Fairy Tale and Film

Fairy Tale and Film
that typically feature in our dreams, as well as fantastic fiction. The 
uncanny – or 
unheimlich
– is a means of unwittingly remembering 
what has been repressed, and a genre like horror cinema, Wood argues, 
gives the subconscious shape in the form of various monstrous figures 
returning from the grave, as it were, to make their presence known. 
Equating the ‘repressed’ with marginalised figures in society, Wood 
claims that ‘one might say that the true subject of the horror genre 
is the struggle for recognition of all that our civilization represses or 
oppresses’, distinguishing between ‘progressive’ and ‘reactionary’ films 
through ‘the way in which the monster is presented and defined’, 
and ultimately how much sympathy they are given (1984: 171, 172). 
Horror’s ability to question convention and make us rethink social 
norms and expectations is epitomised in its depiction of the family: an 
institution which, far from being presented as healthy or harmonious, 
is increasingly aligned with monstrosity, a tendency Wood aligns with 
interesting socio-political potential.
3
Critics such as Tony Williams 
(1996) have extended his ideas, arguing that ‘family horror’ is a dis-
tinct subtext in the genre, replete with dysfunctional families and their 
monstrous progeny, while Chika Kinoshita affirms that ‘single parents, 
abused, abandoned and/or murdered children constitute most J-horror 
narratives’ (2009: 107).
4
Lest we regard these as recent concerns, fairy 
tales skewered the idea of happy families centuries ago, suggesting a 
dysfunctional upbringing was the norm rather than an exception, and 
thus popularising a motif later espoused in psychoanalysis. Curiously, 
Freud appears to have overlooked this narrative feature, excluding fairy 
tales from his examples of the uncanny, arguing that the defamiliaris-
ing experience elicited through fantasy does not occur in a genre in 
which fantastical occurrences are commonplace. Zipes rightly objects 
to this exclusion, contending that, while all manner of out-of-the-
ordinary experiences occur, fairy tales can still disturb or unsettle us. 
In fact, he goes so far as to argue that ‘the very act of reading, hearing 
and viewing a fairy tale is an uncanny experience in that it separates 
the reader from the restrictions of reality from the onset and makes the 
repressed unfamiliar familiar again’ (2011: 2). Fairy tales frequently uti-
lise fantasy to subvert ‘normality’, resulting in unease and sometimes 
outright horror. Most pertinently, in turning presumed carers into 
cannibals and killers, the very idea of the 
unheimlich
(literally what is 
unhomely
) is made manifest. By extension, what is homely – and atten-
dant assumptions about who to trust and where we can be safe – are 
turned on their head in fairy tales, as well as the cinematic narratives 
that draw from them.

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Houses of Horror 
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A mainstay of horror is what critics dub ‘the terrible place’ – homes 
where evil has entered. According to Suzie Mackenzie: 
Horror is about consciousness, it’s about being awake to whatever it 
is that threatens us ... It wouldn’t work if we didn’t all, in some way, 
share the same terror ... be it the Gothic castle of Hammer Horror, the 
empty ruin in 
The Blair Witch Project
, the suburban home of 
Halloween
, 
Nightmare on Elm Street
et al. This place, which we’d thought of as 
sanctuary, is where the final terror will be enacted. (1999: 9)
The terrible place is sanctuary subverted, a house of horror where mon-
strous figures are encountered. Just as ‘Hansel and Gretel’ (ATU 327A) 
and ‘Goldilocks’ (ATU 171) warn against entering unknown places, 
films like