The Company of Wolves (1984): When Little Red Riding Hood Becomes a Nightmare 🐺🩸

 Not every princess wears a crown—some wear a red hood and walk through the woods, holding their fear like a secret.

Fair warning: if you're looking for a straightforward plot, you won't find it here. This is art-house horror that prioritizes atmosphere, metaphor, and psychological terror over linear storytelling. It's as far from Disney as you can possibly get without leaving the planet.

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The Company of Wolves is a 1984 film by Irish director Neil Jordan, an adaptation of Angela Carter's dark fairy tales, notably a fever dream of a version of Little Red Riding Hood dripping with both desire and danger, along with the raw pulse of transformation. This is a film intentionally baffling, deeply disturbing, and entirely not for children

It begins in the modern world; a young girl, Rosaleen, falls asleep in her bedroom. From that moment on, everything turns strange—because what we see next isn’t reality but her dream. Inside that dream, she lives in a medieval village surrounded by forests, where wolves are never just wolves.

Her grandmother, who frequently refers to her as “my little princess,” warns her about men.

"Never trust a man whose eyebrows meet," Granny warns. "They're wolves.

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But as Rosaleen ages, she begins to question these warnings, and the line separating man and beast, innocence and desire, becomes blurred.

The structure is deliberately fragmented. Granny tells Rosaleen stories about werewolves, and when she does, we enter those stories. We see:

A bride whose new husband runs into the forest and never returns, only for her to discover he's a werewolf with another wife and werewolf children

A man cursed to change, his skin literally splitting open as fur erupts from beneath

A pregnant woman, taking shelter in a group of people only to realize all of them are wolves.

Each story is even more disturbing than the last. The transformation scenes—peeling skin and breaking bones and tearing bodies open—are, of course, about the violence of puberty, of sexual maturation. It's literally showing you the pain of transformation, the shedding of childhood, and becoming something else. It's grotesque because growing up does feel grotesque and violent when one is going through it.

The boiling heads, dismembered bodies, and severed heads are some of the images representing the death of innocence, the violence intrinsic in sexuality and adulthood, and the dangerous situation women are put into by predatory men, symbolized by wolves. When a man peels his skin off to reveal the wolf underneath, it shows that the "monster" was always there beneath the veneer of civilization.

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The core story follows Rosaleen's coming of age, from a sheltered village girl into a young woman on the cusp of a sexual awakening. Her grandmother's warnings about wolves aren't just about literal predators—they're about desire, danger, and the transformation that happens when innocence is lost.

Rosaleen is drawn to a young huntsman she meets in the forest. He is charming, handsome, and dangerous; he is also a werewolf. They play games, make bets, and flirt in ways that are clearly charged with something darker than childhood innocence.

When Rosaleen arrives at her grandmother's home—the part of the story we're about to explore—the wolf is already there. Instead of fear, however, there's attraction. Chemistry. A strange, unsettling connection.

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Here's where the film transitions into a full-fledged Gothic horror-romance: Rosaleen doesn't run from the wolf. She's fascinated by him. Drawn to him. And in the film's most contentious and confusing moment, she seems to become a wolf herself.

The ending is intentionally ambiguous: wolves pour out of the forest, break through into Rosaleen's "real world" bedroom, and break the boundary between dream and reality. Is she still dreaming? Has she literally transformed? Or has something inside her changed so profoundly that there's no going back?

The film never provides solid ground to stand on: we're meant to feel lost, disoriented, and trapped between waking and sleeping.

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Writer Angela Carter and director Neil Jordan have deliberately made the film nonlinear, dreamlike, and symbolic. It is not supposed to be a linear narrative; rather, it is supposed to feel like an actual dream—illogical, disturbing, and full of symbols that don't quite make sense but feel meaningful.

The Company of Wolves proves that "Beyond Disney" doesn't just mean darker or grittier but can, in fact, mean completely abstract, deeply psychological, and genuinely disturbing. This is a film that treats its audience like adults capable of handling ambiguity, violence, and uncomfortable questions about desire and transformation. This isn't a princess story, exactly—Rosaleen is only called "princess" by her grandmother; she's beautiful and young, but she's not royalty. She's every girl on the edge of womanhood trying to navigate a world full of wolves, wondering if she should run from them or become one herself.

It's a film that doesn't hold your hand. It just throws you right into this nightmarish world and expects you to find your own meaning in the symbols and imagery. Some people like it for that very reason. Others—understandably—find it too weird and impenetrable.

Did the body horror disturb you, or did you find it weirdly fascinating? And do you prefer your fairy tales with clear plots, or do you like the dreamlike, symbolic approach? 🔮🧿