The Company of Wolves - A Neil Jordan Film

Werewolf Movie Based on the Writings of Angela Carter

Jul 9, 2009

Neil Jordan (The Crying Game, Interview with the Vampire) directs this imaginative reworking of Little Red Riding Hood.

Neil Jordan’s fairytale horror film The Company of Wolves reworks Charles Perrault’s ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ into a dream-like gothic fantasy. Rosaleen (Sarah Patterson) has restless dreams of living by a forest long ago. Rosaleen is told never to stray from the path by her worried parents, especially now her sister has been killed by the wolves lurking within the forest.

There are other dangers out there though; men who are as Granny warns ‘hairy on the inside.’ On a trip to visit her Granny, Rosaleen meets an enigmatic Huntsman (Micha Bergese) who tries to tempt her into the forest, but she is wise enough to know better. Yet Rosaleen remains intrigued by this handsome stranger.

Stephen Woolley and Nik Powell, who ran the now defunct Palace Pictures had been distributing films for about a year and had made some money from releasing The Evil Dead (Sam Raimi 1982). Woolley saw and admired Jordan’s debut movie Angel (82), a remarkable thriller about a sax-player hunting down the killers of a mute girl. Initially they planned to make a screenplay Jordan had written called ‘The Soldier’s Wife,’ but Jordan had trouble finding an ending. They would eventually turn this script into The Crying Game (1992).

Neil Jordan Collaborates with Angela Carter

The Company of Wolves is based on stories taken from Angela Carter’s collection The Bloody Chamber in which she rewrites fairytales from a feminist perspective, Jordan and Carter settled on a narrative that would allow them to tell stories within stories and link them together. Jordan, a novelist initially, had met Carter at a literary festival and decided to collaborate on a film. ITC Entertainment, the television studio famous for making shows like Return of the Saint provided the £2 million budget.

Filming took place at Shepperton studios. Jordan went for an expressionistic feel, with objects and sets designed to be bigger than they usually would be. The look of the Hammer Horror films was clearly an influence, but so too is the work of Jean Cocteau who in Orphee (1950) used inventive techniques to suggest the otherness of the supernatural. Anton Furst, who had worked on Alien (Ridley Scott 1979) and would go on to win an Oscar for his work on Batman (Tim Burton 1989) was able to visualise and create many of Carter and Jordan’s unusual ideas, including giant versions of children’s toys and weeping marble babies hatching from eggs.

Although The Company of Wolves found an appreciative audience amongst audiences and critics in Britain, its US release was a disaster. Cannon bought the distrubition rights and tried to market it as a gory horror film. There are some gruesome moments; it is after all a werewolf movie, but The Company of Wolves was never going to satisfy an audience looking for cheap thrills. Like all the best fairytales it is about transformation, of becoming something new and the wonder involved in this journey.

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