The Company of Wolves Book Update

I’ve just submitted the final proofs of my monograph on The Company of Wolves (part of Auteur’s ‘Devil’s Advocates’ series), so it won’t be too long before it’s available to pre-order. I also wanted to share a preview of the beautiful cover design (right).

Here’s a little snippet from the intro:

The Company of Wolves is a dark fantasy film quite unlike any other. A meditation on the horrors of the adult world, and of adult sexuality, as glimpsed through the dreams of an adolescent girl, it amalgamates aspects of horror, the Female Gothic, fairy tales, werewolf films and coming of age parables. Drenched in atmosphere and an eerily sensual malaise, it boasts striking imagery immersed in fairy tale motifs and startling Freudian symbolism. 

The Company of Wolves was Irish filmmaker Neil Jordan’s second film, and his first foray into the realms of Gothic horror. Jordan co-wrote the screenplay with British novelist Angela Carter, and it is based upon several short stories from Carter’s The Bloody Chamber, a collection of reinterpreted classic literary fairy tales told from a piercing feminist perspective. 

The film incorporates elements from three stories - each a provocative reworking of Little Red Riding Hood: ‘The Werewolf’, which tells of how Red Riding Hood discovers her ailing Grandmother is actually a werewolf; ‘The Company of Wolves’, which begins as a series of folkloric anecdotes relating to werewolves, and ends with Red Riding Hood seducing a lycanthropic huntsman; and ‘Wolf-Alice’, the tale of a young girl raised by wolves who grows up outside the confines of civilised society and comes of age in the lonely castle of a werewolf duke.

Stay tuned for further updates.