Movie: The Company of Wolves (1984)
Tagline: Where fairy stories meet horror stories [Australia Theatrical]
Trivia: Angela Carter’s first draft of the screenplay, which contains a number of differences from the finished film, was published in her anthology ‘The Curious Room’. One of the most noticeable differences is the end. In Carter’s script, the film ends with Rosaleen diving into the floor of her bedroom and being swallowed up. ‘Neil Jordan’ liked this ending, but as he explains on the DVD commentary for the film, the limited visual effect technology of the time made such a scene impossible to shoot on a small budget. Other differences include another story told by the Huntsman to Rosaleen, a different final tale told by Rosaleen to the wolf and a scene in a church with an animal congregation.
“A bag full of symbolic folklore about werewolves, or, rather, their sexual connotation. Granny tells her granddaughter Rosaleen strange, disturbing tales about innocent maidens falling in love with handsome, heavily eyebrowed strangers with a smoldering look in their eyes; about sudden disappearances of spouses when the moon is round & the wolves are howling in the woods; about babies found inside stork eggs, in a stork nest high up a tree; etc., etc. Of course the story of Little Red Ridinghood is also present, with a very handsome he-wolf! (And of course this he-wolf consumes Grandmother, but ‘consumes’ Little Red Ridinghood). All the stories are somehow reducible to loss of innocence, and fear of/hunger for (a newly acquired sense of) sexuality; their Freudian character is mirrored in their dreamlike shapes. This movie is not really a horror movie; it’s more a multiple tale about growing up into adolescence. Written by Homme A. Piest <piest@pobox.leidenuniv.nl>”
