'Hell Yeah!' is an ongoing series in which horror filmmakers, critics and fans share their take on movies they love. This month: werewolves!

This is a fancy werewolf movie.  There are fancy actors in it.  They dress fancy (mostly).  They talk fancy.  And the decapitations land in a pretty pile of allegories. 

I’m no arthouse snob, but I love this fancy werewolf movie.  The Company of Wolves was Neil Jordan’s second directorial effort, taking place years prior to him spooking audiences with that schlong popping out of a miniskirt in The Crying Game. Given that horror is considered the poor stepchild within the spectrum of movie genres, it’s nice to occasionally see a fancy director and fancy actors taking the genre seriously.  Once in a while, for variety’s sake, it’s also nice to watch a genre flick that isn’t a slapdash upchuck of boobs and bloodshed. 

The plot:  a series of gothic fairytale vignettes unfold within the Little Red Riding Hood inspired dream of an adolescent girl named Rosaleen.  In this dream, Rosaleen’s weird granny plies her granddaughter with cautionary tales about how men can be “nice as pie until they’ve had their way with you – then the beast comes out!”  Party at the house of allegory! Innocent young girls bite into apples (finding worms, no less)!  Toads and serpents slither underfoot and overhead as Rosaleen recalls her grandmother’s warnings not to “stray from the path”!  Crying clay fetuses emerge from hatching stork eggs, and impart a valuable lesson:  if you agree to take a walk through the woods with the horny village idiot, you could likely return with one whopper of a souvenir.  The visuals are gorgeous, and the surreal, mind-bending symbolism is part of the ride.  Plus I get to feel like a little bit of a smarty-pants for dabbling in Jungian analysis during my leisure time.

One of Granny’s fables is about a young woman who marries a “traveling man” (one gathers that this is the medieval equivalent of a drummer in a rock band) and, according to Granny, gets what’s coming to her for doing so:  she’s abandoned by said traveling man during a full moon (hmmmm), is eventually knocked up by a new husband, and pops out a brood of shrieking toddlers.  The first husband (who, yes, is a werewolf) re-enters the picture following a long and mysterious absence, but guess what?  Amidst the banality of the woman’s domestic life and strife, her wayward wolfman almost looks like the lesser of two evils – a twist which I find to be pretty brilliant.  To drive the point home, after the werespouse is beheaded, New Hubby offers his woman not comfort, but rather, the back of his hand.  (Let that be a lesson to you, ladies!  Never fondly caress the again-human severed head of your former husband in the presence of your current husband!)

My favorite portion of the movie has to be Rosaleen’s encounter with a handsome noble huntsman in the woods on her way to grandma’s house one day.  The studly huntsman knows “the very place for a picnic,” if you know what he’s saying – and I think you do, because it’s nearly 2010 as I write this, and what now passes for an allegory of blossoming womanhood is Megan Fox in microscopic shorts, straddling a motorcycle.  But I digress.  The dapper huntsman entices the red-cape clad Rosaleen with the revelation that, “I have the most remarkable object in my pocket!”  The remarkable object is merely a compass, silly.  (Which is an allegorical penis.)  Things escalate at Grandma’s house as Rosaleen launches into her famous, “My, what big [insert body parts here] you have!” routine.  The film isn’t just fancy – it’s funny, too.  Most modern movies are missing both the wordplay and foreplay contained in this scene.

As with every other werewolf movie in existence, the transformation scenes leave something to be desired.  This flick was made in the early 80’s, and when put into that context, it’s not any worse than most of its contemporaries.  The producers probably could have ponied up some additional cash for slightly more believable FX makeup, but then they likely couldn’t have afforded amazing actors like Stephen Rea, Terence Stamp and Angela Lansbury.

Regardless, to return to my main point: some might complain about the coy tone of such a throwback film.  I like this movie for that very reason.  In lieu of instant gratification (both romantically and creatively), there was once courtship.  The Company of Wolves is dreamy and dialogue-driven, and it actually courts its audience instead of just jamming a tongue in its ear by way of hello.  It’s “a thinking man’s werewolf movie,” writes one reviewer at Netflix.  

I couldn’t agree more.