What Big Teeth You Have

Although it came during the cycle of werewolf movies of the early 1980s, Neil Jordan's The Company of Wolves (1984) doesn't have much in common with The Howling or An American Werewolf in London and their imitators. Apart from a taste for gory transformation effects, The Company of Wolves comes from the tradition of arty European horror movies from a decade or so earlier, indeed going back to the likes of Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast or Jaromil Jires's Valerie and Her Week of Wonders. Like these films, The Company of Wolves reinterprets the Gothic through a modernist lens, influenced as much by surrealism and by the various European New Wave movements as by the then-contemporary norms of the horror movie. Its director claims that it's not a horror movie at all, but there is a whiff of self-interested deflection in that pronouncement. And besides, Jordan has made several other horror movies of a similar bent, so it's not like a horror movie is out of character for him. But in some ways, he has a point. There is certainly an otherness to The Company of Wolves that sets it apart from its contemporaries.

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