"Even a man who is pure in heart and says his prayers by night may become a wolf when the wolfbane blooms and the autumn moon is bright," lectures Claude Raines to Lon Chaney Jr. in the seminal horror classic The Wolf Man (1941). Based on folklore of shape-shifting, lycanthropic demons, the werewolf came to life as the latest of Universal's movie monsters. The studio's early werewolf effort helped establish the rules of the genre: these creatures will only succumb to silver and fire, and those who survive its bite are forever damned to the shape-shifting curse!

Over the next few decades, the werewolf saw its sexier cousin, the vampire, become more popular, and by the 1970s the werewolf had nearly vanished from the screen. Then The Howling, the 1977 pulp novel by Gary Brandner, was optioned as a high-concept horror project for Avco Embassy Pictures, and director Joe Dante was brought on board. Feeling that the script was too conventional, Dante tapped John Sayles, with whom he had worked on the Jaws retread Piranha (1978), to do a substantial rewrite. Like Dante, Sayles envisioned a smarter, more reflexive film that delivered the necessary thrills of a genre piece but also played on a tongue-in-cheek level, satirizing pop culture.

More than 20 years after its release, The Howling remains a clever, scary and entertaining ride. While certainly appealing to the casual viewer, it offers an intertext that's sure to amuse film buffs and horror geeks alike, one that's full of hip references and campy nods to classic genre pieces.

Sayles' inventive script follows serial killer Eddie "The Mangler" Quist (Robert Picardo), who communicates with the media through news anchor Karen White (Dee Wallace) as the Los Angeles police track his reign of terror. Trying to recover from her traumatic experiences with Eddie, Karen is referred to a mountain commune, The Colony, by her new-age therapist George Waggner (the inimitable Patrick Macnee). In a delicious parody of the Me Decade's self-help crazes (particularly EST), Karen joins The Colony to find peace and play tennis - only to discover that these new-age cultists are actually swinging shape-shifters learning to get in touch with their inner wolves.

The new DVD of The Howling from MGM Home Video offers a choice of full-frame or 16x9-enhanced widescreen viewing. Both transfers offer a consistently faithful rendering of the lush lighting scheme devised by John Hora, ASC, as well as Rob Bottin's landmark special makeup effects. Hora, a gifted and frequent collaborator of Dante's (Gremlins, Explorers, Gremlins 2 and Matinee), has a knack for warmly photographing primary colors that shine with an otherworldly zeal, an approach well suited to the often-outrageous events that occur in Dante's films. In the extensive interviews on this DVD, Dante perfectly sums up Hora's work on The Howling: "He wanted to make a COLOR film, not just a film in color." Although the film's original monaural audio is well presented, the digitally enhanced 5.1 track adds dimension to Pino Donaggio's eerie score and gives sound effects more punch.

MGM's earlier DVD release of The Howling lacked supplemental materials, even those from the solid 1995 Image laserdisc version. Thankfully, the studio has included most of those extensive 1995 materials on this new edition. The best is a feature-length commentary by Dante, Wallace, Picardo and the late Christopher Stone; this entertaining and boisterous track sheds light on low-budget filmmaking, the horror genre, and the conflict that arose between Bottin and Rick Baker when John Landis' An American Werewolf in London went into production during The Howling's shoot.

Select stills, outtakes and a generous supply of deleted scenes have also been borrowed from the laserdisc edition, but MGM has also compiled some great new material. This includes a charming segment entitled "Dick Miller: Thespian" and a terrific, 55-minute "making of" documentary. The latter, which features a surprisingly high number of participants (including Hora), is inexplicably fragmented into four sections, each with a full end-title crawl!

In the post-Scream landscape of contemporary horror movies - filled with eye-winking and mandatory reflexivity - it is hard to imagine a time when this scary/funny spin felt fresh and unforced. Still apparent among The Howling's virtues is Dante's skill as an astute juggler of clever gags that manage never to disrupt the pleasure of the grade-B genre conventions they parody. Colored by Hora's deliberately lurid lighting, crackling with Sayles' offbeat dialogue and blessed with Bottin's still-impressive makeup effects, The Howling's fangs have been well polished for this sharply produced DVD.

- Kenneth Sweeney