Howls from History: The Cursed and The Company of Wolves Reshape Lycanthrope Legends
In the mist-shrouded forests of Victorian England and fairy-tale woodlands, two films unleash werewolves that claw at the boundaries of myth and modernity.
Period werewolf horror finds fertile ground in these twin masterpieces, where the full moon illuminates not just transformation but the enduring terror of the beast within humanity. Both films draw from deep wells of folklore, yet they spin distinct webs of gothic dread, one rooted in historical curses and the other in dreamlike fables.
- Unpacking the shared lycanthropic roots while highlighting divergent narrative paths through Victorian curses and surreal storytelling.
- Dissecting visual artistry, from practical effects evoking primal fury to lush, symbolic dreamscapes that redefine monstrous femininity.
- Tracing influences on modern horror, revealing how these period tales evolve the werewolf archetype into symbols of societal taboo and psychological fracture.
Folklore’s Feral Foundations
Werewolf legends stretch back through centuries of European oral traditions, where the curse of lycanthropy often symbolised the untamed wilderness encroaching on civilised society. In medieval tales, such as those chronicled in the Malleus Maleficarum, the werewolf embodied satanic pacts and divine punishment, a shape-shifter punished for sins of the flesh. These stories migrated into Victorian gothic literature, with authors like Rudyard Kipling and Clemence Housman infusing the beast with class anxieties and imperial fears. Both The Cursed (2021) and The Company of Wolves (1984) excavate this heritage, transplanting it into period settings that amplify the clash between restraint and savagery.
The Cursed, directed by Sean Ellis, unfolds in 1871 rural England, where a logging dispute with gypsy settlers unleashes a lupine plague. The film meticulously recreates the era’s social tensions, portraying werewolves not as lone romantics but as a contagious horde ravaging a community. This echoes historical werewolf panics, like the 1760s Gévaudan attacks in France, where peasants hunted enormous wolves blamed on witchcraft. Ellis grounds his monsters in tangible pathology, their transformations triggered by silver-embedded relics, blending folk curse with pseudo-scientific horror reminiscent of Victorian werewolf novels such as The Were-Wolf by Housman.
Contrast this with Neil Jordan’s The Company of Wolves, a nonlinear tapestry of bedtime stories told by Granny (Angela Lansbury) to her granddaughter Rosaleen. Drawing from Angela Carter’s feminist reinterpretations of fairy tales in The Bloody Chamber, the film reimagines Little Red Riding Hood as a lycanthropic parable set across 18th-century countrysides. Werewolves here are seductive aristocrats and huntsmen, their changes fluid and erotic, symbolising sexual awakening rather than mere bestial rage. Jordan’s werewolves evolve folklore’s punitive beast into a metaphor for puberty’s perilous allure, where the moonlit hunt becomes a rite of passage.
The divergence sharpens in their treatment of the curse’s origins. The Cursed posits a specific vendetta, a gypsy’s silver fang buried in sacred ground, cursing the landowners with hallucinatory visions and grotesque mutations. Victims claw at their own flesh, their bodies contorting in agony captured through practical makeup that emphasises visceral decay. This mirrors 19th-century medical texts on lycanthropy as clinical madness, a nod to evolving perceptions from supernatural to psychological.
The Company of Wolves, however, embraces multiplicity, with tales within tales revealing lycanthropy as an inherited family trait or devilish bargain. One segment features a priest-werewolf damned eternally, his hellish resurrection a gothic inversion of Christian redemption. Jordan’s script weaves Carter’s prose, where wolves converse philosophically, underscoring the myth’s elasticity. These narratives reject singular causation, portraying the werewolf as an eternal archetype mirroring human duality.
Both films honour the period’s aesthetic, with foggy moors and candlelit interiors evoking Hammer Horror’s legacy. Yet The Cursed leans into realism, its muddy villages and period-accurate costumes grounding the supernatural in historical plausibility. The Company of Wolves favours stylisation, miniature forests and stop-motion wolves creating a oneiric realm where reality frays like Rosaleen’s nightgown.
Narrative Nightmares Unveiled
The plots propel these mythic evolutions forward, each constructing a labyrinth of suspense that tests human fragility. In The Cursed, noblewoman Isabelle (Kelly Reilly) discovers her son Edward (Max Mackie) savaged during a gypsy eviction. As mutilations mount, the village descends into paranoia, with Father Byrne (Ron Perlman) suspecting a vengeful spirit. Isabelle’s investigation unearths the silver tooth relic, forcing her into brutal confrontations amid thorn-choked woods. The narrative builds methodically, intercutting domestic tragedy with nocturnal hunts, culminating in a revelation tying the curse to ancestral sins.
Key performances anchor this dread: Reilly’s steely matriarch wields a rifle with maternal ferocity, while Boyd Holbrook’s American trapper adds enigmatic allure, his scarred visage hinting at prior beastly encounters. The film’s rhythm mimics the lunar cycle, slow-burn tension erupting in transformation sequences where actors’ contortions, enhanced by Adrian Smith’s prosthetics, convey excruciating rebirth.
The Company of Wolves shuns linear progression for fractal storytelling. Rosaleen (Sarah Patterson) dreams of Granny’s cautionary yarns: a huntsman-wolf seduces a village girl, only to reveal his furry truth; a suave lord hosts a masked ball where guests shift under chandeliers. Awakening in her modern bed, Rosaleen transforms, shattering the frame to merge dream and reality. This structure, inspired by Carter’s nonlinear tales, layers peril upon peril, each vignette escalating the erotic menace.
Angela Lansbury dominates as the storytelling Granny, her folksy wisdom laced with foreboding, while Stephen Rea and David Warner embody charming predators whose civility peels away like wolf pelts. Jordan’s direction employs slow dissolves and distorted lenses to blur innocence and monstrosity, making every forest path a potential wolf’s lair.
Comparatively, The Cursed excels in communal horror, its werewolf outbreak fracturing a society already strained by industrial encroachment. Villagers form vigilante packs, echoing real 19th-century mob justice, while Isabelle’s arc from sceptic to slayer personalises the apocalypse. The Company of Wolves internalises the threat, Rosaleen’s solitary journey into womanhood framing lycanthropy as intimate metamorphosis, less plague than personal destiny.
Monstrous Makeovers: Effects and Aesthetics
Werewolf cinema thrives on transformation’s spectacle, and both films innovate within period constraints. The Cursed prioritises practical effects, shunning CGI for gelatinous prosthetics that elongate jaws and sprout fur in real-time agony. Makeup artist Adrian Smith draws from Rick Baker’s An American Werewolf in London, but tempers gore with subtlety, fangs glinting silver under moonlight to symbolise the curse’s metallic heart. Cinematographer Shelley Johnson captures these shifts in wide, rain-lashed frames, the beasts’ glowing eyes piercing fog like accusatory beacons.
Set design immerses in authenticity: crumbling manors and gypsy camps evoke Brontë moors, while sound design amplifies bone-cracks and guttural howls, immersing viewers in primal terror. Ellis’s restraint heightens impact, transformations unfolding gradually to mirror folklore’s insidious onset.
Jordan’s The Company of Wolves embraces artifice, Antony Gibbs’s editing weaving miniature landscapes and matte paintings into a storybook hellscape. Werewolf designs by Christopher Tucker feature elongated snouts and baleful stares, practical suits puppeteered for eerie grace. The film’s palette shifts from sepia villages to crimson-tinged dreams, Anton Furst’s production design layering gothic spires with carnal symbolism, like phallic tree branches clawing the sky.
Soundscape mesmerises: George Fenton’s score blends harp plucks with wolfish snarls, while voiceovers narrate moral ambiguities. Where The Cursed horrifies through realism, Jordan surrealises, wolves bursting through church windows in balletic fury, redefining the beast as poetic predator.
This aesthetic duel underscores evolutionary shifts: The Cursed modernises the monster for post-Game of Thrones audiences, grounding myth in gritty verisimilitude, while The Company of Wolves preserves 1980s fantasy-horror hybridity, influencing films like The Witch.
Thematic Terrors: Sexuality, Society, and the Savage
At their cores, both films probe the werewolf as societal mirror. The Cursed dissects Victorian imperialism, the gypsy curse retaliating against land theft, transforming colonisers into the very beasts they oppress. Themes of inherited guilt resonate, Edward’s bite perpetuating cycles of violence, critiquing how privilege devours itself.
Sexuality simmers subdued: Isabelle’s encounters with Holbrook’s drifter hint at forbidden desire, the full moon catalysing repressed passions. Gender roles invert as women wield silver blades, subverting damsel tropes.
The Company of Wolves explodes these with Carterian feminism, lycanthropy as menstrual metaphor. Rosaleen’s temptation by wolfish suitors celebrates carnal agency, Granny’s tales warning yet empowering: “The worst of wolves are handsome.” This reframes the monstrous feminine, virgins becoming huntresses.
Socially, Jordan skewers patriarchy through dissembling males, werewolves unmasked at society balls. Both films evolve folklore’s punitive beast into agents of liberation, the curse freeing id from superego.
Psychological depth elevates them: hallucinations in The Cursed blur victim and villain, while Rosaleen’s dream logic exposes subconscious fears. These layers cement their status as thoughtful horror.
Legacy’s Lingering Howl
The Company of Wolves paved gothic fantasy’s revival, inspiring Interview with the Vampire and Crimson Peak, its feminist bite enduring in A24 folk horrors. The Cursed, though recent, nods to Universal classics while carving niche appeal, its box-office restraint belying festival acclaim.
Together, they illustrate werewolf horror’s maturation from schlock to sophistication, period trappings amplifying timeless dread. Their evolutions challenge audiences to confront inner wolves.
Director in the Spotlight
Neil Jordan, born in 1950 in Sligo, Ireland, emerged from a literary family, his father a professor of Romance languages. Educated at Trinity College Dublin in history and English, Jordan initially pursued music, co-founding the folk-rock band Sugar Cross before turning to writing. His screenwriting debut came with Travels with My Aunt (1972), but directorial acclaim arrived with Angel (1982), a gritty tale of an IRA singer navigating Dublin’s underworld.
The Company of Wolves (1984) marked his horror foray, adapting Angela Carter to critical praise and Palme d’Or contention. Jordan’s career skyrocketed with Mona Lisa (1986), earning Bob Hoskins a Best Actor Oscar. He navigated Hollywood with The Crying Game (1992), its transgender twist securing Oscars for screenplay and supporting actor (Jaye Davidson), while grossing over $60 million.
Influenced by Catholic guilt and Irish mysticism, Jordan blends lyricism with violence. Interview with the Vampire (1994) adapted Anne Rice, pitting Tom Cruise against Brad Pitt in gothic opulence. Michael Collins (1996) biographed the revolutionary, Liam Neeson embodying national fervour. The Butcher Boy (1997) darkly satirised 1960s Ireland via young Eamonn Owens.
Versatile, he helmed The End of the Affair (1999), a lush Graham Greene adaptation with Ralph Fiennes and Julianne Moore. The Good Thief (2002) remade Bob le Flambeur, starring Nick Nolte. Breakfast on Pluto (2005), with Cillian Murphy as a trans sex worker, won Irish Film Awards. Ondine (2009) mythologised a selkie romance.
Recent works include Byzantium (2012), vampire feminism with Gemma Arterton; The Lobster (2015, producer); Greta (2018), psychological thriller; and The Watchmaker’s Daughter (television). Jordan’s oeuvre spans 20+ features, marked by outsider empathy and stylistic flair, cementing him as Ireland’s premier auteur.
Actor in the Spotlight
Kelly Reilly, born in 1977 in Surrey, England, grew up in working-class roots, her father a policeman. Rejecting drama school, she honed craft in theatre, debuting at 16 in Terrahawks (1983). West End triumphs followed: Donmar Warehouse’s Piaf (2005) earned Olivier and Tony nominations for her raw Edith Piaf.
Reilly’s screen breakthrough was Prime Suspect 1989 (1992 miniseries), but films like Land Girls (1998) showcased range. Sparks (2002) paired her with Colin Macpherson; Dead Bodies (2003) gritty indie. Hollywood beckoned with Greenland (wait, no: Pride & Prejudice (2005) as Caroline Bingley, opposite Keira Knightley.
Television elevated her: Above Suspicion (2009) detective series; True Detective Season 3 (2019) as Amira, earning Critics’ Choice nod. Blockbusters include Sherlock Holmes (2009) and sequel (2011) as Mary Watson; Yellowstone (2018-) as Beth Dutton, her venomous rancher securing Emmy buzz and global fandom.
In The Cursed, Reilly’s Isabelle commands, blending vulnerability with ferocity. Filmography spans Eden Lake (2008) survival horror; Me and Orson Welles (2008); Shanghai (2010); Fright Night remake (2011); Flight (2012) with Denzel Washington; Locke (2013) voice role; Calvary (2014); Black Sea (2014); Hotel Transylvania sequels voicing; Monster Trucks (2016); 100 Streets (2016); The Mercy (2018). Recent: Venom sequel voice (2021), Four Lives (2022 miniseries). With 40+ credits, Reilly excels in complex women, her intensity defining modern British acting.
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Bibliography
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