“They gelled perfectly well”: The tiny Welsh village that perfected the modern horror comedy
Wales isn’t the first country you think of when it comes to cinema, although it has given us some proper Hollywood stars, like Richard Burton and Anthony Hopkins.
It also gave us one of the most iconic scenes in the horror comedy genre, so if you’re ever in the mood to go hunting for werewolves, you’ve got to take yourself to Crickadarn, an ancient parish in Erwood.
Located in Powys, the tiny village set the scene for a monumental moment in horror when David Naughton and Griffin Dunne descended upon it to film John Landis’ An American Werewolf in London, which is a masterclass in balancing genuine terror with humour, a difficult line to tow, and has since become one of the most influential entries to the genre, especially inspiring Edgar Wright’s Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz.
The director once said, “I suppose the reason that this film changed my life is that very early on in my film-watching experiences, I saw a film that was so sophisticated in its tone and what it managed to achieve. It really changed my life.”
An American Werewolf in London was one of Dunne’s earliest roles, his character Jack mauled by a lycanthropic beast while wandering on the Yorkshire moors with his friend, David. These naive American tourists aren’t aware of the trouble they’re in for when they take this dark and ominous route, even though they’re warned against it by hostile locals at a nearby pub.
Despite the Yorkshire backdrop that sets in motion the events of the film, it was this small Welsh village that stood in for the fictional East Proctor, while the moors were the nearby Black Mountains, showing that clearly, you can fabricate anything on film, and in An American Werewolf in London, Wales stands in for Yorkshire, inadvertently putting the unsuspecting village on the map as a legendary filming location.
There’s nothing like a pilgrimage to the filming locations of your favourite movies, but you won’t find much in Crickadarn. I mean, the Slaughtered Lamb pub interiors were shot in Surrey, so you can’t even get the proper experience of entering the terrifying pub full of scary locals and questionable designs on the walls. The exterior was simply a cottage in Crickadarn, but apart from that, there’s not much to see.
Still, the cold countryside informed the shooting of the film, which Landis reflected on in an interview with The Guardian, recalling, “We filmed the moors scenes in Wales. David Naughton and Griffin Dunne were inexperienced movie actors, but they gelled perfectly as two American backpackers attacked by a werewolf. But there was this moment when they were out walking, it was freezing, and Griffin’s nose started running. He thought I’d called ‘Cut’, but I hadn’t, so by the end of the sequence, he was just wiping his nose and almost giggling. We left it in: it gave the scenes a wonderfully real feeling.”
The movie has gone down in film history, and while it was directed by an American and featured various US stars, we’ll always have that tiny Welsh village to thank for setting the backdrop to one of cinema’s most simultaneously humorous and unnerving moments.
