Parenting & Family Quote by Neil Jordan

Neil Jordan’s frustration here is also a sales pitch in disguise: the film is “difficult to prepare an audience for” because it refuses the comfort of a label, and that refusal is the point. Genre isn’t just a marketing shelf; it’s a contract. Horror promises fear with rules. Fantasy promises escape with wonder. A children’s film promises safety with a moral. Jordan is describing a movie that keeps breaking those promises, forcing viewers to stay alert about what they’re watching and, more importantly, what they’re being asked to believe.

The subtext is about power. The Company of Wolves, adapted from Angela Carter’s revisionist fairy tales, treats “Little Red Riding Hood” less as bedtime material than as a battleground for sexuality, predation, and agency. Jordan’s triple negation isn’t coy; it’s a warning that the film will use the imagery of childhood to talk about adult initiation, desire, and danger. Calling it horror would make the wolf a monster. Calling it fantasy would make everything metaphor. Calling it children’s cinema would neuter it. Jordan wants the wolf to remain morally unsettled: seductive, terrifying, human.

Context matters: early-1980s British/Irish art cinema and feminist rewrites of myth were pushing against tidy genre lanes, while the industry still depended on them. Jordan’s question “so what is it?” lands as a challenge to audiences trained to consume stories pre-sorted. The film’s real category is transformation - of bodies, of stories, of the viewer’s expectations.