Howlingween 4: Beastly Mist

Synopsis

While still in Florida and not long after surviving Jack O'Beggar (in Howlingween 3: Red River County), the hapless Forran family meets its greatest challenge: an insatiable swarm of tiny flesh-eating bugs.

Even eight-year-old Tracy Forran's other father, a huge supernatural wolf (named Wolf), cannot defeat the swarm.

The family finds an ally in Professor Fred Rolfe, a retired entomologist, whose hobby is making and selling honey in the tourist community of Mayerling where he lives. Unfortunately, he has lost his wife to the swarm and is determined to rid the swarm from Mayerling.

What the professor fears most is the swarm's ability to learn. It becomes a contest as to who learns quicker about the other: the swarm about the ways of humans or the humans about what makes the swarm tick. Tracy envisions Doris (from Howlingween 3: Red River County) in trouble. Thomas and the professor save her.

In the meantime, the professor is working feverishly to create a new spray. Ordinary insect sprays won't do as the bugs are so formed, due to their unique evolution, as to be practically immune. He guesses, however, the swarm’s nest lies beyond the marshes and somewhere along the edge of the swamp.

The professor and Thomas Forran attempt to destroy the nest by dive-bombing a drone into it, but the strategy fails as the swarm envelopes the drone in mid-air and sends it down into murky swamp-waters.

Other attempts to destroy the nest have also failed.

Wolf's role is ambivalent: he will protect his daughter (Tracy) but will not destroy the nest as he has a long history of hatred towards humans, originating from 1891 when white hunters killed his pack. In the end the nest is destroyed and the swarm flees Mayerling to parts unknown in Florida's everglades.

In this fourth instalment, we learn for the first time that Wolf is doubly conflicted: not only is he constrained from hurting humans by his obligation to his human daughter, but his immortality was achieved by allowing into his soul on that fateful day in 1891, Skull, the ever-vengeful spiritual leader of all wolves. Should Skull leave Wolf’s soul, Wolf will lose his immortality.

However, after eventually seeing the swarm as an existential threat to his daughter, he disobeys Skull and helps the professor and Thomas in destroying the nest to Skull's chagrin, who transforms Wolf into a normal-sized mortal wolf.

The world celebrates the heroism of the professor, the Forrans, Doris and Wolf (now acting as Tracy's pet). Thereafter, the Forrans, Wolf with them, travel to a beautiful landscape in Montana where Wolf originally lived in 1891. To Tracy’s sadness, the Forrans see off Wolf as he joins a wolf pack.

But to her joy, she sees her biological mother, Katrina, whom Wolf transformed into a she-wolf after her murder by human-organ hunters (please see first instalment, Howlingween), join Wolf as the two of them disappear into the forest to presumably live happily ever after.