Straying from the path: Horror and Neil Jordan’s The Company of Wolves

Abstract

The Irish and Ireland play central roles in a number of other countries’ horror fi lms and television shows, including Halloween 3: Season of the Witch (Tommy Lee Wallace, 1982); Leprechaun (Mark Jones, 1993) and its many sequels; Gorgo (Eugene Lourie, 1961); Dementia 13 (Francis Ford Coppola, 1963); Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Joss Whedon, 1997-2003); Angel (Joss Whedon, 1999-2004); The Others (Alejandro Amenabar, 2001); Evil Breed: The Legend of Samhain (Christian Viel, 2003); and 28 Days Later (Danny Boyle, 2002). However, Neil Jordan has been one of the few Irish directors to work in a style that overtly invokes horror tropes through the inclusion of vampires, werewolves, and psychotic murderers. Few would identify his fi lms The Company of Wolves (1984), Interview with the Vampire (1994), The Butcher Boy (1997), or In Dreams (1999) as abiding by the dominant expectations of the horror genre; the fi lms simply do not produce the expected affect. Keith Hopper argues that by restoring the Irish Gothic, “Jordan revitalizes an Irish sensibility that is both archaic and modern at the same time, and which is therefore amenable to modifi cation across a range of generic forms (both national and transnational)” (2003: 25). In relation to the dismal box offi ce gross in America ($4.5 million) where the fi lm was disastrously marketed to 800 mainstream theaters as a slasher fi lm (Finney 1997: 82), this article will look at The Company of Wolves’ transnational relationship to the American horror genre to demonstrate that Jordan’s fi lm presents a different aspect of horror, one that I see as jamming the generic structures of feeling and knowing.