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The Company of Wolves (1984) (& revisiting The Bloody Chamber)
October is always a fun month at independent movie theaters, if you like horror and the more broadly macabre. The Company of Wolves is more the latter than the former; a local theater was screening it and I'd been meaning to watch it for... over two decades, actually, as I'd first heard of it as a kid. It is a 1984 film by Neil Jordan adapted loosely from Angela Carter's short story of the same name, and from Angela Carter's work in general--and adapted, interestingly, by Angela Carter, who served also as screenwriter for the film. That captured my interest as well: I've certainly seen feature-length narrative treatments expanding on short stories before, including allegorical and surreal ones, but it's another thing for the author themselves to get the chance to revisit it. Given that + it's semi-relevant to a current project of mine, I was all in on seeing it.
The Company of Wolves is a multi-frame-story metafictional gothic fairy tale Red Riding Hood, more or less, although it defies paraphrase a fair bit; it's a young girl's dream of a life as a frustrated Red Riding Hood-like girl in a Charles Perrault-inspired 18th-century France-ish place hearing nested and self-contradictory stories about wolves and werewolves. And it was great! I wasn't sure what I expected going in, but every time it lay something allegorical down, it doubled back on it and complicated it; it has everything you'd expect from the material on coming of age, sexual temptation, grooming and predation, otherness & transgression, but delivered neither through unsubtle moralizing nor noncommittal shapelessness. --I do like a fair handful of movies that catch a lot of flak for being noncommittal and shapeless and not really following through on their themes; I think a lot can be suggested by visual storytelling.
But The Company of Wolves isn't that: if anything it's very dense with story, in kind of a nonliteral Rashomon-like way. I've read a lot of modern fantasy that attempts something like it, but I found the film a lot more successful than most, 80s special effects and all. (There's an early nested story that shows a painful werewolf transformation in corny, extended, Grand Guignol style and medium-budget special effects, prolonged to the point of campiness--and then the mood and visual frame of the scene shifts abruptly. I think that was I started going "huh, this IS going to be untidy" in an approving way, and then it kept on getting untidier.)
It uses the familiarity of Perrault's Red Riding Hood for suspense in a discursive story; I thought a little of the oldish narrative game The Path, but if The Path uses the inevitability of arriving at the house in the woods for unease, The Company of Wolves puts off the girl's fated errand as she rehearses, imagines, and considers her encounter with the wolf in conflicting ways. I think it has a very interesting ambivalent approach to the central horror of sexuality and coming-of-age: neither the played-straight Perrault-ish seduction = predation = death nor the common modern sex-positive empowerment lens, exactly. But I don't want to make it sound like a plain succession of themes either! It's also a fun gothic fantasy from the 80s, with some of the same visual charm as Labyrinth or Ladyhawke.
After watching, I was of a mind to revisit both "The Company of Wolves" itself and The Bloody Chamber as a whole. It's been years since I read Carter in any depth, so it was fun to crack the collection open and reread it in light of the film. I like Carter's writing and I like The Bloody Chamber, for all the collection gets a little repetitive; my favorites are "The Tiger's Bride," "The Erl-King," and "The Lady of the House of Love." I think these stories have the most framebreaking weirdness to them, of them all; "The Erl-King" in particular has a strange recursive structure and self-contradictory POV that I find really interesting, as vs. the more literal(ish) symbolic fairytale adaptations in "The Bloody Chamber" and "The Courtship of Mr Lyon." Carter is a hell of a stylist, regardless, and a very particular one, and it means even her more straightforward pieces hit pretty different compared to their 90s and 2000s fantasy descendants.
But with "The Company of Wolves" in particular, and the collection as a whole, I was really struck by--well, how much I thought the film (and screenplay) The Company of Wolves really improved upon and complicated her work. It makes sense that the short story was doing completely different work to begin with: among other things, it's brief and it was her first time visiting the material. So it was a real joy to see what a writer does with a story when given the opportunity to revisit it and have to commit to 90 or so minutes with it. It was kind of the opposite of my experience of most adaptations, which usually sand off a lot of edges: sometimes for the better, usually not. It's cool to read the original story now, see the comparative straightforwardness of the ending--little Red transforms fearlessly, in the face of all expectation--and know that the author later went, okay, but is it really that easy? And then worked on her own transformative work. Would that more artists had the chance.
The Company of Wolves is a multi-frame-story metafictional gothic fairy tale Red Riding Hood, more or less, although it defies paraphrase a fair bit; it's a young girl's dream of a life as a frustrated Red Riding Hood-like girl in a Charles Perrault-inspired 18th-century France-ish place hearing nested and self-contradictory stories about wolves and werewolves. And it was great! I wasn't sure what I expected going in, but every time it lay something allegorical down, it doubled back on it and complicated it; it has everything you'd expect from the material on coming of age, sexual temptation, grooming and predation, otherness & transgression, but delivered neither through unsubtle moralizing nor noncommittal shapelessness. --I do like a fair handful of movies that catch a lot of flak for being noncommittal and shapeless and not really following through on their themes; I think a lot can be suggested by visual storytelling.
But The Company of Wolves isn't that: if anything it's very dense with story, in kind of a nonliteral Rashomon-like way. I've read a lot of modern fantasy that attempts something like it, but I found the film a lot more successful than most, 80s special effects and all. (There's an early nested story that shows a painful werewolf transformation in corny, extended, Grand Guignol style and medium-budget special effects, prolonged to the point of campiness--and then the mood and visual frame of the scene shifts abruptly. I think that was I started going "huh, this IS going to be untidy" in an approving way, and then it kept on getting untidier.)
It uses the familiarity of Perrault's Red Riding Hood for suspense in a discursive story; I thought a little of the oldish narrative game The Path, but if The Path uses the inevitability of arriving at the house in the woods for unease, The Company of Wolves puts off the girl's fated errand as she rehearses, imagines, and considers her encounter with the wolf in conflicting ways. I think it has a very interesting ambivalent approach to the central horror of sexuality and coming-of-age: neither the played-straight Perrault-ish seduction = predation = death nor the common modern sex-positive empowerment lens, exactly. But I don't want to make it sound like a plain succession of themes either! It's also a fun gothic fantasy from the 80s, with some of the same visual charm as Labyrinth or Ladyhawke.
After watching, I was of a mind to revisit both "The Company of Wolves" itself and The Bloody Chamber as a whole. It's been years since I read Carter in any depth, so it was fun to crack the collection open and reread it in light of the film. I like Carter's writing and I like The Bloody Chamber, for all the collection gets a little repetitive; my favorites are "The Tiger's Bride," "The Erl-King," and "The Lady of the House of Love." I think these stories have the most framebreaking weirdness to them, of them all; "The Erl-King" in particular has a strange recursive structure and self-contradictory POV that I find really interesting, as vs. the more literal(ish) symbolic fairytale adaptations in "The Bloody Chamber" and "The Courtship of Mr Lyon." Carter is a hell of a stylist, regardless, and a very particular one, and it means even her more straightforward pieces hit pretty different compared to their 90s and 2000s fantasy descendants.
But with "The Company of Wolves" in particular, and the collection as a whole, I was really struck by--well, how much I thought the film (and screenplay) The Company of Wolves really improved upon and complicated her work. It makes sense that the short story was doing completely different work to begin with: among other things, it's brief and it was her first time visiting the material. So it was a real joy to see what a writer does with a story when given the opportunity to revisit it and have to commit to 90 or so minutes with it. It was kind of the opposite of my experience of most adaptations, which usually sand off a lot of edges: sometimes for the better, usually not. It's cool to read the original story now, see the comparative straightforwardness of the ending--little Red transforms fearlessly, in the face of all expectation--and know that the author later went, okay, but is it really that easy? And then worked on her own transformative work. Would that more artists had the chance.
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