"I will not be threatened by a walking meat loaf."

I stand corrected. You can't just keep pig's blood in a cooler in the trunk of your car for a couple nights. It will clot. To keep it from clotting you have to keep it super-cold, and perhaps add an anti-coagulant. I'm sorry I just took Stephen King's word for it, and am thankful for those readers who've played with enough blood to know better. I hope all you teens and guys in their 20s who have skeezy moustaches and drive muscle cars get this in time to adjust your prom plans accordingly. 

This week's Thursday Thriller is An American Werewolf in London.

This 1981 horror/comedy by John Landis is about two young American bros backpacking across Europe. David Kessler (David Naughton) and Jack Goodman (Griffin Dunne) stop into a pub called The Slaughtered Lamb one night to get out of the cold Northern England countryside. Their reception is only slightly less chilly, and just as one of the regulars lightens the mood with a mildly racist joke, Jack has to screw it up by asking why they have a five-pointed star painted on the wall. David and Jack decide to leave, taking with them nothing but a little advice to beware the full moon and stay off the moors. They screw that up. Jack gets killed and David winds up in a coma.

While still in the hospital, Jack's shredded corpse visits David and warns him that he is now a werewolf, while Jack is undead and will have no rest until the werewolf line is severed. He asks David to kill himself. 

Naturally, David declines. He gets out of the hospital and moves in temporarily with his hot nurse Alex (Jenny Agutter).

Sounds pretty good, right? Even if David is a werewolf, that just means once a month he develops an unquenchable bloodlust, kills a few people and wakes up naked and disoriented with no memory of the previous night's maulings. What's so bad about that?

Well, first and funniest, the people you kill start following you around telling you to kill yourself. Secondly, animals don't like you any more. Thirdly, wolfing out hurts like hell, and you know it's coming, so there's a lot of pacing around listening to Creedence Clearwater Revival beforehand.

This movie strikes a great balance between the comedy and the horror. The characters are funny and relatable, but when it's time to deliver the scare, it doesn't hold back. The transformation is one of the best that's ever been done, and cinched special effects man Rick Baker an Academy Award for best makeup.

An American Werewolf in London streams on Netflix and Amazon Prime.