The Company of Wolves (1984) really is a force of nature – a vivid array of stories-within-stories which capture the insurrectionist tendencies of Angela Carter’s book, The Bloody Chamber, a collection of familiar fairy stories reworked into unfamiliar forms. The film brings several of Carter’s tales to the screen, albeit via a new, modern framing device, one which links the humdrum with the imaginative, showing ways in which these two states overlap and influence one another. Ambitious, aesthetically-pleasing and intricate, it’s a film which has a diehard fan base, but perhaps has always struggled to attain the audience – or the appreciation – it merits, coming as it does at the tail-end (pun noted) of a number of grisly werewolf flicks and a growing appetite for the gory, not the Gothic. But there’s much to reward the viewer in The Company of Wolves, and now – with James Gracey’s book about the film – it yields up more still in this observant and scrupulous study.
Noting that the film appeared after a brief but significant werewolf phase in horror cinema, with the likes of An American Werewolf in London and The Howling still fresh in audience minds, Gracey sets out just how different The Company of Wolves was to these films (and, later in the book, how disastrous marketing strategies mis-sold the film as another grisly werewolf horror, to the probable disappointment of many viewers). Repositioning the film as a richly symbolic piece of work with a novel attitude to female sexuality at its core, Gracey is primed to explore the history of the project before contextualising both the film and The Bloody Chamber with a series of thought-provoking appraisals.
After an enlightening warts-and-all retelling of director Neil Jordan and author Angela Carter’s meeting and involvement in the project – theirs was a close, fruitful but occasionally rocky relationship – and some interesting facts (like Andy Warhol being the original choice to play the Devil) Gracey moves onto an important contextual consideration of the film: the history of storytelling. Oral folklore existed in various forms for hundreds of years before anything was written down in even a rudimentary form, but in the last couple of centuries, folklorists have taken an interest in what these stories can tell us about the mores of their times: as well as what’s in the tales, there’s an increasing regard for what gets left out, when, and why. For example, the Brothers Grimm, who believed that maternity was tantamount to an exalted state, turned a lot of malign mothers into the proverbial ‘wicked stepmothers’, even if there was no suggestion of this in their source material.
The book then moves on to a specific tale, one usually now known in English as Little Red Riding Hood. This story has especial significance within The Company of Wolves, where its scope for sexual subtext is inverted and called into question (and call me naïve, but I never twigged that this story had any sexual undertones whatsoever until I first saw the film!) Gracey talks us through a number of interesting variations on this story through time, conservative and otherwise. Over the years, little girls have fought back or embraced their fates, wolves have turned into ogres, and the moral of the story has shifted. Charles Perrault, in the 17th Century, made his Petit Chaperon Rouge a deeply moral tale which warned young girls about ‘stranger danger’, particularly men, implying that girls who fraternise with strangers deserve whatever they get.
Carter, in her short story The Werewolf, definitely pulls this version of the story into pieces, and along similar lines The Company of Wolves playfully inverts the vulnerability and innocence of Red Riding Hood, making the story of a girl endangered in the woods into a coming-of-age yarn where it’s the girl who finally prospers. Gracey also takes a look at the cinematic legacy of this particular tale, noting other ways in which it’s been adapted to tell us (or warn us) about different things. Along the way, there are effective and reasoned put-downs of those critics who wouldn’t accept the work Carter did in destabilising old tales of damsels in distress in her own work.
The book also offers detailed comment on the film’s use of symbolism, its impact on cinema and its legacy in film (the likes of Pan’s Labyrinth, for instance) and of course an engaging chapter on lycanthropy. This section of the book eventually brings us full circle, discussing the history of lycanthropic cinema, but before then we go back to the origins of the werewolf myth and its evolution through literature – noting that male and female lycanthropes have tended to receive very different treatments, something which has seeped into cinema, too.
Gracey’s writing is on point from the very first here; lucid, detailed and meticulous, with exhaustive knowledge of the film, its inception and its interpretation. However, this requires a similar familiarity with The Bloody Chamber, so Carter’s ability to interrogate old tales (Gracey calls her “deconstructive and transformative”) forms the backbone of this appreciation of the film. An able defence of Carter’s approach feeds into a worthwhile appreciation of The Company of Wolves, all the while with some nice turns of phrase; cinematic conventions surrounding the werewolf are described as ‘congealing’ in popular culture, for instance.
Academic film writing is nothing new, and as Film Studies as a phenomenon continues to grow, more and more academic writing will appear to map out hitherto less-noteworthy films and genres. However, film writing which effectively crosses the divide between academia and fandom is still rare. Happily, two of the books I’ve read so far in the Devil’s Advocates series fit the bill, and James Gracey’s book is one of these. Is that important, if this book is targeted more at students of film (coming via Auteur Publishing) than casual readers? I’d say yes, it is, as someone coming to a film like The Company of Wolves for a purely academic exercise would fall flat. Yes, the language here is highly formal and it’s a studious book in tone, but there’s still the sense of a dedicated film fan couching something they love in academic language, rather than an academic trying to dedicate their attentions to an interesting film. This book remains accessible, provides ample food for thought and never strays into abstraction; perhaps more importantly, it makes a compelling case for giving The Company of Wolves the credit it so richly deserves.
Devil’s Advocates: The Company of Wolves by James Gracey is available now from Auteur Publishing. You can find out more here.
How short can you – legitimately – make a cinematic scare? There are people who would say that a second is enough, but these people are probably discussing jump-cuts. Jump-cuts aren’t scary; jump-cuts are the equivalent of someone screaming BOO! into your ear to trigger a reflex reaction. Most people need – and expect – rather more than that – but the question remains – how short can a film possibly go?
I try to make it a point never to openly roast films just for the fun of it; whatever I say about a project, I try to ask myself whether I’d be happy to say it in front of the filmmaker themselves, and I try really hard to remember that real people out there might have poured a lot of effort into their movie. So, with that in mind, I did try to stick to this with regards The Curse of the Witch’s Doll (2017), and not only because I was the one who chose to watch this screener – I made the decision. So all told, in this case I would definitely say these things in front of the people responsible for this film, and it turns out to be physically impossible to talk about it without an air of exasperation bordering on a good roast. To do otherwise would be worse than dishonest. Alright, so let’s get on with it.
A missing child is meant to be a cataclysmic event in a person’s life, but no one in this film seems massively bothered. To be fair, I feel that the cast are making an effort with what they’ve been given, but they come across as self-conscious, and certainly not expressive of any great concern – not the mother, not the detectives who pop in once or twice and do little else, and not the landlord either. You could possibly argue that as ‘things aren’t what they seem’ (yes, the film attempts THAT plot twist) then this is reflected in the performances, but actually I don’t think so – I’m not prepared to do the work here to justify what I’ve watched. Add to this a script rammed with stock phrases like “we’re doing all we can” and a bewildering array of lighting and sound problems, and it’s devilishly hard to suspend your disbelief. Additional attempts to add dramatic interest by changing tack invariably fall flat, because it’s not possible to believe in anything up until the point of the plot shift anyway.
The ‘mockumentary’ format has been used to interesting effect over the years; note that I said ‘mockumentary’ rather than ‘found footage’, a sub-genre which usually conjures more questions than it can ever answer. There are some important distinctions between the two. Strawberry Flavored Plastic dodges the most typical question asked during found footage, which is ‘why are we/you filming?’ by positioning itself as a film about filmmaking, detailing what two filmmakers are willing to go through in order to see their unique angle through to a completed piece of work. In this, it’s reminiscent of a couple of older films – Man Bites Dog and Resurrecting The Street Walker perhaps, though far more subtle and psychological than either of these predecessors.
This is a slow-building film with ample philosophical elements: our killer spends a lot of screen time pondering the nature of his crimes, after being asked a range of questions by two young men eager to understand what motivates him. Noel is very much the key character here, thanks to an absorbing performance by Aidan Bristow; it’s oddly difficult not to warm to his character, although he is capable of terrible things. Perhaps there are some similarities with early seasons of Dexter here (the ‘unscratchable itch’ and the ‘dark passenger’ are similar ideas), albeit we are never made party to Noel’s internal thoughts in the same way – not if he doesn’t want us, via the film, to know about them. Noel manages to dominate Ellis and Errol’s lives even when he disappears for periods of time. However, despite Noel’s overall dominance of the screen time, the two naive but very driven filmmakers gradually emerge as characters in their own right, not just guys behind cameras. We see them beginning to appreciate the strange quandary they’ve brought upon themselves – and, via them, the film explores the pressures of filmmaking: when is it time to call time on a project? When must you call ‘cut’ for good? When does a good documentary end?
We’ve all heard of post-apocalyptic drama – literature, film and television which look at life after the End of the World as We Know It – and we can all name a few noteworthy examples, I’m sure. Well, the recent BBC series Hard Sun reinterprets this idea, giving us something rather different: ‘pre-apocalyptic drama’. It’s a new one on me. But, using this idea of a modern world poised on the edge of something catastrophic has – at least on paper – some bite. How would knowledge of some impending doom alter the behaviour of people waiting for it to come?
There are many strengths here: the attention to little details works well, with portentous graffiti warning of the ‘hard sun’ beginning to appear all over London. This is a neat touch, which adds to the increasing sense of something being wrong, if not openly discussed; London on the whole looks like an intimidating, alien space for most of the time it’s shown on camera. There’s a bit of mischief involved, too: some of the character names refer to folklore (Grace’s surname is Morrigan – Celtic goddess of death) and we even have a Herbert West in here for good measure, which fits quite well with his particular plot line. These may be entirely coincidental, I suppose, but it seems unlikely. As for the performances; I’ve read quite a lot of criticism of them, and yes, they tend towards being rather overblown (with the exception of Amuka-Bird, who is so calm and collected for the most part that a plot twist where she turned out to be AI wouldn’t have been too much of a leap). But, for most of the characters, the overblown style doesn’t seem to be so bad a fit, given the mode and the topic at hand. It’s all a bit like a London manga, more about spectacle than slow-burn, or indeed plot coherence.
Don’t Look Now is a strange and rather wonderful horror film: routinely featuring on ‘best films of all time’ lists, it clearly made (and continues to make) a resonant impression on viewers, whether those who saw it upon release or those who have come to it later. It’s this lasting appeal which has prompted some serious consideration in print in recent years, with this edition of the Devil’s Advocates series by author Jessica Gildersleeve marking an upcoming addition to the fold.
Perhaps the main body of the book and its arguments, however, is devoted to the film’s specific treatment of trauma; this certainly isn’t your standard book which devotes a chapter to the director, then a chapter to the key actors, and so on. In order to retain her chosen focus, Gildersleeve uses something she refers to as ‘contemporary trauma theory’, and it’s at this juncture that the book really hikes up its academic tone. Of course, the Devil’s Advocates series tends towards the scholarly, granted, but I do feel that, in comparison with 
This must be a boom time for dystopian sci-fi and horror; I cannot imagine why. Over the past few months I’ve received either information about upcoming projects or screener links for a range of dystopian cinema, whether films about worlds poisoned by tech, gripped by environmental havoc, or somewhere between the two. God knows, I haven’t even been able to get around them all. Even that fail-safe low-budget staple – the zombie – seems to have taken a back seat at this moment in time. Maybe this is just a trend, or maybe people are just sweating the small stuff, such as the US President using social media to goof around on the topic of nuclear annihilation. What a time to be alive! Still, I’m sure people aren’t using their films to play with some of their anxieties, because sci-fi and horror have never been used in such a way. Nope.
To judge by the information available on IMDb, Defective had a tough time on the budget front, eventually working with only half of what they’d pegged to get the film made. Unfortunately, the low budget is quite noticeable: for instance, the film isn’t slick, there is some slight echo in places, and there are obviously constraints on the setting/locations which, to an extent, detract from the believability of this version of the world, albeit if we do accept that this dystopia is not that far in the future. At times, there’s a disparity of threat: people can attack the metal-clad enforcers and every time, this seems to hurt them despite their armour. However, the shots used are generally good, even innovative in places (a sequence where people are pursued down a stairwell looks great, for instance) and the performances are decent. Had the film had an abundance of money to play around with, then, would it have been a completely different experience?
Frankenstein’s Creature is one of the true modern horror archetypes. Like the vampire or the ghoul, it’s an enduring and versatile monster, ready to reflect whatever set of anxieties we currently have; its ghastly stitched flesh and tendons are durable enough to withstand whatever we seek from it. And yet, unlike the vampire – which was popularised by literature and the likes of Le Fanu and Stoker later in the century, but existed in myth in various forms for centuries beforehand – this reanimated man made of men stems from the imagination of one person: a teenage girl, Mary Godwin, later Mary Shelley. Although she wrote throughout her life, it is Frankenstein for which she’s famous, and its legacy is quite unprecedented. And, as cinema developed, it was one of the first horror stories ever to be adapted for the screen, where it has returned in a wide array of forms over the past century.
An elopement to France followed, which had to be curtailed due to penury, and when Mary – pregnant, sick – returned to England, even her forward-thinking father would no longer assist her. Her first child was born prematurely in the following year, and died without even receiving a name. Plunged into a depression, Mary wrote in her journal of a “dream that my little baby came to life again; that it had only been cold, and that we rubbed it before the fire, and it lived.” Already in Mary’s life and in her imagination, even by the standards of the early nineteenth century, birth and death seem to be interlinked and interchangeable. Mary quietly bemoaned her frequent further pregnancies, complaining of how they stripped her of vital energy and health; only one of her children ever reached adulthood, and Mary nearly died of a miscarriage. Her own mother, the feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, had written to Godwin towards the end of her pregnancy with Mary that she expected “the animal” was about to be born; when the animal came, it left Mary Wollstonecraft with an acute infection which killed her within days. Doubtlessly, very female anxieties underpin the horrors of Frankenstein, just as much as anxieties about male-dominated science; the terrors of bringing new life in into the world do not start and end with Victor Frankenstein’s new methods.
It seems to me that, once Frankenstein had started appearing on the new phenomenon of the cinema screen, both the novel and the new medium quickly became a distorting mirror for particularly twentieth century anxieties about twentieth century science. Universal Studio’s Frankenstein was released in 1931; by 1945, nuclear warfare would change world politics forever, and to this day ‘Frankenstein’ is an ongoing shorthand for worries about the direction science is heading – remember the ‘Frankenstein foods’ slur used against GM-crops when anxieties about this hit their peak about fifteen years ago? For early twentieth century viewers, with escalating world tensions, new methods of mass destruction and a constantly-refigured understanding of their place in the world, it seemed that monstrous things really did happen in labs. Frankenstein’s creature became a monster not of the ‘unhallowed arts’, but of bad science, and it’s a phenomenon which still recurs today.
Penny Dreadful (2014-16) – It’s easy to scoff at the trend for literary mash-ups – you know, the likes of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies – but Penny Dreadful, which shows us a Victorian London peopled with a whole host of famous literary monsters, is a triumph of interesting developments and love for the source material. Frankenstein’s Creature is played in the series by Rory Kinnear: his is an outstanding representation which brings us right back to the start. Kinnear’s creature is humane, intelligent and persecuted but utterly monstrous, tormenting his Creator and destroying his other work. However, Victorian London was awash with misfits and malformed, and the Creature escapes, seeking to build some sort of a life amongst others rather than fleeing for the wilderness. His subsequent association with the theatre is a fitting development, a final link between novel, screen and performance.
It’s comparatively rare these days to go into a film viewing with no idea of what to expect, so often your best chance at this is to gain access to an online screener – particularly if these screeners come via film festivals which, for good or ill, have a fairly selective audience until such time as their films get a general release. In the case of Rabbit (2017), which first screened at Toronto After Dark last year, I got the chance to see this film with a completely blank slate – and I’m very glad I did. From the opening scenes, the film weaves a clever and nightmarish spell, eschewing gratuitous horror or torment in favour of something far more subtle.
This is maintained artfully throughout Rabbit, because every line of dialogue and every gesture has a somewhat practised air: I’m trying to avoid invoking the name of a certain director, but there are some unmistakable resemblances to Mulholland Drive in the first half of this film. Things do progress in a slightly more tried-and-tested way in the second act, admittedly, although the atmosphere sustains the impression that this is not just another horror. Overall, there’s a convincing sense that some conniving intelligence with grim intentions is manipulating events, something which horror has played to great effect in recent years, from Martyrs to Starry Eyes to Get Out – though none of these films have utilised mise-en-scène quite so well. Director Luke Shanahan and cinematographer Anna Howard have set up a series of gorgeous, unsettling sequences which you barely glimpse, but which are deeply unsettling. The film is fraught with menace, and it all seems to operate in that pre-digital space which is equally beloved of modern horror. Perhaps for modern audiences, this symbolises an unfamiliar terrain where help is not at hand; in any case, a lot of films seems to have dispensed with phone trouble as a plot device.
I’ll spare you the full preamble where I say how fast the year has flown, or that I haven’t been to the cinema as much as I’d have hoped, or that [current year] wasn’t all that great for films; in actual fact, I’ve seen some excellent films this year, in some cases from entirely unanticipated directions. On these lines, I never expected to enjoy a film so much that is based on Greek myth, blending horrible realism with farce and potentially supernatural elements. The Killing of a Sacred Deer is my first outing with director 
In one of those cases where I’ll just be adding my voice to the choir, Get Out is another of my picks of this year, and it actually has some similarities to The Killing of a Sacred Deer. Director Jordan Peele caused something of a stir on his Twitter feed recently when he declared that Get Out ‘is a documentary’. It isn’t, of course, if we’re to take him at face value at least, but it’s a seamless blend of social commentary and supernaturalism; the fantastic elements of the film lead it into conflict with realism, but in so doing, they underline a few distinctly uncomfortable truths about race in America in a way which only fantasy can really achieve. Daniel Kaluuya does a superb job as Chris, a black guy who just happens to be in a relationship with a white woman, Rose (Allison Williams). They’re about to visit her parents for the first time and he’s naturally a little apprehensive as to whether his race is going to be an issue. At first, the issue seems to be that they’re tripping over themselves to prove that it isn’t an issue whatsoever, which leads to some incredibly uncomfortable cinema as Rose’s dad insists he would have voted for Obama a third time, if he could. But for all their achingly liberal pretensions, the Armitages have black servants – black servants who behave decidedly oddly. As Chris finds out what’s going on, the horror escalates in a series of quite subtle but effective ways. Raising lofty and complex issues such as comparative power in society, though interweaving moments of comedy for some much-needed light relief, Get Out is an innovative and, I’d say, an important film, whose reputation will surely build and build. Me and Ben discussed our take on the film at the time we first saw it; you can take a look at that 
Here’s another of those ‘preaching to the choir’ moments, as I’m going to mention a film which has met with ample acclaim, and rightly so. Well, saying that, there were a number of people who seemed to feel that Blade Runner 2049 was ‘boring’. Ordinarily I can manage other people’s opinions, but that seems a bizarre assessment in my book. Blade Runner 2049 was the sequel we’d dared to hope for. In a world of tawdry remakes and pissant prequels, this entrant into the Blade Runner universe was absolutely superb. It asked questions, but it didn’t drag the audience right up to the thing they were meant to notice; from the importance of having a name, to the impact of commodification, to selfhood, to what constitutes humanity – it was all in there, but refracted through an almost silent and self-possessed main character, and a dystopian world which veered between garish superficiality and the drabness of a meagre, lonely existence. The most human relationships in the film weren’t between humans at all; humans clung to what made them ‘special’, but their own special status made them behave like animals. As for the film’s gender politics – another sticking-point for some viewers (as ever, it seems) – firstly, the film is under no obligation to show us an idealised future, what with being a dystopia and all; more to the point, it seems to me that in an overcrowded, desperate, but ultimately technologically-advanced universe, sex would be just another commodity, just as it is in countless places around the world today. An uncomfortable truth perhaps, but just another facet of the film’s uncompromising investigation into how people behave (allowing for the fact, of course, that no one is ‘just’ a sex worker in the film). Blade Runner 2049 is also an aesthetic and an aural odyssey, with something humbling happening on every beat. I for one cannot wait to see this film again when it gets its general home release in January, and if you’ve missed out so far, then maybe 
It’d be remiss of me to get to the end of this article without mentioning IT – probably the most straightforward horror film to make it into this year’s list, but an absolute romp from start to finish. No doubt this film was engineered in some respects to appeal to people of roughly my age who grew up during the 80s, but it’s a visual treat in any case, and there are good performances from the young cast to pit against Bill Skarsgård as Pennywise the Dancing Clown. Harder-hitting than the 1990s TV miniseries, and bleaker too perhaps, the new film still retains that level of fairy story type fantasy, where the boogeyman can clamber out of books, projectors, creepy houses to menace children, whilst their parents are completely oblivious to what’s happening to them. It’s a loud, proud horror film which doesn’t let up for its entirety. This is unashamed entertainment, which is sometimes just what we need.
We go straight into the essays themselves – there’s no introduction and as such, no overall proposed direction – and we start where you may expect, with slasher classic Black Christmas (1974). Stephen Thrower, one of my favourite film writers, provides a detailed history of the film alongside what to me seems even more interesting, a wealth of accompanying comments on the film’s reception (there were some highly amusing comments in the press about the indecency of female characters swearing). Likewise, you would probably expect to see a feature on Silent Night, Deadly Night (1984) and the book fulfils that too: this material is engaging enough, though probably less interesting for me than other fare as I’m just not that into slashers (although fans of slashers often spend a great deal of time defending slashers against being simplistic, which is the case here too. Where you stand on that depends on your own tastes, of course.)