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.
