Culture
When life is no fairy tale: three dark fantasy films inspired by classic fairy tales
By: Gordon Briggs
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Once upon a time, long before Disney sanitized many of them, Grimm’s fairy tales were ominous works meant to warn children about the evils of the world. Occasionally, we get movies like the recent cult film Ugly Stepsister, which blur the line between fairy tale and horror film.
So, in keeping with the Halloween season, here are three more films inspired by classic fairy tales.
The first is The Company of Wolves (1984). This movie embraces the darker, more sexual aspects of those fairy tales and creates one of the freakiest fairy-tale movies ever. Centered around an eerie retelling of Little Red Riding Hood (here, the wolf is a man who wishes to bed young Riding Hood), Neil Jordan adapts Angela Carter’s gothic fantasy story. It crafts a film packed with weird Freudian symbolism and a Russian-doll structure in which stories unfold within stories and dreams occur within dreams. Naturally, the film’s disjointed nature and visual peculiarities will alienate some viewers, but for me, those are its distinguishing features. Rating: ★ ★ ★1/2
It’s 2015, and we are at the tail end of a new wave of fantasy movies, most of which were very “muscular.” That’s exactly why the darkness and genuine weirdness of Tale of Tales is so striking. In a film that never feels the need to uplift its audience, we get four interlocking Italian fairy tales, each centered around bodily transformation or good old-fashioned lust. There are monsters here, magic, and a cast of actors who fill the material with passion (I like the story where a randy prince falls for an ugly woman’s voice without having seen her face). Thankfully, director Matteo Garrone (Gomorrah) plays this material straight, relying on his actors and writers rather than computer-generated spectacle. In the end, each unfolds with the violence of a horror movie but the patience of a Grimm’s fairy tale. Rating: ★★★1/2
Enchanted, Stardust, and The Brothers Grimm. In the mid-2000s, fairy tale movies made a comeback. Most were romantic comedies or pseudo-action films. Thank God for a movie like Pan’s Labyrinth. Here, Guillermo Del Toro has crafted a violent but beautiful fairy tale cloaked in darkness and speckled with blood. On a technical level there is so much to praise; the creature design is superb (the faceless ‘pale man’ with eyeballs in his palms is nightmare fuel) the villain is menacing from minute one (the scene where he kills a man with a bottle still disturbs me) and the visuals are lush and lived in (Del Toro’s fascination with intricately designed subterranean settings is used to full affect). What’s most impressive is the story itself. In blending fantasy film with the war movie, Pan’s Labyrinth uses its magical world to reflect how the fantasies produced by fascism are the most dangerous of all. Rating: ★★★★