s still going to marry his brother and go back to her responsible life. “I don’t care if I burn in hell. I don’t care if you burn in hell.”
Now, I admit, in a true werewolf movie, this would end with Loretta and Ronny getting gunned down with silver bullets. But because it’s not (quite) a werewolf movie, it has a happy ending. Although it feels like Ronny really doesn’t see a difference between “we die together” and “we live happily ever after.”
“We are here to ruin ourselves,” he tells Loretta as he admits he loves her, “and to break our hearts, and to love the wrong people, and die.”1
Moonstruck (original script title: The Bride and the Wolf) is interesting because you can easily see how the genre elements could be inserted seamlessly. Just a couple of tweaks and a few Rick Baker makeup effects and you’re there. Loretta as a werewolf who’s been suppressing her animalistic side, her passionate side, ever since her husband (also a werewolf?) died, encounters Ronny, who’s been doing likewise since his fiancé left him. Recognizing the wolf in one another, they are flung out of their repressed, dull lives, causing chaos for themselves and those around them.
But the more I think about this as a werewolf story, the more I think about how we often dress up stories about extreme and taboo subjects through the lens of fantasy, science fiction, and horror. While science fiction discusses scary ideas about technology or society, horror tends towards things we find scary about ourselves, our homes and families, our emotions and bodies.
Werewolf fiction and movies has been used to talk about everything from puberty and adolescence, to rural poverty, to southern gothic family secrets, to, um, being a messed-up Amish kid who loves heavy metal music.2
But a consistent theme is uncontrollable urges – rage and lust and fear in particular. And in Moonstruck, people’s lives are derailed by those urges. A New Yorker article about it from a few years back compared it to Shakespeare’s As You Like It, noting the play’s line “Love is merely a madness.”
Which isn’t the dominant view of love, at least not in North America/western Europe. Love is a lot of things, but it’s not supposed to be this uncontrollable. So to make a movie about a love that’s deranged, unexpected, “merely a madness,” you… well, you don’t have to put a buffer between the subject and the audience, but it helps. People don’t like to think directly about what it means to be vulnerable to those kinds of internal forces.
It could easily have been a horror movie. But instead, that buffer was humour. Because if you want to reach a mass audience and get a bunch of Academy Award nominations, you can’t present all that life-wrecking passion nakedly.
You’ve got to dress it up with jokes. Or, alternatively, with fur and fangs. Moonstruck picked its side, but it could have easily gone the other way.
Recent reading
Finished Simon Jimenez’s The Spear Cuts Through Water a few weeks ago, and it was so good and so different from most of what I’ve read recently that I’m going to need to write a whole post about it here. So look forward to that, and also, go read the damn thing! It’s good – mixing literary elements with a fun, accessible fantasy adventure!
Also enjoyed Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s The Daughter of Doctor Moreau (I have loved Moreau stories since a Sunday-morning airing of Island of Lost Souls scared the crap out of me as a kid) and I’m now hip-deep in Void Star by Zachary Mason, a very very very Gibsonian cyberpunk novel from 2017, which I missed because it was published as high-toned “speculative fiction” (Picador was the imprint, rather than Tor). Probably going to talk about that in this space as well.
Obligatory self promotion corner
Nothing this week, so hello to all the new subscribers who are showing up because of the Long Tail article. Welcome! I’m sure you were expecting exactly this, right?
Remember, never like, share, or subscribe! I know a guy who subscribed to too many newsletters and he stopped showing up at work, and they went to his house, and they found him squished under a big digital pile that had spilled out of his phone. Before he died, he managed to scribble “I blame Substack,” on a Post-It.
Could you make Moonstruck today? This is a boring question, of course you could. But… there would be discourse. Really, really annoying discourse.
My favourite werewolf novels: Stephen Graham-Jones’ Mongrels, Toby Barlow’s Sharp Teeth, and Kornwolf, by the late Tristan Egolf.