Fairy Tale and Film

Fairy Tale and Film
a young girl, Catherine, relates Perrault’s story to her squeamish older 
sister, Marie-Anne, in a loft-room. Her version reiterates the idea of the 
wife marrying for money, and makes her a ‘virgin princess’, while evinc-
ing a bloodthirsty imagination. Dispensing with the brothers, Catherine 
allows the wife to decapitate her murderous husband herself, yet 
although this suggests a bold revisionism at work, Breillart adds a dis-
turbing end to the tale-within-a-tale. Marie-Anne fearfully backs away 
from her sister at hearing the final scene. Begging her sister to stop, she 
loses her footing and falls to her death. As Zipes notes, ‘their mother 
arrives and seems strangely unaware of her older daughter’s death, even 
though she stands directly above the girl’s body’ (2011: 168), suggest-
ing that this death may not truly have happened. Perhaps Marie-Anne’s 
fall symbolises the fate of females who allow fear to get the better of 
them, or maybe it is indicative of the degree to which Catherine has 
imaginatively allowed herself to be carried away with her fantasy. There 
is also another, more disturbing reading: the idea that one sister has 
truly killed her sibling, perhaps even deliberately. The possibility that 
such a tragedy could really occur, and the mother’s apparent heedless-
ness, is reminiscent of the disconcerting way that fairy tales often 
present familial ruptures and tragedies as the norm. Just as ‘Bluebeard’ 
de-romanticises the prospect of marriage to a stranger, many fairy tales 
undermine familial ideals, including the idea that parents will serve as 
protectors, or that children are necessarily all that innocent. It is this 
theme of the home as a place of danger, rather than safety, and the sug-
gestion that blood ties may simply put individuals at odds, rather than 
bind them closer together, that is the next chapter’s central concern.

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5
Houses of Horror: Domestic 
Dangers and Man-made Monsters
The scary side of fairy tales is often obscured, yet far from being con-
ceived as cosy bedtime reading for children, they originally aimed to 
entertain listeners of all ages, and a number of gory and gruesome fea-
tures remain. Monsters may take various forms, but are perhaps most 
frightening when presumed care-givers are shown to deviate from their 
role. Child abuse, cannibalism, murder and incest are but some of the 
crimes that feature in these tales: terrors conspicuously located in the 
family home – making them veritable houses of horror for imperilled 
protagonists. The frequent appearance of familial foes has prompted 
folklorists and psychoanalysts to offer various explanations. Why make 
mothers and fathers into threatening figures, and turn a place usu-
ally associated with security into a dangerous realm protagonists must 
escape? Do such narratives exaggerate common childhood fears as a 
means of voicing repressed anxieties, perhaps hoping to incite a level 
of maturity via characters who are forced to leave their homes and fend 
for themselves? Or do they voice other (often unspoken) ideas via their 
manifestly unhappy families? As Angela Carter notes in her introduction 
to 
The
Virago Book of Fairy Tales
:
Fairy-tale families are, in the main, dysfunctional units in which 
parents and step-parents are neglectful to the point of murder and 
sibling rivalry to the point of murder is the norm. A profile of the 
typical European fairy tale family reads like that of a ‘family at risk’ 
in a present-day inner city social worker’s casebook, and the African 
and Asian families represented here offer evidence that even widely 
different types of family structures still create unforgivable crimes 
between human beings too close together. (1990: xix)

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