Still regarded as among the best - if not the best - treatment of the lycanthropic legend on screen - An American Werewolf In London arrives on DVD and Blu-Ray this week.

We thought we'd take a wander back to the barren moors and down the haunted streets of London to discover where this amazing horror came from.

1. Born From Scary Tales…

An American Werewolf in London was truly born in Yugoslavia.

It was originally dreamt up in 1969 by a then-19-year-old John Landis who, at the time, was working as a production assistant (read: gofer) on the set of war movie Kelly's Heroes.

One day, while shuttling between locations, he and a Yugoslavian member of the film's crew stumbled across a group of gypsies, who were performing a ritual during a burial.

The procedure involved burying the man feet first, wrapped in garlic so he couldn't rise from the grave.

The spooky idea stuck with the young wannabe filmmaker, who quickly realised that the concept of the undead was something he never wanted to confront in real life, and wasn't sure how someone at his tender age would handle it.

But it would make a great idea for a film… If not necessarily a werewolf film. "I did a lot of research before I started writing," recalls the director.

"I knew I didn't want to do a serial killer or a zombie, I wanted something where you really had to suspend disbelief. I settled on werewolves mainly because, other than ghosts, they're the only really international monsters - every culture has man-beast stories. Even Dracula can turn into a wolf!

"That said, I really took from the Lon Chaney Wolfman picture because what that added was this element of tragedy. Historically, people in France and Wales were burned to death for being werewolves or witches and the film made it a curse, where the wolfman himself is a victim."

After writing the script, he didn't find a lot of support for the idea and quickly ended up shelving it for more than a decade. But his career soon began to take off, ironically following his first real stab at a comedy horror with Schlock - the tale of a blind girl who falls in love with an ape-monster.

Quick and cheap, with a $60,000 budget, it got Landis noticed, alongside the film's make-up expert, a man named Rick Baker.

But Landis would veer away from the horror and stick with comedy for the next few years, making his name with the likes of The Kentucky Fried Movie, Animal House and The Blues Brothers.

And on the back of the Brothers, he decided to resurrect a furry little story sitting in a drawer…

Next: Full Moon Rising