Neil Jordan’s densely metaphoric adaptation of Angela Carter’s “Red Riding Hood” inspired short stories is one of those very, very rare things: an intelligent horror movie. It actually starts to work against the film, in subtle ways, as at a certain point the film stops being about even the pretense of horror or the supernatural and starts to disappear up its own sense of symbolism.

Which is fine, to be honest; the symbolism in question has some real punch to it, and as I said, any flicker of intelligence or intellectual depth in anything even approaching the horror genre is rare enough to be treasured.

The film opens in the “real” world, with intercut shots of a teenage girl in a white gown running through the woods and a car racing down a road, which eventually join together to give us an image of the girl, Alice, arriving home just in time to make it look to her parents in the car as if she has been at home all along, caring for her younger sister Rosaleen. We then move into Rosaleen’s room, filled with antique toys, and see Rosaleen, her face childishly made up with her sister’s stolen make-up, dreaming. From there the bulk of the film is actually of Rosaleen’s dream world, where we see a dream-Alice attacked by giant versions of Rosaleen’s toys before being set upon by a pack of wolves. Dream-Rosaleen lives in a simple, rural village, in an indeterminate time period, and she lives a simple life of farmwork, flirtations with a neighbor boy, and stories from her grandmother about the dangers of wolves. Or men. Or men as wolves. Granny’s stories are a potent mix of rural horror stories about the dangers of wolfmen and not very subtle warnings to Rosaleen about the sexual appetites of men. Rosaleen’s reaction to the stories is interesting as well. Shes fascinated by the violence and sexual overtones of the stories, but rebels against the moral prohibitions that they imply. Tellingly, when Rosaleen is told that her sister died because she strayed from the path (that is, became sexually active), Rosaleen’s response is to ask “why couldn’t she save herself?” She repeatedly questions the role of women in her grandmother’s stories and warnings as perennial victims.

Rosaleen’s resistance to the warnings against male and female sexuality reach their heights when the film flips into full on “Red Riding Hood” mode when Rosaleen, in her red shawl knitted for her by her grandmother, gets waylaid on her journey through the woods to bring her grandmother a basket of wood by a handsome hunter who claims to have lost his way. He and Rosaleen make a bet, that if he can get to her grandmother’s house before her, she will give him a kiss. You know how the story usually goes at this point, up to and including the hunter’s instruction to Rosaleen to burn her clothes in the fire, since she won’t need them anymore, but at that point the story becomes new and far more interesting, as Rosaleen decides that, unlike her sister, she can save herself, and she forces the hunter back into his wolf form and takes control of the situation for herself. In the morning, the people of her village search through the woods for Rosaleen, only to find two wolves in her grandmother’s house, one wearing Rosaleen’s cross, who both escape into the woods. The final image of the film is of a pack of wolves racing through the real Rosaleen’s house, before bursting through the walls of her bedroom and destroying her toys.

The symbolism gets pretty heavy handed in all this, and it’s more deftly handled in Angela Carter’s original prose works, but it’s still pretty compelling stuff. The neat trick that I think Jordan pulls here is setting us up to see werewolves as a horror metaphor for sexual aggression in men, but by showing us Rosaleen’s assertion of her own identity, we see them instead as a parable of both a young woman’s sexual identity awakening but also of her intellectual and emotional transition from childhood into an adult identity. It’s frustrating also because of that, because the film tends to suffer from its own sense of importance. Far too much time is spent dragging out imagery, reminding us that “this is important” or “this is a symbol.”

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