The Company of Wolves (Neil Jordan, 1984)

A strange and heady blend of postmodern art film about storytelling, fairy tale, and folk tale, YA tween movie for and about girls dealing with puberty, and full-on '80s flesh-ripping horror, The Company of Wolves confused audiences on initial release before becoming a popular cult film. It also confused my friends and I when we rented it in junior high expecting some traditional werewolf action. I have since grown up (mostly) and become much more interested in the lives and experiences of women and girls and the art they make, but in late '80s/early '90s small town Midwest U.S.A., where gender roles were (intentionally and unintentionally) fixed, frozen in place, and rigidly adhered to, a movie about the internal lives of girls using fairy tale imagery and metaphor and featuring a major role for the Murder, She Wrote lady was pretty baffling for four 13-year-old boys hoping for An American Werewolf in London part two.

Watching it again at the age of 45 (how can this happen? how could this happen?), I was much more receptive to and excited by the film than when I was going through my own puberty hell and convinced by society that girls' interests and experiences were silly compared to my own. What a stupid world we live in sometimes.

Neil Jordan's second film as director, The Company of Wolves was adapted from several short stories in Angela Carter's 1979 collection The Bloody Chamber, with Carter and Jordan collaborating on the screenplay. (After reading up on the fascinating life of Angela Carter, I am excited to read some of her work.) Carter's book was advertised by its American publisher as "adult fairy tales," a phrase Carter despised, considering it a fundamental misunderstanding of what she was trying to do. Instead of making these tales more adult, Carter said she was attempting instead to "extract the latent content from the stories." This approach carries over to the film, which clearly exists in a fairy tale world but also expresses the moments fairy tales hint at, imply, or conceal.

Beginning in what appears to be the present in an English country house, the film makes the unusual move of revealing from the near-beginning that we are watching a dream in the sleeping mind of 12-year-old Rosaleen (Sarah Patterson). Audiences in the '80s, given too many "it was all a dream" endings, may have been turned off by this approach, but lazy viewers such as myself and my fellow 13-year-old bros are missing the forest for the trees in getting upset about this narrative device. The Company of Wolves is concerned with the subconscious, the inner life, the storytelling tradition and its effects on shaping societal roles, physical transformation, and the dreamlife bleeding into the waking world, so having the narrative exist within a dream shouldn't be a deal-breaker here. Never mind that there is something surreally "off" about Rosaleen and her bedroom, and the forest outside her window. The boundaries between these worlds are not as clearly delineated as we'd like to believe, the movie repeatedly tells us.

The main narrative thread (the dream) is a composite of several short stories in Carter's book, mostly inspired by Little Red Riding Hood, and the characters within this thread also tell stories of their own (adapted from other Bloody Chamber stories), creating a complex stories-within-a-dream-within-a-story structure. Jordan and Carter keep excellent control of this tricky tone, and the movie never runs away from them.

Rosaleen's modern English family are transformed into fairy tale characters in the dream, living in a fairy tale past in a storybook village near a dangerous forest full of wolves (and werewolves). Rosaleen is warned repeatedly by her grandmother (Angela Lansbury) to stay on the path, and that wolves can't be trusted, particularly the other kind of wolf that presents as a man. Rosaleen is skeptical of her grandmother's warnings and curious about the world of boys, men, and wolves. She frequently veers off the path, causing her family, who already lost their oldest daughter to wolves, much worry. When she finally meets a huntsman (Micha Bergese) in the woods, the film's skill at both meeting and subverting expectations reaches its height.

I'm not going to attempt a smarty-pants lecture about what the film is really about, but I will say that it gives you a whole lot to chew on about coming of age, repression and expression of women's sexuality, the role of storytelling in enforcing and subverting traditional roles, patriarchy and the complicity of some women in enforcing their own submission and repression, and the inner life versus the external one.

Jordan (Mona Lisa, The Crying Game, Interview with the Vampire, The Butcher Boy, The End of the Affair) was dealing with a much smaller budget than he'd have to work with on many later projects, but he creates a compelling visual world to frame Carter's ideas. Like the story and its themes, Jordan's sets and images feel both viscerally real and artificially heightened, and the werewolf transformation scenes are weird, wild, and gruesome.

The nature of the project means that there is some distance and remove between the characters and the audience, but Jordan makes it all connect in honest, human ways. It also doesn't hurt that he's got a pretty fine cast to bring it to life. In addition to the recently deceased Lansbury (RIP), we also get the recently deceased David Warner (RIP), Jordan regular Stephen Rea, Kathryn Pogson, Brian Glover, a great cameo from Terence Stamp, and, in her only film role, cult musician Danielle Dax as a naked wolfwoman. The Company of Wolves is a gem and way better than I remembered it.

          

Creepshow (George A. Romero, 1982)

I don't think it's possible for me to watch Creepshow with anything other than childhood eyes. Each revisit takes me back to that highly anticipated first watch, but in feeling more than specific memory. I don't recall too many of the details surrounding that first viewing, including how old I was (I had to have been somewhere between fourth and sixth grade), but I remember exactly how I felt, and nearly every frame of the movie imprinted itself on my young, spongy brain. I'm sure there are flaws in Creepshow, and I know George Romero made stronger and deeper films, but I can't see anything wrong with it. It was everything I wanted as a kid, and I feel like that kid every time I revisit it.

Creepshow managed to put several of my childhood horror obsessions into one brightly colored package. My mother, who was extremely strict about keeping R-rated movies away from me until I was 13 unless she'd heard from a reliable source that the movie wasn't too brutally violent or filled with sex or constant f-bombs, was much more lenient when it came to books, and she mostly let me read whatever I wanted. And most of what I wanted to read were Stephen King books. I started devouring them at age nine (my mom had to tell the skeptical local librarian in my tiny hometown that it was okay for me to check out King books) and kept it up through my 13th year, though, oddly, I haven't read one since then. (My love for horror movies never died, but I stopped enjoying horror fiction in high school. I don't really know why.) 

I was also obsessed with George Romero, which is a little stranger, since the only Romero film my mother allowed me to watch was the original Night of the Living Dead. Despite having little exposure to the rest of his body of work, I knew Romero was my guy just from the glimpses of his other films I'd seen in the Fangoria magazines I would covertly pore over at the grocery store magazine rack, working up the courage to beg my mother for a copy. (It almost never worked out, though I was finally able to buy my own once I earned a little pocket money from babysitting my cousins and mowing my grandparents' lawn.)

The '50s EC horror comics were also a staple of my terror-obsessed childhood. Though I was born two decades after their heyday, originals or their '70s reprints would occasionally turn up at garage sales in the early and mid-'80s. My mother and grandmother were big garage sale people, and I spent many Saturday mornings accompanying them to sales. On a handful of occasions, I hit the jackpot and cheaply acquired a decent little collection of Tales from the Crypt, Vault of Horror, Haunt of Fear, and Shock SuspenStories issues. I wish I knew what the hell I did with those comics.

Finally, the horror anthology format was a big television trend in the '80s (kickstarted by the success of Creepshow), and I was a devoted fan, regularly watching Tales from the Darkside, the reboots of The Twilight Zone and Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Friday the 13th: The Series (not really an anthology, but the main characters were thrust into a different terrifying scenario every week), Amazing Stories (not always horror, but sometimes it delivered the horror goods), Monsters, and Tales from the Crypt whenever I could get access to HBO (my family were not premium cable people).

I knew Creepshow was an anthology film inspired by EC comics, written by Stephen King, and directed by George Romero, with special effects by Tom Savini. I had to see it. I had to. This was totally and completely my shit. The only problem? It was rated R. This was like Conan the Barbarian all over again. The pain. The agony. The misery. C'mon, Mom, it'll be a hundred years until I'm 13. Just let me watch it. I was saved by my uncle's then-girlfriend, Tammy. Like me, she was a horror movie fan, and luckily for me, my mom trusted her judgment. She gave my mom the good word that Creepshow was appropriate viewing material (other than some swearing and cartoonish violence, it's a very mild R), and I finally got to see it. (Tammy also talked my mom into letting me watch A Nightmare on Elm Street and Witchboard when I was in fifth grade, so she really did the Lord's work for me back then. Thanks, Tammy, wherever you are.)

Unlike most delayed gratification experiences, Creepshow lived up to the hype. It was exactly what I wanted it to be, and it felt like it was created especially for me. I loved all five stories and the wraparound segments, I loved the title of the movie, I loved the way it looked, and I never got bored or impatient with it. If I'd never seen it before and watched it for the first time this week, I think I'd have a favorable opinion, but my first encounter was so pleasurable and it's so inextricably tied into a happy stretch in my life that I am thoroughly incapable of approaching it critically. To paraphrase Ray Parker Jr.'s endorsement of bustin', Creepshow makes me feel good.

I haven't even talked about the movie part of the damn movie yet, but you've all seen it. If you haven't, log off and go watch it. We've got Tom Atkins doing his best asshole since The Rockford Files throwing away young Joe Hill's horror comic, Ed Harris disco dancing, Stephen King saying "meteor shit!" after sticking his hand in meteor goo (and also watching Bob Backlund wrestling Samoa #1 at the tail end of the Vince Sr. era of WWF), Leslie Nielsen burying Ted Danson up to his neck at high tide, Hal Holbrook feeding Adrienne Barbeau to one of the greatest monsters in '80s horror, and E.G. Marshall fighting the worst cockroach problem since my own goddamn 1960s-built Austin, TX house every goddamn summer.

Part of what makes Creepshow so enjoyable is the sense that everyone involved in this thing is having a blast. I don't know if that's true (part of movie magic is convincing an audience that miserable people are having fun), but it sure feels that way. Romero, King, and the entire cast (made up of veteran character actors, future stars, and members of Romero's Pittsburgh troupe of players and family friends) seem like they're having the time of their lives. Part of that feeling comes from the departure in Romero's visual style. Unlike Romero's other features (with the partial exception of some of the Day of the Dead OTT violence and mayhem), Creepshow is deliberately stylized in its framing and colors, in this case to mimic and pay tribute to the EC horror comics, and it's a real departure for the filmmaker. No matter how implausible the scenario, Romero's other films are played mostly straight (though not without humor) and attempt to convince the audience that this is happening in our world or one very much like it. Creepshow, however, is deliberately artificial and tongue-in-cheek and always reminds the audience that it's existing in a cartoonish, comic book universe. (Day of the Dead, Romero's next film, interestingly plays like it has carried over some of the heightened comic book world of Creepshow into the social realism of the rest of the Romero filmography.)

Each story in Creepshow feels distinct from the others but complementary. Interestingly, Romero used a different editor for each segment, editing the third story himself. The Romero-edited segment (with Danson and Nielsen) is also the one that stays closest to his traditional style, operating in a more realist, less overtly artificial mode until the comic book color palette and framing return in the conclusion. (That story is also the only one not filmed in Pittsburgh or its suburbs and was instead shot in Island Beach in New Jersey.)

Creepshow was Romero's biggest hit and his only film to make it to number one at the box office. Besides inspiring several TV shows, most directly Tales from the Darkside (Romero was a producer of the show and wrote several episodes), there have also been two sequels and a Shudder TV series, to diminishing returns. The 1987 sequel was written by Romero based on King short stories and directed by Creepshow's cinematographer Michael Gornick, but the third film is an in-name-only sequel made without Romero, King, or Gornick and based on none of King's writing. The TV series is a direct tribute and has adapted King and Joe Hill stories, but, except for a few episodes, it lacks the pep, humor, and inspiration of Romero's original and suffers from the modern epidemic of characters who speak like they're reading their Twitter feed. You can't rebottle magic, baby.