Joan Ormrod
Manchester Metropolitan University
The Beast Made Flesh – Masquerade, Disguise and Transformation in Brotherhood of the Wolf
Windows Media Video
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Brotherhood of the Wolf (2001) was one of the biggest French box office draws of 2001. It stitched together a number of genres including gothic horror, kung-fu, action adventure, and heritage drama. The plot is based on a well-documented event in which a mysterious beast attacked and killed nearly 100 people in the Auvergne 1764-7. However, the film chooses to subordinate the horror of the monstrous beast to examine other issues connected with masquerade and transformation. Indeed virtually every character, including the beast, engages in some form of masquerade in the film.
Masking and masquerade often express cultural concerns over change and upheaval within a specific socio-historic context. Often masking is concerned with challenging national, gendered or ethnic identities where it replaces conviction with ambiguity. It is argued that masking and masquerade in Brotherhood of the Wolf function to explore French identity/ies within a new millennium from concerns over the exotic other to the unruly mob with its connotations of the French Revolution.
Using a mixture of ideas, from Mikhail Bakhtin on the carnivalesque and Foucault’s notions of discourse and knowledge, my analysis will examine issues of the mob and exoticism and the concerns of French culture at the turn of the millennium to unmask the reasons for Gans’ fascination with disguise.
