Fairy Tale and Film

Demon Lovers and Defiant Damsels 
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rather than his wife, who is the main source of fascination today, new 
variations on the mysterious male killer curtail the claim. In fact, a 
number of cult thrillers have emerged that cast male murderers in a new 
light, designed to evoke our sympathy. Some films have even begun to 
question the distinction between virtue and villainy via characters that 
are scarcely aware of their own misdeeds. The wife killers in Christopher 
Nolan’s 
Memento 
(2000) and 
Inception 
(2010) provide a novel take on 
‘Bluebeard’, with murderers no longer presented as monstrous fiends 
but as pitiable figures. Far from dismissing their dead wives, their loss 
is keenly felt, too much to even admit to, in each case, with the motif 
of the ‘forbidden room’ transformed into a recess of their repressed sub-
conscious (an idea that reworks the motif used in 
Secret beyond the Door
). 
While 
American Psycho
(Mary Harron, 2000) attempts satire in its sadistic 
yuppie serial killer, utterly lacking any moral restraint,
18
Nolan’s pro-
tagonists provide much more engaging characters who lose the women 
in their lives for reasons that are shown to be beyond their control. We 
might ask if this is a twenty-first-century reboot of the Gothic romance, 
with sympathetic killers, cursed with tragic pasts, doomed to mourn the 
women that have been taken from them. The neo-noir men situated in 
Nolan’s films are not controlling ogres, but the hapless victims of fate, 
who cannot bear to think of the part they played in their wives’ deaths, 
and whose punishment is to remain locked inside a permanent state of 
self-delusion and loss. Have these sympathetic Bluebeard figures elided 
the wife’s role as either victim or investigative avenger, becoming the 
chief character we identify with? 
Significantly, while the governing characteristic of heroines in 
‘Bluebeard’, ‘The Robber Bridegroom’ and ‘Fitcher’s Bird’ is a display 
of intuition, intrepidness and ingenuity that gets them out of a poten-
tially fatal union, these scenarios do not necessarily condemn all men. 
‘Bluebeard’, after all, ends with another marriage for his widow, and 
even Angela Carter’s version of the tale, ‘The Bloody Chamber’ (1979), 
has a replacement spouse lined up in the form of a blind piano tuner. 
Marriage is thus preserved as a desirable, even inevitable, conclusion, 
the murderous husband a presumed exception to the norm – just as 
Perrault sought to argue three centuries ago – although the array of 
examples that have continued his legacy suggest otherwise. Yet maybe 
it is not simply the bad fortune of meeting a fiend that hovers around 
these tales. If we consider the historical conditions in which such stories 
emerged, ‘Bluebeard’ can be seen to symbolise more than a dangerous 
man per se. Indeed, it might be understood to warn women that all 
sexual unions were potentially fatal in some way. Marina Warner has 

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Fairy Tale and Film
made the interesting suggestion that the grisly contents of the bloody 
chamber represent the realities for any potential bride in terms of the 
risks involved in pregnancy, particularly at a time when childbirth was 
the major cause of mortality for women (1995: 263). It is a contention 
that is particularly significant because it invites us to look at the tale 
from a female perspective and reminds us of the frightening realities that 
accompanied relationships at their most basic level: sex, and the chance 
of procreation, could well be fatal, and any man a figurative Bluebeard. 
The alliance between women in ‘Bluebeard’, ‘The Robber Bridegroom’ 
and ‘Fitcher’s Bird’ is additionally notable. Whether it is Anne’s loyalty 
in electing to reside with her married sister, the female cook who warns 
the robber’s intended bride (and opts to leave with her), or the youngest 
sister’s risky dalliance with a wizard in order to retrieve her lost sisters, 
these are interesting tales of female camaraderie, particularly when con-
trasted against the bitter female rivalries that typify the best-known fairy 
tales. The heroine in ‘Fitcher’s Bird’ is especially interesting, saving her 
sisters by emulating the wizard’s magical powers, as well as saving herself 
by paralleling his deceitfulness, donning a costume (disguising herself 
as a bird) for similar reasons as the heroines in ‘Alleriauh’ (Coat of Furs) 
and ‘Donkeyskin’ – a reversal of Cinderella’s enticing gowns in seeking 
to escape a man, rather than attract him. It seems likely that ‘Bluebeard’ 
tales are especially interesting to women because they speak of a range 
of concerns their female protagonists are faced with, not least of which 
is an indictment against the abuse of patriarchal power. Cinematic vari-
ants often take the side of abused wives who undergo notable transfor-
mations, finding greater assertiveness the more their lives are placed at 
risk – with some even killing their husbands when push comes to shove. 
Laura ( Julia Roberts) in