Werewolves (pt. III)

Dog Soldiers

The Company of Wolves

Hoooooooooowdy, dear readers. I hope the long, meandering month of August has treated you well, or at least kept you busy enough to ignore the increasingly-delayed Fall we tend to experience. Thankfully, it’s time for September: the time of pumpkin spice lattes, Virgos and Libras, and, if you’re a spooky bitch like me, the pre-game for peak horror movie season. If you’re not a spooky bitch like me, you may be saying, “it’s too damn early for horror movies, girly” which is fair, but this week we had a blue moon (a rare second full moon in a month) that was also a super moon (a phenomenon we won’t experience again until 2037), and if that’s not a sign from the universe that spooky season is starting early then I don’t know what is. To get us hyped for (the theoretical) Autumn and commemorate this rare blue super moon, I thought it would only be appropriate to view another round of werewolf films. I was neither a horse girl nor a wolf girl, but a Greek Mythology girl growing up, and this hyper-fixation led me to discover many mythical beasts, including Lycaon—who, along with his sons, was punished by Zeus (weren’t they all) to turn into a wolf. Werewolf lore then became more closely-associated with Nordic folklore, but nearly every culture to exist on Earth created their own form of the myth of the werewolf—often as a means of explaining humanity’s struggle with good and evil, and one’s own inherent struggle between logic/reason and nature/beastliness. This concept, and the unique ways that it has been brought to life on screen, is endlessly fascinating to me. This is the third round of werewolf double features on Double Feature Thursday and while I was initially afraid that I was running out of options, the more I look into this creature feature genre, the more subgenres and wolf-grey areas there are to explore. There are psycho-sexual werewolf films like Joe Dante’s The Howling, there are werewolf whodunits like Josh Ruben’s Werewolves Within, coming-of-age werewolf movies like Ginger Snaps, and while I’m sure to encounter more, the most specific subgenre of this creature’s genre comes from the UK, and is comprised of horror, humor, and lots of bros. This was the case with the 2015 British film Howl, and it was the case with the 2002 Scottish film Dog Soldiers. The film places us inside the gloriously green Scottish Highlands that were simultaneously idyllic and intimidating, as we witness a young, camping couple get ripped to shreds within the first two minutes. We’re then shown a soldier, our main protagonist Private Cooper (Kevin McKidd), completing some kind of training in these very woods, where his last task is to shoot a dog for some reason… But our good protagonist refuses, which angers his grumpy superior Captain Ryan, and prevents our hero from making the Special Forces Unit team he was training for. Four weeks later, Private Cooper, a much nicer Sergeant Wells (Sean Pertwee), and a handful of other soldiers, are dropped into a remote part of the Scottish Highlands to carry out another training exercise, this time against that Special Forces Unit that Cooper failed to make. Since this is an exercise and not real combat, the soldiers are only armed with blanks and a charming, Scottish sense of cockiness, but when the soldiers stumble upon the Special Forces Unit—all dead except for a nearly-dead Captain Ryan—they quickly prepare for war. These Special Forces soldiers, or rather, the rotting flesh that is left of them, came armed with tranquilizer darts and other bizarre weaponry, but before the alive soldiers have time to question these supplies, they hear the sound of howling in the distance. From this point on, Dog Soldiers is a frantic, ferocious frenzy of monster mania and soldier-slaughtering, that is edited together in such a fashion that might make one dizzy. This film was made in the dark ages of horror filmmaking, and I mean that literally, because so many movies of this era, just like this one, are visually darker than they need to be. That being said, there are still some really cool shots in this movie—mostly each time that the camera made use of the reflection in someone’s eyeball to reveal the claw that’s about to end their lives. I loved how quickly Dog Soldiers’ chaos begins to unfold, and how, even when they’re rescued by a local woman halfway through the movie, things never feel safe or secure. There is some really excellent gore and some really fun practical effects in this movie, which is utilized in a surprisingly subtle, methodical way for such an action-packed, fast-paced movie. Honestly, all of the soldiers in Dog Soldiers started to blend together at a certain point and I was at times confused by the plot, but that didn’t bother me, and eventually (with the help of subtitles), every part of this story clicked into place. And while there was no shortage of goofy machismo antics, like every interchangeable soldier talking about “the footy” (football game) they’re missing, this disarmed me and only made the eventual terror more horrifying. It’s pretty challenging to find a unique werewolf story in this day and age, but Dog Soldiers was pretty clever, and offered up a fairly solid twist as well. Even though it’s over twenty years old, Dog Soldiers represents a newer, grittier age of werewolf storytelling that has the potential to be quite terrifying. There was a werewolf movie boom in the early 1980s, full of flicks that were teen-centric and goofy, sexified and sultry, or just antiquated and solely rooted in folklore—which may not seem as scary, but when placed in the hands of the right filmmaker, can be quite impactful. Such was the case with Neil Jordan’s 1984 film The Company of Wolves, a film based on the short story of the same name by Angela Carter. You may know director Neil Jordan from his iconic film adaptation of Interview with a Vampire, or his lesser-known-but-just-as-iconic-and-star-studded vampire film Byzantium—but decades before these successes, Jordan made the shocking, hairy, horny oddity that was The Company of Wolves. The film begins in the then-present-day 1980s, in a large, cavernous country house, where a young girl named Rosaleen is sleeping so soundly and so deeply that she cannot hear her annoyed-sister calling her name. Rosaleen dreams of an 18th century fairytale-esque enchanted forest, and pictures her annoyed-sister getting chased by hungry wolves until she reaches a dead-end. In her dream, we see Rosaleen and her parents mourning their loss. Rosaleen is instructed to go stay with her superstitious grandma (Angela Lansbury) while her parents grieve, and there her grandma knits a bright, red shawl (with a hood, even) for her to wear. While she knits, Granny Lansbury tells Rosaleen the story of a young woman who marries a unibrowed-but-handsome traveling man, who on their wedding night inexplicably disappears under the light of the full moon. The young woman assumes he was killed by wolves, then shortly after, remarries and has several babies with someone else. Years later, this same unibrowed man returns to her cottage on a night when her husband is gone, and claims he is starving—likely for several babies. If it weren’t unfortunate enough for her werewolf ex to show up at her door, he then begins to shift into his full, furry form. The young woman and her children survive this attack, but Granny Lansbury tells Rosaleen to “never trust a man who’s eyebrows meet.” There are several other brilliant stories told via vignettes throughout The Company of Wolves—some more twisted and memorable than others—but within each one there was plenty of horror and fascination to be found. This film plays with shadows and light in a way that may make its antagonists more obvious, but I found this, and its somewhat-obvious sound stage set, to be kinda kitschy and fun. But no matter how obvious the scenery and set ups were here, nothing could’ve prepared me for The Company of Wolves’ superbly-disgusting werewolf transformation, which, even as someone who watches a lot of werewolf movies, kept my jaw firmly on the floor for the entirety of its terrifying transfiguration. There will always be the iconic, genre-defining, horror-movie-makeup-revolutionizing, Oscar-Award-winning makeup and effects of An American Werewolf in London, but there was something very special about the practical effects utilized here, and in every werewolf film of this era. I’m always excited to see how a film decides to tackle this tricky phenomenon, and I was not let down by The Company of Wolves’ zany effects and ideas—no matter how accidentally-funny or needlessly-rapey they became. Rosaleen was a fine stand-in for Little Red and every person was thoroughly petrified of their village’s looming wolf-menace, but the real standout here was Angela Lansbury as Granny, who was far more rude, more savage, and more hilarious than any other werewolf premise has featured before or since. She says things like “You can’t trust anyone, least of all a priest—there’s a reason they call them ‘father’”, and was generally so brutal and bold and scared so many children that there was a moment where I thought that expert-storyteller Granny Lansbury was the wolf terrorizing this village, (which would’ve been awesome) but alas, there is no mystery to who the wolf is in this creature feature. But what The Company of Wolves lacked in mystery it made up for in bizarre, surreal, psycho-sexual terror—where the stories being told began to blend with the real world, only for us to be periodically reminded that all of this is happening inside the head of a young girl who is asleep. I’ll be honest, I wasn’t stoked about the dream set up, but I was very impressed by The Company of Wolves at every turn, with every absurd, spooky story told and every unhinged character introduced. The surrealism of this movie knows no bounds—from the strange, not-even-werewolf creatures sprinkled throughout, to the scene where spiders fall on top of an unphased-Rosaleen from the church ceiling, to the rainbows and peculiarly-phallic trees that would randomly appear, to the hordes of German Shepherds that were clearly meant to be menacing but were instead just cute (they were technically Belgian Shepherds dyed different colors, there are only two real wolves in this movie.) The Company of Wolves was truly so bonkers and bewildering, even for the director who would eventually give us Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt kissing, and at no point during my viewing was I bored, or did I see any of it coming. I won’t reveal exactly how the film ends but what stood out to me, was the message to young girls that plays over the end credits, warning them that “the sweetest tongue has the sharpest tooth.” Any audience member may interpret that as they will, but to this feminist viewer, I took this warning as an appropriate cautionary message (to anyone) about men—especially the charming ones, because… duh. Granny Lansbury said to never trust a man who’s eyebrows meet, but I would take her advice one step further and just say to never trust men in general, except for maybe, once in a blue moon. (#NotAllMen, #NotAllWerewolves) Ta, ta for now! 🐺