One-Sheet Wonders! – THE COMPANY OF WOLVES (1984)

There are some things that just don’t make sense. When it belatedly hit US theaters in the spring of 1985 after opening more than six months earlier in the UK, THE COMPANY OF WOLVES should have been a hit just off its poster alone. I remember being really intrigued by the agonizing sight of a wolf’s snout emerging from a man’s face. It seemed to be a fresh spin on what effects master Rick Baker had achieved with his werewolf transformation in John Landis’ AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON (1981).

Directed by Neil Jordan, the Irish filmmaker who would soon go on to acquire critical and financial success with such offerings as MONA LISA (1986), THE CRYING GAME (1992), and INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE (1994), THE COMPANY OF WOLVES offers up a mature, esoteric examination of “Little Red Riding Hood”. To the film’s detriment, there wasn’t anything like it in theaters at the time, and that novelty seemed to alienate a lot of moviegoers. Ultimately, the film cashed out only a bit more than $4 million stateside and it was left to become a rather obscure cult classic. Forty years later, it seems to be unheard of by the younger horror fans, which is one of the reasons I’m featuring it here. With the rise of A24 Films and the work of directors like Robert Eggers, I think there are some newer horror hounds out there who would find a lot of inspiration in Jordan’s adult fairy tale.

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