Bad Moon/Thor: Dog Bites Wolf Man
2022 Halloween Spooktacular: Werewolf Week Day #4
Bad Moon is an okay adaptation of a great book, which is actually a compliment. The book, Thor by Wayne Smith, is written almost entirely from the perspective of the family dog, so adaption is a pretty tall order. The film ends up being more about the human members of the family, but Thor is still prominently featured.
The story beats of both are pretty much the same: after an unnamed tragedy, nature photographer Ted is convinced to come live with his sister and her small children. The family dog, Thor, is thrilled about the idea — him and Ted are old friends — but when Uncle Ted actually arrives, Thor can sense something is amiss. He can smell it. In the book, he calls it “The Bad Thing.” He doesn’t know how The Bad Thing and Uncle Ted are intertwined, but he knows they are. As time goes on, Thor’s suspicions come to a breaking point and he becomes openly hostile toward Ted as a threat to his pack, which lands him in hot water.
Bad Moon isn’t considered a horror classic, by any means, but it has a lot going for it. The performances are decent. The kids aren’t annoying. Primo, the German shepherd actor, is great. There’s a rotten early-CGI transformation, but the werewolf in final form — some kind of puppet-costume mix — looks fantastic. The dog drama pitting Thor vs Uncle Ted works well and results in an emotional family reunion after Thor is cast out…that is subsequently followed up by a knock-down drag-out fight between Thor and the werewolf!
One last thing I’ll note about Bad Moon, because it’s a significant departure from werewolf lore, is that Ted transforms nightly. I’m not sure why this peculiar decision was made — maybe it just helped with the timeline of the narrative — but I don’t think it was necessary. Michael Paré, as Ted, sells his oppressive condition well enough, but you’d expect someone who turned into a werewolf 365 times a year to be out of their fucking mind. It’s rough enough on the psyche of someone who turns 1–3 times per month. That’s not to say there isn’t an interesting story there, but the film didn’t take full advantage of it.
Wayne Smith needs to be commended for his ability to get inside the mind of a dog in Thor. Sometimes the details seem a little overboard. You’ll go where Thor goes! Smell what he smells! Eat what he eats! But a lot of it pays off in different ways and, at the very least, it gets you to empathize with the character without anthropomorphizing him too much. Mostly, I think the real genius of having a werewolf story told from the perspective of a dog is that it situates this semi-human monster in nature and the world of the animal.
The werewolf is so often a tortured person, who brings their own fears, emotions, and desires with them beyond their transformation. That may still be the case for Uncle Ted, but in Thor the reader gets a lot more about wildness and the cruel savagery of nature. The eyes of an animal can bring you to that place, but our domesticated protagonist also serves as a nice contrast to the raging beast when describing the line that separates them.
The book opens with a prologue from a different animal — a grizzly bear that has stumbled across a corpse in the middle of the woods. While it noses at the bloodied body, a strange smell on the wind stimulates its sense of nearby danger. The bear lingers long enough to find a candy bar in the victim’s jacket pocket, but departs feeling an unfamilar emotion: fear. I thought we might get Grizzly vs Wolf Man, which would have been pretty rad (kind of like the T-Rex vs Giant Shark fight at the beginning of Steve Alten’s Meg), but making a grizzly bear get shivers down its spine sells the werewolf as something unique and terrible in the animal kingdom.
Thor has a similar episode early in the novel while on a visit to Uncle Ted’s cabin in the woods. There, he uses his keen sense of smell to track The Bad Thing’s actions to a nearby trail. This is daytime, so the werewolf is long gone, but Thor’s perception can tell a story that a human observer could not. He knows where The Bad Thing encountered a woman hiker. He knows how scared she was. He knows how she threw herself into painful undergrowth to evade The Bad Thing. He know what path The Bad Thing took around the undergrowth. He knows how the woman was attacked and he knows where she died. Thor finds the mutilated corpse and, without the revulsion a normal human would exhibit in his place, he is able to investigate. The Bad Thing had torn out her heart, but left her liver intact. Thor loves liver, but he resists eating it, not because of some sense of morality, but because he has been conditioned by his owners to not eat things he finds outside.
Thor leaves the murder scene without emotion and without passing judgment on the animal that killed the hiker. He even muses about how he might be called on to kill a human someday if it endangers his pack. He never attempts to call attention to what he found that day. It isn’t some aberration, it is simply part of nature. His feelings, of course, change, when he senses The Bad Thing is coming to his door. He knows it’s coming before it even arrives, but when it does, it’s just his familiar Uncle Ted. Through his keen senses, he can tell that Ted and The Bad Thing are connected and, over time, he deduces that they are one in the same. Thor’s fear and urgency at The Bad Thing being in close proximity to his family continues to sell just what a threat the werewolf is. His family is completely clueless, but the beast’s aura permeates the natural world that Thor inhabits.
My favorite part of the book, and maybe one of my favorite all-time scenes in all werewolf fiction, is Thor’s first real encounter with The Bad Thing. Uncle Ted may be getting twisted by his curse, but he’s still a good guy that loves his family and doesn’t really want to hurt anyone. When the change is about him, he takes off into the woods with a pair of handcuffs and chains himself to a tree. Tracking him one evening, Thor find The Bad Thing thrashing and straining against its restraints. In a pivotal moment, the wolf and the dog lock eyes. In The Bad Thing, Thor can see a burning hatred, but also an invitation. The werewolf isn’t an assault against nature. It is unbridled wildness. In a practically-telekinetic exchange, Thor can sense The Bad Thing urging him to throw off his own chains, to cross that line and fulfill the potential that resides in his powerful jaws. A chilling thought occurs to Thor: he acknowledges that if he wanted to go home and kill every member of his human family, he could do it without much trouble, but he is loyal to the pack and its own natural order. His refusal drives The Bad Thing mad with anger, but their eventual showdown must wait for another day.
When that day comes, Thor and The Bad Thing come to blows in much the same way as they do in the film adaptation. However, there is one important distinction. In Bad Moon, Ted’s sister (Mariel Hemingway) is allowed to land the killshot, which is fitting considering the film’s shifted focus to the human characters. In Thor, the two meet in the woods after their final battle. When the sun has risen, Thor finds Uncle Ted returned to human form but gravely injured. Without hesitation, Thor tears out his throat, employing his brute nature in a controlled fashion to serve his ultimate purpose: protection of the pack. But even so, he fears what crossing that savage line into taking a human life will mean for his place in the family going forward.
Is it scary? Both the book and the film have their moments, sure. However, the framing of the novel allows for a lot more chilling encounters like some of the ones I’ve described above.
Streaming: Bad Moon is available on Tubi, Peacock, and Shudder/AMC+. You should check it out. You might also be able to track down a cheap paperback of Thor somewhere. I got it on Kindle for a couple bucks. It’s a quick read and well worth it.
