Film · 1981 · Films · 1980s
An American Werewolf in London
Scored from 457 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 1980s (3,141 peers).
Summary
American backpackers David Kessler and Jack Goodman are crossing the Yorkshire moors when the wary regulars of a pub called The Slaughtered Lamb turn them back out into the night, and something on the moor kills Jack and mauls David. David wakes weeks later in a London hospital and begins an affair with his nurse, Alex Price, while Jack reappears to him as an increasingly decayed apparition bearing a warning: David was bitten by a werewolf, and the creature's victims remain in limbo until the bloodline ends. As the full moon nears, David's dreams and blackouts worsen. John Landis wrote and directed this horror comedy, whose transformation sequence was built by makeup artist Rick Baker.
An American Werewolf in London is a 1981 horror and comedy film directed by John Landis. Its certificate is R. Inside comedy it is classed as Dark Comedy. It runs 1h 37m. Its country of origin is listed as the United States. David Naughton, Griffin Dunne and Jenny Agutter head the billed cast.
The calibrated figure is built from 457 reviewers whose rating history varies enough to place their own average. A broader pool of 468 reviewers with two or more reviews feeds the raw-average track instead. The cohort it is ranked inside is 1980s films — 3,141 of them.
How the score was built
We compare the reviewers of this title against every other title those same people reviewed. Each review is scored relative to the reviewer's own baseline — a 7/10 from a hard grader sits well above their average, while a 7/10 from a generous grader sits below theirs. Every reviewer then counts the same, so the result is a calibrated consensus rather than a raw average.
- Global percentile
- Where An American Werewolf in London lands against every title we rank.
- In-cohort percentile
- The same comparison narrowed to its cohort — titles of the same format released in the same decade. A 1970s film is judged against 1970s films, not against last year's streaming series. Ranked against Films · 1980s (3,141 titles).
- AI-adjusted percentile
- The same reviewer-normalized score, corrected for how much confidence the sample supports: thin samples are pulled toward the corpus average. Each title keeps the share n / (n + 53) of its measured distance from the average, where n is its calibrated-reviewer count, and the result is ranked on the same scale as the global percentile.53 is the median sample size across everything we rank. Here n is 457.
Cohort: Films · 1980s
