The Company of Wolves

The Company of Wolves is a fantasy horror film adaptation of the screenwriter's story entitled, The Bloody Chamber, which is based on the classic children's story of Little Red Riding Hood. This film is not traditional horror, however, and falls into a subcategory of horror known as the fantastic. It features a young girl, Rosaleen, as our central character and our 'Red Riding Hood'.

A key feature of the fantastic is the blurred line between the natural and supernatural, allowing the film to take on either reading. The Company of Wolves has a very clearly 'fantastic' fantasy element to the narrative that eventually bleeds into the real word of Rosaleen. Although the fantasy plot of the film takes place within Rosaleen's dream, the ending of the film leaves the viewer unsure of what was real or imagined when the wolves from the dream come bursting in through her window, leaving the nightmare and manifesting into reality. This ending can be read as a symbolic ending to her innocence, or the line of reality within the film can be viewed as blurred.

According to the excerpt from the horror textbook, the intentional line blurring is a key element of this genre, and the unreliability of the narrative is left open to interpretation purposefully. In this regard, the fantastic is distinct from horror in the way that the phenomenon is explained. In horror, science ultimately cannot answer for the paranormal. In the fantastic, it is ambiguous, just as it is in the two worlds of Rosaleen's we see onscreen. There is a "fantastic hesitation", as the text puts it, for both the viewer and the characters.

This film also falls into a version of horror dubbed as Dark Romance: stories in which there are sexual and romantic encounters between the paranormal and normal beings. Lorna Jowett argues that this film, unlike most horror, gives voice to a young female protagonist and is "decidedly feminist" in its portrayal of Rosaleen.