Kevin Smith’s fourth feature film, Dogma, was chock full of references, both to his own films, and to other things from pop culture. Whether it’s the “no ticket” from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade or Jay and Bob’s planned trip to Shermer, Illinois, the movie managed to craft a world that both acknowledged and poked gentle fun at several of Smith’s most beloved movies. One of those, apparently, was The Howling, although nobody noticed it at the time. Or since. Actually, Smith himself just revealed the reference in the latest episode of his podcast, Fatman Beyond, with Marc Bernardin.
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The issue came up when a fan asked what the most obscure reference that Smith and Bernardin had ever snuck into their work was. Bernardin said that he has snuck a reference to Aliens into everything he has ever written, but few people have ever noticed.
“In Dogma, there’s a scene where we’ve rounded up the heores and the bad guy is going to give the villain speech,” Smith explained. “They’re in the bar, and Jason Lee plays Azrael the Demon, and he has everybody in chairs and he’s walking around, telling everybody how he was behind everything and s–t like that. At a certain point, Silent Bob, there’s Cardinal Glick’s driver that we find out later was blessed…and Azrael tells him to pick it up. He sees an interaction between two characters; Serendipity is trying to inspire Silent Bob to hit him with the golf club. Azrael sees it and he he says ‘You think you can hurt me with a golf club? Be serious, I’m a f–king demon. You think you can hurt me with a putter?’ So he says to Silent Bob, ‘Go ahead, pick it up, pick it up, come on, hit me.’ I forget the exact line but he goes, ‘Don’t you know anything?’…it’s a moment from The Howling, where gives the other character the gun and he says, ‘come on, bright boy, do it. Don’t you know anything?’ And he turns into a werewolf, but the gun had silver bullets in it, and he takes out the wolfman.”
You can see the episode below.
Coming out 18 years before Dogma, The Howling was a 1981 werewolf movie that kicked off a long-running franchise, with several sequels, a remake, and another remake supposedly coming soon from Netflix (although director Andy Muschietti may never get to do it, since it appears The Flash will take forever).
