The Company of Wolves

Angela Carter adapting her own story with Neil Jordan, and it is a nested set of dreams rather than a narrative.

A girl asleep in a modern house dreams a village, in which her grandmother tells her stories, inside which other characters tell more. The wolves are men, the film says so out loud, and the moral of the grandmother's tales is always the same warning delivered as folklore.

The transformations are practical and grotesque in the correct way: a wolf pushing out through a man's mouth, skin peeling back, done with animatronics that are visibly artificial and work anyway because the whole film is a dream.

Carter's dialogue is the reason to watch. Nothing else in this category is written like it.

Made by Palace Pictures, who were simultaneously fighting the DPP prosecutions of The Evil Dead.