Neil Jordan’s The Company of Wolves turns a classic bedtime story into a haunting and unforgettable cinematic experience.
By Ria Pathak
From Snow White to Cinderella, the cinematic world has seen many retellings of these fairy tales over the years. Many of these tales, like Sleeping Beauty and Hansel and Gretel, crossed themselves to the horror genre with a mix of fantasy. One such film from the 80s doesn’t just retell the tale of Little Red Riding Hood but turns the classic bedtime story into a dark, haunting and unforgettable cinematic experience. Neil Jordan’s The Company of Wolves, rather than showing a colorful, happy fairytale, confronts the darker aspects of desire and fear. The film plunges the audience into its subconscious, revealing the unsettling truths hidden beneath the surface. Even 41 years later, this British fantasy film stands as one of the greatest gothic tales ever told in cinema.
The Company of Wolves is a screen adaptation of British author Angela Carter’s 1979 short story of the same name. Carter, who also co-wrote the screenplay along with Irish director Neil Jordan, experienced a troubled childhood. She spent most of her childhood with her maternal grandmother and suffered from anorexia, an eating disorder that causes people, especially young women, to obsess over their body image and weight. Hence, Carter used the theme of adolescence and the fears related to it to craft dreamlike to transform the forest into a breeding ground for primal fears. With one of the most iconic and genre-bending werewolf transformations ever portrayed in cinema, The Company of Wolves is a testament to the power of gothic horror.
The Company of Wolves begins in modern times, where the audience sees a middle-aged couple returning home to their daughters. While their elder daughter, Alice, is there to greet them at the door, their younger daughter, Rosaleen, is asleep in her room. The family lives in a country house in the 18th century that is surrounded by a forest full of vines and creatures. The audience sees Rosaleen, played by Sarah Patterson, deep into her sleep, twisting and turning into her bed, implying that she is dreaming. In the next scene, Alice roams into the dark forest one night, chased and attacked by a pack of wolves. The following day, her family is mourning her death, and her funeral procession is taking place. This whole opening sequence is shown in a dreamy, slow-motion way, maintaining a feeling of unease throughout. In The Company of Wolves, the dream structure isn’t just a narrative device; it’s the very foundation of the film. Rosaleen’s dreams, layered within each other, allow the film to delve into the fears and desires associated with adolescence and sexuality. In the film, the forest becomes a metaphor for the subconscious, a place where hidden desires and anxieties manifest as wolves and seductive strangers.
“Dream within a dream, story within a story,” this narrative style has often been used in cinema to explore the psychological depths of different emotions. Two of the biggest examples are David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive and Victor Fleming’s The Wizard of Oz. Both films use dream logic to blur the lines between reality and fantasy. Lynch, who always made sure to maintain a meditative quality in his movies, used dreams to link the best and worst of both worlds. In Mulholland Drive, he uses the dream narrative to explore themes of identity, desire, and the dark side of Hollywood. On the other hand, The Wizard of Oz allows the audience to witness the transition from the black-and-white reality of Kansas to the technicolour, fantastical world of Oz — a clear marker of the dream state. In all three films, the familiar characters and fears from the protagonists’ lives appear in their dreamland, transformed into symbolic figures.
The Company of Wolves Introduced Feminist Gothic Horror
Traditional gothic horror films used to rely on Arthurian castles, supernatural creatures, damsels in distress, and a gloomy atmosphere. However, rather than creating a gothic vibe with these elements, The Company of Wolves locates the terror within the protagonist’s psyche. The film focuses on the internal terror of a human being. All the stories that are unfolding in the movie, the audience witnesses them through Rosaleen, who is a young girl stepping into the realm of womanhood. Her mind is equipped with thoughts, fears, and doubts about this new chapter of her life. The forest, the wolves, and the seductive strangers aren’t just external threats; they’re manifestations of Rosaleen’s internal struggles with her burgeoning sexuality and the conflicting messages she receives about womanhood.
“Never eat a windfall apple and never trust a man whose eyebrows meet,” Rosaleen’s grandmother, played by Oscar-winning Angela Lansbury, warns her when she comes to stay with her after her sister’s death. Her ‘Granny’ acts like a gatekeeper of all the curiosity Rosaleen wishes to experience with her growing age. In order to impart her dark wisdom to her granddaughter, she narrates cautionary tales that are both seductive and terrifying. In the film, we see four different stories: two are narrated by Rosaleen’s Granny and the other two are narrated by Rosaleen herself, one to her mother and another to a huntsman she meets in the woods. All stories are very different yet linked with the common thread of sending the message across the consequences one must face when one experiments with teenage desires. But what makes The Company of Wolves unique is that, unlike the other fairy tale heroines, Rosaleen is not manipulated and controlled by the norms of society. She likes roaming around the woods and meeting strangers along the way. This was a novel approach at the time as it took a classic piece of children’s literature and turned it into a feminist gothic film. The Company of Wolves paved the way for more feminist-oriented horror films like Crimson Peak and The Babadook.
While wandering through the woods, Rosaleen stumbles upon a mysterious huntsman with a predatory gaze. Played by Micha Bergese, the huntsman whose eyebrows meet tries to tame Rosaleen with a shiny compass and challenges her to reach Granny’s house before him. The huntsman who arrived at Granny’s place before Rosaleen revealed his true animalistic nature and killed her. Rosaleen reaches the house afterward only to witness the carnage, and the huntsman asks to provide her part of the bargain in the form of a kiss. But while trying to save herself from his grip, Rosaleen shoots the huntsman, and it triggers one of the greatest werewolf transformations ever.
The werewolf transformation sequence in The Company of Wolves resulted from special effects with masterful cinematography, leaving a lasting mark on how lycanthropy is portrayed in cinema. The man behind this impactful scene was pioneering special makeup effects artist Christopher Tucker, who also did the prosthetic makeup for David Lynch’s The Elephant Man. The scene, which shows the slow and agonizing transformation of the huntsman, heavily relied on practical effects and prosthetics. Unlike the usual on-screen creature-to-human transformation, The Company of Wolves showed a metamorphosis from a human to the beast inside him. The imagery of the gothic body horror later became a point of reference for werewolf transformations in contemporary cinema. It created a realism that CGI could never replicate. In a 2023 article published by The Guardian, Micha Bergese, a.k.a the huntsman, shared his experience on filming the transformation scene. He said:
“Turning into a wolf was fantastic: I got to go from the acting world back into my dance world. I wore contact lenses that had to be taken out every 15 minutes, though much of the transformation was just done with makeup.”
To create a dreamlike atmosphere, the film’s cinematographer, Bryan Loftus, overcame the challenge of creating a timeless gothic piece without a large production scale. Rather than using wide and open shots to create the gothic tone, Loftus captured the dense, fog-shrouded woods with a sense of claustrophobia, enhancing the feeling of being trapped within Rosaleen’s subconscious, as evidenced by the film’s ending, which follows Rosaleen as she wakes up in the present day from her nightmare. A pack of wolves is seen running through the forest, entering her house and moving towards her room. They barge in by breaking her window glass, and the movie ends with a screaming Rosaleen. While the filmmakers never emphasized the ending in length, director Neil Jordan has often expressed that he wanted to conclude the film differently, but the budget limitations made it unachievable. However, regardless of the ending, The Company of Wolves continues to be a landmark cinematic achievement as a timeless gothic piece which dared to explore the darker undertones of the fairy tale world.
Source: This 41-Year-Old British Fantasy Film Is Still 1 of the Greatest Gothic Horror Movies Ever