Show Notes
Neil Jordan and Angela Carter turn Little Red Riding Hood into a nested dream of wolves, warning stories and growing up. FolknHell gets into the artificial forest, the gloriously different transformation scenes and the awkward question of whether a fairy tale this strange is horror, folk horror, or both.
The woods are indoors, the bedroom is leaking into the forest, Angela Lansbury is issuing increasingly alarming advice about men who are hairy on the inside, and nobody in Rosaleen's dream seems especially surprised when something impossible happens.
In this episode, FolknHell revisits Neil Jordan and Angela Carter's The Company of Wolves (1984), a film several of us first encountered far too young on television. We talk about its deliberately artificial studio forest, the way household objects migrate into the dream landscape, its stories-within-stories structure, and four werewolf transformations that refuse to behave the same way twice.
The film's real subject soon becomes harder to miss. Rosaleen is growing up while everyone around her offers a different version of what the path, the woods, sex, marriage and adulthood are supposed to mean. The wolves are predators, but they are also possibility. The village is safety, but safety starts to look suspiciously like staying exactly where you are told.
And then there is the folk horror question. Is a dream built from fairy tales, folklore and inherited warnings folk horror if it is not especially interested in conventional horror tension? We end up much more interested in what the old stories are doing than in whether the film can be made to sit tidily inside a genre box.
Spoilers throughout.
FolknHell Verdict A strange, beautiful and densely packed film that uses fairy-tale artificiality as a strength. The studio-bound forest gives the dream nowhere to escape to, while folklore, inherited warnings and a closed village place it firmly inside the folk-horror conversation. The horror may be intermittent, but the folk material is doing serious work.
Scores David Hall: 8/10 Dave Houghton: 9/10 Andy Davidson: 8/10 Total: 25/30
Links To Add The FolknHell episode: The FolknHell transcript: IMDb: TMDb: Rotten Tomatoes: LetterBoxd: Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Company_of_Wolves
Content Warning Spoilers throughout. Discussion includes body horror, predatory sexual behaviour, domestic violence and the sexual awakening of an adolescent character. Folknhell is the folk horror podcast where Andy Davidson, Dave Houghton and David Hall dig into strange cinema, argue about whether it really counts as folk horror, and score every film out of 30.
Add your own score and comments about the films at https://www.folknhell.com/scores
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