Jason revisits The Company of Wolves

Neil Jordan's 1984 riff on Little Red Riding Hood was the first movie I "discovered." Until then, my life had been all Hollywood all the time. This was the first off-the-radar flick I took a chance on and it cemented my love for obscure, independent movies. If it wasn't for The Company of Wolves, The Basement wouldn't exist.

Sold as a horror movie, The Company of Wolves is actually more a 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. All the stories are somehow reducible to loss of innocence, and fear of/hunger for a newly acquired sexuality.

Sounds pretty deep and heavy right? Boring? Not at all. This movie is as fast paced as any fright flick and equally as entertaining. But it's charged with a sexuality that is hard to explain; yet it takes you in at the same time. The Company of Wolves is not a kids movie, that's for true. To put it into context: this is the kind of flick The Knowledge Network plays on Halloween. Dig it.

I can remember having the biggest crush on star Sarah Patterson, which is kinda creepy now as she was 12 when she made the movie and I was in my early 20s when I saw it. I didn't know she was 12 at the time, honest. Patterson has since gone on to achieve a kind of cult status for her work here, so I must not have been the only guy who was taken in by her.

Jordan does a great job giving the film a Grimm's Fairy Tale look, and the practical werewolf effects are still awesome and intense. The whole thing is gorgeous to look at and creepy at the same time. And George Fenton's score is simply old-school awesome.

Watching this again, I'm reminded of what a modern classic it is. And it's going to make my annual Halloween rotation of films every year. A Good!

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