Red Riding Hood: The director of Twilight made a better YA horror romance that far fewer people saw

15 years later, Red Riding Hood is even better out of the context that created it

With this pedigree of pure opportunism, the movie naturally received withering reviews and middling box office, though it’s a measure of Twilight’s success that a live-action Red Riding Hood retelling could be considered a disappointment after making nearly $100 million worldwide. But removed from that context, Hardwicke’s film looks far more well-crafted and thoughtful than it did at the time.

Amanda Seyfried has given better performances than her work in Red Riding Hood. Just recently, she showed off her range as a scheming trophy wife in the hit thriller The Housemaid and a musicalized religious zealot in the Oscar nonstarter (but terrific) The Testament of Ann Lee. But Seyfried is ideally cast in a story that makes crucial use of the line “my, what big eyes you have.” Her version of Red, named Valerie, lives in a snowy village at the edge of a forest, the alleged home of a lurking werewolf who maintains an unspoken truce with the townsfolk — until a wave of wolf attacks begin. The first victim is Valerie’s sister Lucie (Alexandria Maillot), motivating our heroine to seek out the werewolf’s identity. At the same time, she must juggle two suitors: wealthy, parentally approved Henry (Max Irons); and Valerie’s childhood love Peter (Shiloh Fernandez).

Say what you will about Twilight, but at least that series makes it easy to tell Edward and Jacob apart (Jacob is usually the shirtless one), and makes them both sensitive (some might say neutralized) monsters. Red Riding Hood is predicated on the somewhat less enticing question of whether one of two interchangeable boring dudes might at some point turn out to be a monster and therefore one percent more interesting than their woeful human forms. That aspect of the movie deserves all of the critical jeers it received at the time.

The romance does, however, fit the film’s “First YA Horror” vibe, and the lack of source-material fealty gives Hardwicke the leeway to create a more immersive fake world than she did in the nominally realistic Pacific Northwest of Twilight. Red Riding Hood employs plenty of old-fashioned craftsmanship: woodsy sets, frequently fiery and orange-hued imagery, and occasional gorgeous matte paintings. The red cloak gifted to Valerie from her grandmother is a deeper, richer crimson than most modern superhero suits, and Seyfried wears it especially well. She may not be quite as authentically witchy or tortured as Anya Taylor-Joy, but they have a similar conviction behind their distinctive eyes. When Seyfried looks at something, it is instinctively easy to believe it’s real, whether that’s a CG werewolf or an uninteresting male lead.

Understanding this, Hardwicke makes a motif out of Seyfried’s eyes. At one point, the wolf is shown distantly reflected in them. Later, Valerie is accused of witchcraft for her ability to communicate with the wolf, and placed in a lupine iron mask, leaving only her eyes, strands of blonde hair, and red cloak immediately recognizable. What lingers about her performance, and the movie in general, isn’t its youthful romantic ardor; that stuff almost becomes bittersweet by default because of its inability to catch fire. Seyfried fares better working her way through a straight-faced exploration of a young person who has begun to see their world differently. With its gothic-lite sensibility — more mature than most American animation but not quite the Ginger Snaps version of the story that horror fans would understandably prefer — Red Riding Hood is a kind of a scrappy middle-school kid sister to the 2010 Joe Johnston version of The Wolfman.

That era of 2010s fantasy, mixing Disney touchstones, YA knockoffs, and an unapologetically feminine sensibility, eventually gave way to more and more superheroes as the decade wore on. At the same time, mainstream horror hits got a little more hardcore, and between Red Riding Hood and Wes Craven’s studio-ruined Cursed, the idea of a PG-13 werewolf movie became particularly unappealing. But if Five Nights at Freddy’s can pass for an introductory horror text, Red Riding Hood, made with stronger craft on every level, should more than work for a similar audience. Spinning a children’s story into a feature-length story sounds absurd, but Hardwicke uses that in-between sensibility to tap into something folkloric and, despite its specific time-period origins, timeless.

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Red Riding Hood is currently streaming on HBO Max.