Cult Screens offers outdoor showing of films classic and new, trying where possible for an appropriate location or date.

From this year’s Oxford programme, I missed out on Jaws at the Hinksey swimming pool but was able to take in a welcome rerun of An American Werewolf in London at the Oxford Castle site.

This took place – oo-er! – on July 31, the day (or rather night) of our first blue moon since 2012. In modern usage, the name is given to a second full moon in a single calendar month. Full moons, of course, figure prominently in a werewolf’s change into vulpine form, and do so in John Landis’s very entertaining comedy horror.

Thus we watched – as the silver orb appeared above the inflatable mobile screen – the still-impressive transformation of David Naughton into a hairy, snarling beast, to the soundtrack accompaniment of Creedence Clearwater Revival’s Bad Moon Rising.

Much use is made of songs with a lunar theme, including Van Morrison’s Moondance and no fewer than three versions of Blue Moon.

Naughton, you’ll probably remember, plays an American tourist attacked on the moors by a beastie that bumps off his mate (Griffin Dunne). They had rashly ignored advice not to leave the road offered by taciturn regulars (among them a young Rik Mayall) at the legendarily inhospitable Slaughtered Lamb.

A horribly disfigured Dunne returns from the dead to advise his mate to top himself to avoid spreading the werewolf menace. Naughton fails to do so, possibly because he is now bonking his former nurse, played by Jenny Agutter.

Only someone who loves him can kill him, we are told at one point, so it comes as a surprise at Landis’s oddly perfunctory ending to find the job done by a copper, and without a silver bullet.

The werewolf in this scene looks like a black pig, incidentally. As in Jaws, the special effects people were still honing their skills.

Shows continue until September 15. See cultscreens.co.uk