Fairy Tale and Film

The Hero with a Thousand Faces
. Equating 
heroic tales with ceremonial rituals of adulthood, he further notes ‘exercises 
of severance’ in which the subject must undertake a ‘radical readjustment of 
his emotional relationship to parental images’, an idea that evokes psycho-
logically leaving ‘home’ (1993: 136).
7. Driven by lust for her husband’s bad-boy brother, Frank, Julia updates the 
role of a succuba, procuring male victims to reconstitute her dead lover. Kirsty 
plays the virtuous Snow White to Julia’s wicked stepmother, yet, although 
she triumphs, Christopher Sharrett has a point in regarding the film’s main 
purpose as a punishment of female sexuality, affirming that ‘the neoconserva-
tive depiction of Pandora/Eve has Kirsty both unleashing the Cenobites and 
mastering the underworld (she escapes the temptations of “desire”)’ – while 
her lusty counterpart proves the fatal dangers of succumbing to temptation 
(1996: 263). 
8. For further discussion of these films as female coming-of-age tales, and their 
relationship to fairy tales, see Short (2006).
9. See David Carter’s online article (n.d.), which similarly regards fairy tales and 
horror as essentially prohibitive and conservative, although a specific moral 
coda is not always stringently adhered to – in either genre.
10. According to Barbara Creed’s 
The
Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, 
Psychoanalysis 
(1993), heavily referencing Julia Kristeva, a further psycholog-
ical reason dates back to antiquity, aligning the maternal body with abject 
Otherness. Although I agree with some of Creed’s observations, a tendency 
to reiterate essentialist ideas hinders her analysis, with little consideration of 
how monstrosity might be positively reclaimed. 
11. As Tatar puts it, ‘most of the men who produced written versions of this 
tale implicate the wife in the father’s bid for his daughter’s hand. Fidelity to 
the wishes of a dying spouse thus comes to supplant incestuous desire as the 
motive for the father’s attempted seduction of his daughter’ (1992: 128).
12. The distinctive appearance of the spectral females in each film, and their role 
as vengeful spirits, has an interesting historical connection, as Brigid Cherry 
points out, stating precedents in traditional Japanese ghost stories, where 
such figures are similarly dressed in white with long straggly hair, echoing 
the funeral rites of the Edo period. In one of the most famous tales, ‘Yotsuya 
Kaidan’, a female protagonist called Oiwa is poisoned by a rival for her hus-
band, leaving her with the drooping eye later seen on Sadako (2009: 196). 
13. Robert Hyland claims that Asami’s monstrosity is imagined by Aoyama due 
to ‘guilt feelings derived from his own behaviour (as well as patriarchy’s 
abuses) which causes him to project his anxieties’, a reading that substanti-
ates her abuse yet refuses to admit her sadistic ‘revenge’ (2009: 205).

---

Notes to Chapter 5 
189
14. As Diane Purkiss notes (2000), superstition was thus used to explain the trag-
edy of infant mortality as well as legitimating acts of abuse and abandonment. 
15. An edited version of 
Orphan
is often broadcast on television, omitting any 
details of Esther’s abusive upbringing, and thus offering the father a total 
reprieve.
16. Folk tales warning against the potential cost of grief often involve mordant 
humour, as in chain tales resulting in an ever increasing list of tragedies. 
Some Grimm examples are ‘Little Louse and Little Flea’ and ‘The Death of 
the Little Hen’, which warn against ‘undue’ grieving as various characters 
fail to pay adequate attention to the continued hazards of life. The lesson is 
repeated in contemporary cinematic horror that urges bereaved parents to 
remain vigilant for harm, and prioritise their surviving children. 
Orphan
’s 
snowbound setting may additionally be significant, suggesting a possible 
reference to the Russian folk tale ‘The Snow Maiden’ – its title character 
proving insubstantial, just as ‘Esther’ is merely a persona.
17. Moving into her mother-in-law’s former home, Martha makes a change that 
might be viewed as significant, turning a holy picture in their bedroom to the 
wall. She may declare herself a modern woman by this gesture, unfettered by 
the superstition besetting the village women, yet trouble soon follows.
18. Purkiss (2000) is again instructive here, noting that, according to supersti-
tion, pregnancy was deemed to render a woman at risk of being ‘fairy taken’ 
and her newborn would not be considered safe until its baptism. She also 
points out that autism has popularly been used to explain the belief in 
changelings, with related behaviour often misread as possession.
19. The governess in 
The Innocents
(Jack Clayton, 1961) offers another case of 
repression and suspected neurosis that culminates in infanticide, a film 
The 
Others
clearly borrows from.
20. The name is a Middle English word, meaning both ‘good lady’ and ‘old 
woman’ or ‘hag’. It may also be a reference, in this context, to Keats’ poem ‘La 
Belle Dame sans Merci’ (1819) – in which a knight is lured to a wintry lake by 
a lady, lulled to sleep, and dies – just as Coraline will lose her life if she allows 
her dream mother to take over. Gaiman’s interest in maternal doubling and 
the ‘other mother’ is equally evident in 
MirrorMask
– also made into a film.
21. In fact, the story derives from a popular Korean folk tale known as ‘Janghwa, 
Hongryeon’ (‘Rose Flower, Red Lotus’), which is similar to ‘Snow White’ in 
featuring a wicked stepmother. She resents her stepdaughters so much that 
she falsely claims one has had a miscarriage in order to shame her, instructs 
her son to drown her, and torments her sister to commit suicide at the same 
site. The truth is eventually uncovered and when the father remarries his 
wife gives birth to twin girls, presumed to be their reincarnated souls. 
22. In a DVD interview the directors state that the Freudian subtext of the origi-
nal film was a big draw for them, one they deliberately wanted to expand, 
although whether or not they intended to parody the daughter’s Electra 
obsession is not stated.
23. Marina Warner argues that Demy’s film offers a critique against the psy-
choanalytic theories usually applied to incest tales (1993a: 31), while David 
Butler commends ‘the camp aesthetic used to sugar its troubling themes but 
leave them present all the same’ (2009: 54). By contrast, Jack Zipes objects to 
the way it ‘mocks the notion of incest’ (2011: 219) – a reading I agree with.

---

190 
Notes to Chapter 6
24. The mother-in-law’s accusation that her stepdaughter has given birth to a 
monstrous child might be an allusion to her incestuous background. Fears of 
genetic deformity may also be at the heart of tales featuring older mothers 
who beget ‘beastly’ offspring with surprise late pregnancies, children whose 
abnormality they must learn to accept. 
25. The film shows how Precious survives a life of unimaginable degradation, 
her vivid imagination allowing her to transport herself to an imaginary 
future where she is respected, adored and happy. For the most part these 
scenes reflect the influence of a celebrity-obsessed pop culture. She dreams 
of a ‘light-skinned boyfriend’ who gazes at her adoringly as she poses for 
cameras. In the final scene, having taken possession of her two children and 
started a life of her own, with college in mind, she smiles for the first time, 
like her imagined self.
26. While critical scorn has been poured on these films, with 
Eden Lake
accused 
of inspiring hatred against the working class, the UK riots of August 2011 
would lend a hideous sense of reality to what seem like hyperbolic anxieties 
about unruly youth, raping and killing, as well as thieving, en masse, grant-
ing the ‘hoodie-horror’ disturbing prescience because so little seems to be 
exaggerated.
27. Tatar considers 
The Shining
a ‘Bluebeard’ film, perceiving Danny to be the 
equivalent of the curious wife, due to his interest in a ‘forbidden chamber’ 
(rm. 217) at the Overlook (2006). However, it his mother – Wendy – who is 
the main transgressor, galvanised by her husband’s threat to renege her wifely 
obedience. Although previously in denial about Jack’s abusive nature, it is 
only when confronted with an axe-wielding maniac that she is forced to jet-
tison the ideal of a happy family, saving both her son and herself from their 
likely death at his hands. Charlene Brunnell notes the Overlook’s uncanny 
ability to bring out the worst in people, describing it as: ‘the vampiric villain, 
consuming with malicious glee people of questionable character’ (1984: 95).