Plot
Karen White (Dee Wallace) is a Los Angeles television news anchor who is being stalked by a serial murderer named Eddie Quist (Robert Picardo). In cooperation with the police, she takes part in a scheme to capture Eddie by agreeing to meet him in a sleazy porno theater. Eddie forces Karen to watch a video of a young woman being raped, and when Karen turns around to see Eddie she screams. The police enter and shoot Eddie, and although Karen is safe, she suffers amnesia. Her therapist, Dr. George Waggner (Patrick Macnee), decides to send her and her husband, Bill Neill (Christopher Stone), to "The Colony", a secluded resort in the countryside where he sends patients for treatment.
The colony is filled with strange characters, and one, a sultry nymphomaniac named Marsha Quist (Elisabeth Brooks), tries to seduce Bill. When he resists her less-than-subtle sexual overtures, he is attacked and bitten by a wolf-like creature while returning to his cabin. He later returns to find Marsha waiting and the two have sex by the campfire in the moonlight. During the encounter, their bodies have undergone a frightening transformation as they both shapeshift into werewolves.
After Bill's wolf bite, Karen summons her friend Terri Fisher (Belinda Balaski) to the Colony, and Terri connects the resort to Eddie Quist through a sketch he left behind. Karen also begins to suspect that Bill is hiding a secret far more threatening than marital infidelity. While investigating, Terri is attacked by a werewolf in a cabin, though she escapes after cutting the monster's arm off. She runs to Waggner's office and places a phone call to her boyfriend, Chris Halloran (Dennis Dugan), who has been alerted about the Colony's true nature. While on the phone with Chris, Terri is attacked and killed by Eddie Quist. Chris hears this and sets off for the Colony armed with silver bullets.
Karen is confronted by the resurrected Eddie Quist once again, and Eddie transforms himself into a werewolf in front of her. She escapes, and Eddie is later shot by Chris with a silver bullet. However, as it turns out, everyone in the Colony is a werewolf. These werewolves can shapeshift at will; they do not require a full moon. Karen and Chris survive their attacks and burn the Colony to the ground.
Karen resolves to warn the world about the existence of werewolves, and surprises her employers by launching into her warnings while on television. Then, to prove her story, she herself shapeshifts into a werewolf, having become one after being attacked at the Colony by her husband Bill. She is shot by Chris on live television, and the world is left to wonder whether the transformation and shooting really happened or if it was the work of special effects. It is also revealed that Marsha Quist escaped the colony alive and well.
Read more about this topic: The Howling (film)
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“We have defined a story as a narrative of events arranged in their time-sequence. A plot is also a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality. “The king died and then the queen died” is a story. “The king died, and then the queen died of grief” is a plot. The time sequence is preserved, but the sense of causality overshadows it.”
—E.M. (Edward Morgan)
“Morality for the novelist is expressed not so much in the choice of subject matter as in the plot of the narrative, which is perhaps why in our morally bewildered time novelists have often been timid about plot.”
—Jane Rule (b. 1931)
“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
—James Thurber (1894–1961)