A British writer rewrote Perrault's fairy tales as explicitly adult stories of danger and desire. Bluebeard, Beauty and the Beast, Red Riding Hood, all reclaimed as fables of what waits for a girl at the edge of the woods.

THE COMPANY OF WOLVES (1984) was Neil Jordan's second film, made years before The Crying Game and Interview with the Vampire, and the first screenplay author Angela Carter ever wrote. It is constructed like a Russian doll: a girl's dream, and inside it her grandmother's warning tales, and inside those, more tales still, all filmed on a single soundstage as a deliberately artificial forest of gnarled trees and creeping mist.

Angela Lansbury plays the grandmother, warning the girl about men who are "hairy on the inside." The warnings are meant to scare her but serve to stir her curiosity.

The wolf is the dangerous, alluring adult world waiting at the end of childhood. And when the wolves come, Jordan delivers one of the great practical transformations of the era, a snout tearing out through a man's mouth, a shot that still makes people flinch.