The Company of Wolves

Dir: Neil Jordan

1984

*****

Neil Jordan's epic Werewolf fantasy is often overlooked as another Cannon Group failure and a cheap horror film. Neither could be further than the truth. Firstly, it is a Palace Production film and secondly, it's not really a horror. Influenced largely by Wojciech Has's The Saragossa Manuscript, Neil Jordan adopts a 'Chinese box' approach in the film's structure, by having a narrative, within a narrative, within a narrative and so on, which successfully demonstrates situations of conceptually nested and recursive arrangement within a fairy tale setting. With Werewolves. It's very effective and it enriches Angela Carter's short story (from her collection The Bloody Chamber) that is a fairy tale fable in the classical sense but with a strong critical analysis of what a fairy tale is and an exploration of what many of the classics represent. Carter added script from her later radio piece, also about werewolves (as well as a sort of critique of Little Red Riding Hood), which gave the film its final title. You can attach all sorts of symbolic metaphor to the overall film and the different parts that make it a whole and I think that is key to its notoriety. I see something new every time I watch it and it remains fascinatingly objective, as well as intrinsically disturbing. It's brilliant at conveying an otherworldly nightmarish fantasy world, which is both epic in scope and at times uncomfortably claustrophobic. I believe it is a case of Jordan working harder and therefore more creatively, under the limitations of a small budget. The film is full of scenes so lavish you'd think it was a huge production, which is to his credit and the special effects are tremendous and have aged remarkably well. Production designer Anton Furst, responsible for transforming London's Docklands into war-torn Vietnam (Full Metal Jacket) and turning Batman into a Gothic art nouveau, received high praise for his striking visuals. The wolves themselves looked pretty good and the now infamous banquet scene looks as amazing now as it did back in 84. I love everything about, especially the darkly wicked twist at the ending. I love Neil Jordan and Sarah Patterson, Angela Lansbury, Stephen Rea and David Warner made for an eclectic and exciting cast who all give fantastic performances. An unsung classic.