Marsha, Marsha, Marsha: The Legacy of ‘The Howling’ and One of Horror’s Most Unsung Femme Fatales

I think it goes without saying that The Howling is one of the most celebrated werewolf movies of all time. Though it was released the same year as the slightly more beloved An American Werewolf in London, it has actually left a larger pop culture impact. Not only has The Howling spawned seven sequels to date, it has also spawned a comic book series, and hit the true horror royalty high mark of being referenced in Wes Craven’s Scream. Much more than that, it gave audiences the bipedal werewolf that has basically become the standard for the past forty years. The movie’s success is fascinating for several reasons, one of them being that the original novel — as much as I love it — is much more pulp, more of a standard mystery than Joe Dante’s film. The basic premise of a colony of werewolves and most of the major story beats of the text are intact, but it’s full of smart changes.

As a feature, under Dante’s direction, The Howling becomes a story about a woman being gaslit by everyone around her. In some ways, it has more in common with Rosemary’s Baby than any werewolf story before it, as Karen realizes that she is totally alone at the Colony, everyone is manipulating her to some degree and keeping her from the truth, everyone is in on a secret she has no knowledge of, and there is no one she can trust, not even her husband.

That brings me to what I think is ultimately the most interesting thing about the legacy of The Howling being one of the most iconic, cornerstone werewolf stories: it’s a completely untraditional one. This movie shatters every preconceived notion about werewolves and how they are and aren’t supposed to operate. This was a film that played with the conventions of the sub-genre, commented on them, and reinvented them at the same time, over ten years before Scream brought meta horror into the mainstream eye and kicked off a trend. Some of this playful commentary is blatantly obvious, such as the scene in which Chris and Terri watch The Wolf Man after learning that Bill has been bitten by a wolf. Others, such as the fact that most characters are named after directors of previous werewolf films, tend to go unnoticed by the average viewer. But they mark a nice way to honor the legacy of cinematic lycanthropes all the same.

The conventions of werewolf movies are reimagined in several different ways in The Howling.The appearances of the creatures themselves are, obviously, the biggest examples of that. Most werewolf features at the time had still been following in the footsteps of Werewolf of London and The Wolf Man. They centered on a man becoming covered in hair, a transformation accomplished via time-lapse photography. Both The Howling and An American Werewolf in London showcased truly phenomenal transformation sequences, with Rick Baker’s work on American Werewolf winning the very first special makeup FX Oscar.

When strictly looking at the end result, though, it’s the Howling transformation that had the higher influence. London’s David transforms into a demonic wolf, a hell hound, really, while Howling’s Eddie Quist transforms into a nightmarish, upright hybrid between man and wolf, which became the standard for nearly every werewolf movie thereafter. But the non-traditional nature of The Howling goes so much further than that. Unlike most previous films since The Wolf Man, the werewolves of The Howling can transform whenever they see fit. And, more than anything, every previous werewolf movie had depicted becoming a werewolf as a kind of curse. They were about tortured people, seeking to bring an end to their painful condition. The Howling is not.

The werewolves of The Howling, with a few exceptions, are at one with their condition. They see the werewolf as the thing they truly are, their human face as simply a mask they wear. It is a very different approach to this kind of story, and one that still remains uncommon even now, but that also means it is still a refreshing, fascinating take for its depiction of werewolves as gleefully monstrous. And in that depiction of werewolves lies what I think is the film’s most unsung quality: it gave us one of the best female villains in horror history.

Marsha Quist is an incredible antagonist. Even though Eddie is the werewolf who does the most damage, both in attacking Karen and killing Terri, Marsha is the face and the voice of the werewolves in The Howling. She is the most in tune with what she is, to the point that she does not even waste the effort of putting on a public persona, a false face the way so many of the others do. Everyone else at the Colony tries to be Karen’s friend, they try to make her feel welcome, in the case of Doc and the sheriff, they serve a particular role as they play at being human. In short, they all put on a show, whereas Marsha does not. She is the only one of the werewolves who is completely direct in her approach and her intentions. She starts hitting on Bill, Karen’s husband, from the moment she is introduced to him, because she knows what she wants and then decides simply to take it. She is so blunt, in fact, that one has to imagine that if Karen had simply asked her if the people at the Colony were werewolves, she probably would have said “yes.”

There’s an interesting contradiction here, too. While Marsha is certainly the most confident werewolf at the Colony, she almost never appears in her wolf form. We see bits of her transformation during the fireside sex scene, and we see the briefest glimpse of her full werewolf form when she attacks Bill in the woods, and that’s it. This is a testament to Elisabeth Brooks’ performance. We barely need to see her as the werewolf because we feel it in every single scene. In her eyes, in her voice, in her presence, the way she physically dominates each scene, the wolf is there.

She, more than any other character at the Colony, is a wolf speaking through a human mouth, wearing a mask that, while comfortable, is nonetheless false. That’s what makes her so endearing. She may rarely appear in wolf form, and even then usually channels it through more subtly transformed eyes and fangs, but she doesn’t need it, because she is the wolf all the time. There is something so raw and so powerful about this character. She’s essentially an exclamation point on the film itself: a loud, blunt, distilled version of every theme and approach that makes the movie so unique. When talking about the best killer women in horror, Marsha shouldn’t simply be included, she should be one of the cornerstone characters dominating the conversation.

And, to be honest, she should have had a franchise. As much as The Howling is my favorite werewolf movie and as much as I go to bat defending some of the sequels, this franchise should have belonged to Marsha. This is certainly teased, intentionally or not, at the ending, which reveals Marsha to have survived the fire at the Colony, practically winking into the camera to announce her eventual return. It almost feels like this has to be an intentional sequel tease, because Gary Brandner’s follow-up novel The Howling II had already been out for two years by the time the film version of The Howling was released. The book sequel is incredibly worth noting because, much unlike Howling II: Your Sister is a Werewolf, which simply includes Karen’s funeral as an afterthought, Brandner’s Howling II is a direct continuation of the original, one that does bring Marsha back as the primary antagonist. The second novel is entirely centered on Marsha taking revenge on Karen for the fire at the Colony (named Drago in the books) and, essentially, the murder of her whole family.

Marsha in the original novel was easily the most similar character to her on-screen counterpart, other than being renamed Marsha Quist from the book’s Marcia Lura. She’s confident, cunning, often extremely blunt in her intentions, and always sure of herself, and in the second book, that’s all stripped away from her. She’s lost her werewolf family, she’s been physically scarred by the experience, and it’s interesting to explore her character stripped of that confidence, with her back to the wall, and just to dig deeper into her in general. It is probably the best of the three books in that regard.

The end of Dante’s The Howling absolutely appeared to set something like that up, but it just wasn’t what we got. Elisabeth Brooks was offered the chance to return for Howling II, and initially agreed to do it, but health reasons kept her from being able to do it. Conversations with her longtime romantic partner Kristy McNichol over the salary she’d been offered to return also contributed to Brooks eventually turning down the role. But even if she had come back for the film, it would have been a far cry from the revenge plot of the novel.

One would assume that Stirba, the werewolf queen of the sequel, could have been a stand-in for Marsha, but that was apparently not the case. Had she appeared in the movie, Marsha would have been revealed to have been a servant of Stirba all along, and her actions at the Colony simply the actions of a pawn playing a part in a larger scheme, totally robbing the character of the ferocious independence that had made her so interesting in the first place. It’s surprising, too, because Brandner had written the initial script for the second movie, so one would not have expected the character to be such an afterthought.

We can be thankful, at least, that Howling II did not recast Marsha, as it had other characters from the original Howling. So much of what makes her so endearing lies in Brooks’ performance, and while it’s a shame she never got to spearhead the franchise, that pales in comparison to the true tragedy that Elisabeth Brooks never got to have the career she should have, passing away from cancer in 1997 at only the age of 46. She had been diagnosed in the winter of 1994 and managed to fight for three years. While Brooks found success working in television and seemed to successfully live a life outside of the public eye, she never appeared to turn down her nose at the success of The Howling, nor the fans she had gained from it. In fact, she appeared to embrace the horror autograph and convention circuit in its earliest incarnations.

A version of Marsha — it should be mentioned — also appeared in Howling IV: The Original Nightmare, which was another adaptation of the original novel. Given the film’s awkward combination of sequel and remake, Howling IV’s Marsha was renamed Eleanor, and was played by Layma Derval. The actress does a perfectly fine job with the role, but the Eleanor of this new adaptation is unfortunately the only character who can’t help but be constantly compared to the original film, as Marsha was by far the character of the original who resembled her novel counterpart the most.

While the movies never truly managed to bring back Marsha, we did get the next best thing in 2017, with the release of the comic book series The Howling: Revenge of the Werewolf Queen. A direct sequel to the film, it brought back Marsha in a starring role as she sought to bring back the werewolves who had died at the Colony and take revenge on sole human survivor Chris Halloran. The character’s independence, self-actualization and absolute delight in her predatory nature are all pushed the forefront in this miniseries. More than anything, though, Revenge of the Werewolf Queen shows the extreme potential for Marsha to find new life as a comic book antihero. More than many other comics based on horror films that I’ve seen, this character makes a seamless transition to the paneled page and I would absolutely love to see it stick. In a world where there are over a dozen comics based on Evil Dead 2 alone, there is no reason why Marsha can’t headline a series of carnivorous adventures on the comic book page.

In the end, though, we have what we have, and as minimal as that is, it still feels like an embarrassment of riches, because any Marsha we get is a very good thing. Even in the film itself, Brooks does not have a ton of screen time and yet commands the screen in every single scene she appears in. With the recent rediscovery of films like Hello, Mary Lou: Prom Night II and Jennifer’s Body, it seems audiences are really starting to celebrate these assertive, self-actualized killer women who are often a rarity in the genre, and I think Marsha Quist absolutely deserves to stand side-by-side with those other characters. I will always want more Marsha. I want more Marsha comics, I want Marsha T-shirts, I want an action figure. And I think that a celebration of The Howling and a celebration of Marsha are one and the same thing.