We’re back with the second installment of the Spooky Season roundtable, where Blaine Grimes, Blake Collier, Caleb Stallings, and I invite you to join us as we watch and discuss Blaine’s pick, 2001’s Brotherhood of the Wolf. This film is based on the historical string of killings associated with the Beast of Gévaudan. So buckle up for a kung fu–inflected period piece with more creature thrills and intrigue than you can shoot a blunderbuss at!
Ian: Boys, what did we make of this?
Blake: I, for one, really struggled with the techniques and sequencing of this film. It seemed like they were throwing everything but the kitchen sink (though it felt like they were tempted to throw that also) at the wall to see what would stick. It honestly made it really difficult for me to pay attention to the story.
Also, Mani died way too soon. Mark Dacascos was the best part.
Ian: An American Indian in Paris it wasn’t.
Blake: I’m actually curious about what strikes Blaine the most about this movie.
Blaine: It’s funny, because a lot of what you’re describing, Blake, is what makes the movie work for me. I’m drawn to narratives that poke and prod the edges of genre and stylistic conventions that we might normally expect in this kind of story. There are a lot of ways that films can make a self-reflexive turn — in fact, In The Mouth of Madness takes an entirely different tack — but mashing genres and styles together is an interesting way to do so because it doesn’t always forcefully remove you from the narrative world. On another note, I also have an affinity toward movies that go all in on VIBES.
On paper, Brotherhood of the Wolf could be a fairly standard period-horror drama, but when you throw in horror, romance, period accoutrements, Wuxia, and a dash of swashbuckling … well, cool things happen. I like it when you can tell there is a distinct and unique creative vision behind a work.
Caleb: I’m a sucker for genre madness. This has a bit of everything in it. And it felt like an Assassin’s Creed game — and I mean that as a compliment!
Ian: There’s almost a Jaws assonance happening too. Not only in the cover-up but structurally, in that half of the movie documents what follows the cover-up.
Caleb: A further note on vibes: we need more 21st-century pulpy swashbucklers. This and Solomon Kane (2009) are the few early modern fantasy films that tackle some of the concerns of this particular historical moment: not just our hypocritical struggles to define liberty, equality, and fraternity but also our perennial problem with superstition and prejudice.
Blaine: And then, of course, I’m always down with a film that complicates our views on the Enlightenment.
Ian: That’s a really great point, Blaine, because I think the film’s relationship to the Enlightenment is complex. The knight is set up as our protagonist but also as a lovable rogue, sworn to Enlightenment, and a libertine. And that’s why I think his partnership with Mani is interesting, because he, a Native American, is a more traditional figure but not in the same way as the nobility and the peasantry are. But also Sardis, we are told, went crazy from the Enlightenment. And that is an interesting counter-Enlightenment angle: you can oppose its principles, but simply trying to undo this event isn’t adequate because you will create a monster.
Blaine: Exactly, Ian! That’s so good. And it’s notable and impactful to me that when Marianne dies, de Fronsac — the embodiment of the Enlightened man — turns to Mani’s charm.
Ian: I love that in the final confrontation he says, “I have come to name you before God.” That’s pretty tough, and I’m not sure it’s something he would have said at any point earlier in the film.
Blake: I agree with all of the very good and profound points made. I largely enjoyed the film, but complaints were merely technical. I agree that mixing genres and styles that push at the borders of what a film can be, but I still think on a purely visual level, the film comes off more muddled than cohesive in its attempt at dynamism. I can appreciate what [director] Christophe Gans is attempting to do, and I appreciate the mashing up of genres, but the fades, slow motion shots, the quickening of shots, the rotoscope shots, etc., felt confused more than aligned with the story attempting to be told.
And hear me. I spent most of my film criticism life not paying attention to the technical elements of the film and only the ideas, and so for me to notice the cinematography so significantly in my viewing says a lot.
Ian: Yeah, I agree, Blake. I think there’s an interesting idea, and at turns it succeeds and at other turns it doesn’t quite. Because Gans is reaching for something that he is feeling or intuiting, and I think that’s always the danger when you are running off of pure vibes, right? Because it’s so difficult to translate vibes into an artifact, to translate these intuitive movements within your heart to something that can be shared with others, that can be understood sufficiently to be appreciated.
This really was principally, I think, a gothic romance, in the sense that the paranormal aspect is revealed to be something mundane — in the proper sense of this word, not mundane as we use it colloquially, as in drab or boring. But so much Gothic romance turns on the idea that the real monster is this man, but in a more profound way than contemporary Grief Olympics horror does. So I do think it’s very interesting that Jean-François is very much a monster — the master of the monster that the knight and Mani are dispatched to investigate.
So I would say that this is first and foremost a Gothic romance that enjoys mash-ups with these other genres, another being the hard-boiled detective story. The knight’s investigation opens up this style, I was surprised to find. While it wasn’t a noir with a trenchcoated, fedora’d private dick looking for answers who’s a part of the social problem that made the crime he’s investigating possible, the knight is that, albeit dressed in the garb of mid-eighteenth-century France.
Blake: Never put Vincent Cassel in a film if you don’t want the viewer to peg the real monster from the beginning. Haha.
Ian: I feel this, Blake, but I also found the film was successful in portraying him as a sleazy aristocrat who’s far too interested in his sister. So for at least a stretch, it did throw me off the scent and made me see him as a pathetic noble trying to hold on to what he has. Because he is, in fact, both — he is a pathetic noble clinging desperately to his privileges and is the monster.
Blake: The incestuous element of this film really plays into the gothic romance tone for sure. Thinking of Poe’s stories like “Fall of the House of Usher” where he doesn’t say it plainly, but the brother and sister’s relationship is not merely platonic or familial. Also, Crimson Peak for a newer example.
Ian: What I don’t know is how much the film wants me to understand that as an indictment against the aristocracy as a whole, because even the film’s relation to the Revolution is complex. Thomas d’Apcher, who stayed behind in the region to rebuild after the ravages of the Beast, is unceremoniously deposed and taken away to be executed at the end. He stayed behind, he said, out of duty and love for his people, and he is simply not what they accuse him of being.
Caleb: I also like how this is being told as a forgotten history precisely because of how revolutionary madness led to the murder of its final witness (and I think it is implied, his eyewitness account of the extraordinary events). The irony of this Enlightenment moment is how it plunges us back into darkness and ignorance.
Ian: This is such a great point, how every push for progress depends upon death and savagery to make it possible but has to hide that fact from itself. But the testimony that is preserved: it’s almost like God’s grace doesn’t wait for the best of times but shows itself in the darkest times.
Caleb: It was the spookiest of times. It was the scariest of times. Boys were becoming men. Men were becoming wolves.
Blake: I’ve been watching A LOT of Scooby Doo lately with the kids. (Didn’t care for it much as a kid but have grown to love it of late.) I think this movie does what Scooby Doo does in every episode. Enlightenment wins in the end because the monster is revealed (or the only witnesses are killed), and everything returns to reality as we know it.
But when you look at what happens in every episode of Scooby Doo and what it takes the gang to catch the monster … most of it is irrational and mostly aided by powers and situations and traps that defy Enlightenment rationality. Likewise, this film is steeped in the very real existence of werewolves and the conspiracy of the bourgeoisie, and yet it is once again covered over in order to maintain the “sanity of the age” and the controls of Enlightenment thinking.
Ian: Yes! Enlightenment is an impossible and irrational paradigm all its own, undergirded by strange powers that sustain it.
Blake: But are those powers demonic?
Ian: At least some are.
Caleb: Insofar as they are inhuman! What else could you call a cabal of heartless cultists and murderous crowds whose bloodlust had no discernment for justice?
Also, it’s interesting that the secret fraternity that are behind all the problems herein call themselves the Wolves of God. They try to operate in darkness and deceit while the literal wolves, created by God, aid Mani in its unmasking, both as guides and witnesses. Which is how the satanic operates: by distorting and corrupting the real into some sinister and underhanded version.
Ian: That coincides with how Halloween is seen by some as demonic when really it mocks the defeated powers and assures the faithful. There are things that look like a minion of the Enemy, but they are the servants of God.
Blake: The seeming paradox of Halloween: all that you fear is real AND YET it cannot take your very essence as a child of God.
Caleb: And of course there’s the tragedy that the Beast of Gévaudan is just a disguised lion who was abused and tormented into an existence of sheer violence for violence’s sake. There’s a redemptive moment at his end when he allows Fronsac to touch and comfort him in his dying moments, allowing him to return to being a creature of God, not a tool of power.
Ian: Yes, that’s beautiful.
Caleb: Oh, by the way, this is a fall-coded movie because of that one scene where they were shooting pumpkins with blunderbusses.
Ian: Make no mistake — this is no summer movie.
Blaine: This was very clearly an adaptation of Dante’s Inferno.
Ian: Got ‘im!
Thanks for joining us! We hope you too were dazzled by Brotherhood of the Wolf and that you will remember to be nice to critters and bless all beasties as creatures of a good God. Be sure to come back next week when we watch Caleb’s pick, In the Mouth of Madness. See you then, and stay spooky!
