'The Company of Wolves' rebrands Red Riding Hood as sensual horror

"Little girls, this seems to say / Never stop upon your way / Never trust a stranger friend / No-one knows how it will end / As you're pretty, so be wise / Wolves may lurk in every guise / Now as then, 'tis simple truth / Sweetest tongue has sharpest tooth."

That's a bit more poetry than your basic, "My what big teeth you have," no? But then Neil Jordan's 1984 gothic-horror classic, The Company of Wolves, which hits Shudder this week, never skimps on the poetical. Or on the pulsating toadstool caps. Not that that's an either/or situation. 

Adapted by the author Angela Carter from her 1979 short story of the same name, Jordan's film is awash in surrealism, metaphor, dream logic, and Dame Angela Lansbury getting her head knocked off, though perhaps not in that precise order. It's deliciously over-the-top Grand Guignol mashed up with a slasher flick. And there's nothing quite like it even now, almost 40 years on.

How did The Company of Wolves come to be?

Having published a translation of Charles Perrault's legendary 1697 collection, Tales of Mother Goose, from the original French in 1977, Carter, already a decade into her successful writing career, found herself inspired to dive into the sticky stuff of the fairy tales from her own perspective. In John Haffenden's 1985 book, Novelists in Interview, Carter was quoted saying: 

"My intention was not to do 'versions' or, as the American edition of the book said, horribly, 'adult' fairy tales, but to extract the latent content from the traditional stories." 

Carter wanted to make the subtext text; to push the buried themes of female sexuality and power right out to the fore and wrestle with them in the open.

The Bloody Chamber, her collection of 10 stories released in 1979, tackled everything from Bluebeard to Beauty and the Beast to Puss in Boots, excavating their themes of repression and desire and upending them in sometimes startling fashions. Decades before Gregory Maguire gave you-go-girl voice to Oz's Elphaba with Wicked, Carter was soaking her heroines in rivers of menstrual blood and seducing the big bad wolves straight into their beds. 

No big surprise that Carter's work has remained largely untapped in the movie marketplace. Besides The Company of Wolves, there is a 1987 TV adaptation of The Magic Toyshop. That's it. She was considered a lot in her moment. Indeed, it feels like the world's only just coming around to her, with movies like Teeth, Raw, and The Witch all picking up Carter's baton and running forward. The ambiguity of Anya Taylor-Joy's cackling rise into the tree branches at the end of Robert Eggers' witchy drama feels birthed straight out of Carter's canon, as do the complicated sexual heroines of everything from Ginger Snaps to Titane.

Thankfully, all the way back in 1982 Neil Jordan saw her work's cinematic potential. Looking for a sophomore project after his debut film Angel, Jordan met with Carter about turning her Bloody Chamber story "The Company of Wolves" into a full-length movie. The two hit it right off, spending the next couple of years pounding out a script.

Jordan and Carter cooked up a wickedly weird anthology structure for the movie. After going to bed angry after a fight with her sister, the red-hooded Rosaleen (Sarah Patterson) begins dreaming up the remainder of the film in frightful fits and starts. We watch dreams buried within dreams, tales told within tales, all of them echoing one another and underlining the main themes. 

Girl, you'll be a Red Riding Woman soon.

A gothic phantasmagoria of female desire and all the sordid knots of submission and active participation that entails, Carter and Jordan’s script luxuriates in a genuine strangeness, and a darkness that would no doubt terrify today's superficial so-called subversives, like Fifty Shades of Grey author E.L. James. Rosaleen, flush with hormonal contradictions, lashes out in fits of anger (her first dream has her older sister devoured by a tidal wave of hungry wolves) and love, and ultimately an emancipatory lust that’s as dangerous as it is thrilling.

Filmed on a spectacular soundstage in Shepperton Studios, England, Jordan’s film embraces lush artificiality. It’s giving the Platonic Ideal of the strange and terrifying fairy-tale forest. Thick with greenery, this whole world drips with moisture. It’s practically jungle-like, with walls of trees, red like musculature, and gigantic throbbing mushrooms that puppeteers maneuvered from beneath the floor so they pulsated with phallic intent. 

Roseleen, swanning through the darkness in her red cloak, resembles a pinprick of blood sliding through this shadowy world. Everywhere she goes she unintentionally brings violence with her, as if it’s a packaged item smooshed right there into her wicker basket beside the red wine meant for Grandma’s house.

Enter the Grande (Guignol) Dame, Angela Lansbury!

The legendary Angela Lansbury, smack-dab in the middle of her award-winning Murder She Wrote run, ran off to Jolly Ol' to give life and dignity to the role of the old bonneted one who gets good and gobbled up. 

Last year, remembering Lansbury in her obituary, Jordan said the actress understood the assignment:

"We had crew members who had just come off 'The Empire Strikes Back' and regarded what we were doing with a kind of benign contempt or bemusement. But Angela always understood. Not only understood, but gave them the feeling the enterprise might be worth something in the end. She had been in 'Bedknobs and Broomsticks,' after all."

Infusing the film with the heft of serious thespian-ness bestride a twinkle in her eye, Lansbury is clearly having a great time. With a sick glee, she whispers to her granddaughter bizarre tales in which decapitated heads plunk with sudden force into great vats of milk, and unibrows are signs of pure evil.

Lansbury makes a true meal out of the phrase, "hairy on the inside." And watching her do a fire-poker battle with a snake-tongued werewolf fop remains one of cinema's all-time truest pleasures.

"Those are the voices of my brothers, darling; I love the company of wolves."

The Company of Wolves was released in the fall of 1984 only a few weeks before Wes Craven's A Nightmare on Elm Street, another frightening movie that funnily enough injected dream logic into the by-then-becoming-stale slasher formula in order to liven it up. After all, who is Little Red Riding Hood but the original Final Girl? 

Pushing the Freudian implications of the "Have sex, get dead" mantra toward its weirdest extremes, both movies have their leading ladies glide through landscapes thick with sexual metaphor, awakening the beasts within. Rosaleen and Nancy Thompson both come to find out that hey, they're pretty hairy on the inside, too.

And like Elm Street, Wolves was more successful than anyone anticipated. If you were a child at the time, there's a very good chance that the poster and VHS image of a wolf's snout erupting through a man's gaping maw is firmly burned into your brain, an ever-after's worth of nightmare fuel. Indeed, those werewolf transformation scenes, of which there are several, remain great fun and stand proudly against the best practical effects of the time. I'd rank them right alongside the similar and famed scenes in both An American Werewolf in London and The Howling. 

Like the rest of the film, those transformations manage to brilliantly bridge the goofy with the legitimately terrifying. Like Lansbury's performance, this movie knows what great fun there is to be had from campy subversion. In (mother) goosing the gander and speaking the heretofore unsaid, it can become its own reclamation of power.

In Carter's original version of the story, Red Riding Hood laughs in the wolf's face as he threatens her. And as Roseleen embraces her own company of wolves, we too learn how to run free, unfettered, such beautiful howling creatures of the night.

How to watch: The Company of Wolves is now streaming on Shudder.