Hacker Cinema
An American Werewolf in London
1981 · Film · 97 min
Part of An American Werewolf Collection
Directed by John Landis
American tourists David and Jack are savagely attacked by an unidentified animal while hiking on the Yorkshire Moors. After retiring to the home of a beautiful nurse to recuperate, David soon begins experiencing disturbing changes to his body and mind.
3 positivefrom 3 commenters
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3 comments on Hacker News
It's a similar thing to watching movies from before the mid-2000 (I place the inflection point around Collateral in 2004) where after that you get overly dark scenes where you can't make out anything, while anything earlier you get these night scenes where you can clearly make out the setting, and the focused actors/props are clearly visible.
Watch An American Werewolf in London, Strange Days, True Lies, Blade Runner, or any other movie from the film era all up to the start of digital, and you can see that the sets are incredibly well lit. On film they couldn't afford to reshoot and didn't have immediate view of what everything in the frame resulted on, so they had to be conservative. They didn't have per-pixel brightness manipulation (feathering and burning were film techniques that could technically have been applied per frame, but good luck with doing that at any reasonable expense or amount of time). They didn't have hyper-fast color film-stock they could use (ISO 800 was about the fastest you could get), and it was a clear downgrade from anything slower.
The advent of digital film-making when sensors reached ISO 1600/3200 with reasonable image quality is when the allure of time/cost savings of not lighting heavily for every scene showed its ugly head, and by the 2020's you get the "Netflix look" from studios optimizing for "the cheapest possible thing we can get out the door" (the most expensive thing in any production is filming in location, a producer will want to squeeze every minute of that away, with the smallest crew they could get away with).
That example of practical effects looked quite stiff and fake like you said. But practical effects also continued to improve over the years even though CGI came to dominate the film industry.
Alien was released in 1979, but a few years later saw the release of An American Werewolf in London (1981) which featured a memorable werewolf transformation (all practictal effects). Then in 1982 saw the release of The Thing which took practical effects a notch higher.
Also, today filmmakers sometimes use a hybrid approach: combining practical and digital effects.
I do wonder how much further practical effects would have developed if CGI haven't overtook the film industry.
When I was about 5 I wandered into the room just in time to see my slightly older cousin watch the opening scene of An American Werewolf In London. That convinced me I wanted nothing to do with "scary" movies.
A few years later I saw an advertisement for Aliens and declared "I never want to see that movie!"
When I finally did watch Aliens at about 15 it immediately became my favourite movie. AAWIL is also pretty awesome :]