The 1980s saw its fair share of werewolf movies that broke the mold and played fast and loose with the conventions and lore of lycanthropy to impressive effect. However, while John Landis’ An American Werewolf In London and Joe Dante’s The Howling went all-in with a self-aware meta approach that deconstructed the whole wolf man genre while changing the game when it came to transformation effects, a few years later another title came along that did the exact opposite and actually not only went deeper into the lore than ever before.
Neil Jordan’s The Company Of Wolves took the tropes of lycanthropy and embedded it deep in traditional folklore, riffing hard on the story of Little Red Riding Hood; but he also includes a whole truck full of psychosexual themes and feminist metaphors to go with those expected, elaborate transformation effects. Don’t expect a glass of warm milk at bedtime to relax you after hearing this, deeply adult, fairytale.
In the present day, a young girl named Rosaleen slumbers in her bedroom and dreams that she lives in a fairytale world that seems to be set somewhere in England during the 18th century, but that has pythons sitting in trees for some reason. Anyway, after her sister, Alice, is killed in the woods by a pack of wolves, Rosaleen is sent by her grieving parents to live with her kindly grandmother who immediately starts regaling her with “stories” that are supposed to warn her of the dangers of the forest, certain examples wildlife and, of course, the advances of strange men. Among the stories told by various people, there are various instances of men whose eyebrows meet in the middle who literally have that wolf in them and whether it’s a tale of a newly wedded husband disappearing into the forrest only to suddenly return to his wife years later a much diffrent man, or a story involving a spurned woman placing a curse on a rich family, it’s obvious that the wolves lurking in the forest are to be given a wide berth.
However, Rosaleen is not only a headstrong girl, but she also is fast coming into womanhood too, so the lure of the forest proves to incredibly strong no matter how many stories she’s told that concerns themselves with horny men turning into wolves. Before you know it, we start to enter the film’s twisted version of Little Red Riding Hood as Rosaleen, clad in that iconic, crimson fashion item, comes across a bushy-browed Huntsman on the way to her grandmother’s house. Immediately there is an attraction and after a spot of flirting, he challenges her to see if he can make it to her grandmother’s house first.
Will her burgeoning sexuality and the overwhelming metaphors prevent her from seeing sense, or can she score herself the happy ending from the fairytale we grew up with?
It doesn’t take long to see that Jordan’s sophmore film has chosen to ditch conventional narrative like a bad habit, but even after a long overdue rewatch, I’m still surprised just exactly how formless the plot truly is. You’re barely twelve minutes into the thing before you’re being lashed across the flanks by dreams, surrealism and an extremely loose anthology format that sends the film into even more amorphous territory. From the very beginning, it’s made perfectly clear that the entire movie is one long dream sequence that’s ricochetting around in the head of Sarah Peterson’s Rosaleen and this leaves Jordan free and clear to go full force with some lushous, sets that make Ridley Scott’s Legend look like Cube. With conventional storytelling now no longer on the table, the film rolls its sleeves up some incredibly hairy arms and gets down to the business of being the horny lovechild of Hammer Films and David Lynch.
While not particularly scary in a conventional sense, the atmosphere and set design leads to Jordan creating a world that feels genuinely threatening, especially to a young girl on the cusp of womanhood and as reality has long since flown the coop, the feeling that literally anything can happen to anyone at any time is very prevalent. However, the movie has much bigger fish to fry than just making its audience jump in their seats and just when you think you gotten a foothold in the tone of the piece, the movie stars wading in with metaphors and subtext and uses them to merge adult fable and werewolf stuff in a way that makes perfect sense.
Helping nail that delicate, almost experimental, attitude is the presence of Jessica Fletcher herself, Angela Lansbury, as the bespectacled granny who has more pointers for avoiding amorous men than there are rules for Mogwai upkeep – but she sells it like her life depends upon it and her sage, if fairly puritanical, advice drives the main thread of the tale home. If granny’s hysterical advice is solely in place to keep Rosaleen pure and chaste, then the scraggly haired, sexually forward, monobrowed men who emerge from the dense forrest is the sign that puberty is fast approaching and not all the fear mongering in the world can slow it. Of course, another strong subtext is that men, especially ones that suddenly rip their skin off and transform into wolves, simply cannot be trusted with the adoration of naive young girls – but we all knew that.
However, while this blizzard of fairytale, folk horror and frank sexual politics is all very well and good, but you’d have to be a very poor werewolf movie made in the 80s to not contain some jaw dropping creature effects. Thankfully, the film not only delivers them, but does it in a way that’s smartly diffrent than the bladders and bone cracking of The Howling and American Werewolf. Here, the wolves emerge from within the man which sees furry snouts emerge from mouths and a man relieved of all his skin reverts to wolf form while all red and glistening and the jarring body horror is a marvelous slap in the face when placed along such other surreal sights. A severed head flies across the room to shatter like a porcelain doll on the wall, Terence Stamp’s devil rocks up in one of the stories in a fucking Rolls Royce and the ending ultimately completly smudges the lines between fantasy and reality when wolves spill over into the present, presumably indicating that Rosaleen’s childhood innocence has come to a somewhat traumatic as the merciless lupine form of puberty literally comes crashing in through her window.
Strange, enigmatic and hauntingly beautiful, there’s a strong feeling that if this film didn’t exist, we’d definitely have no Robert Eggers and probably no Guillermo Del Toro either as its dedication to creating a fantasy world solely for an adult audience no doubt inspired them to no end. Possibly one of the more original werewolf movies ever made, Jordan ensures that we all marvel at what big teeth The Company Of Wolves truly has.
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