Fairy Tale and Film

Fairy Tale and Film
violent child spirits than the mothers we have assessed. The name given 
to him is significant because he is not a patriarch, and most importantly 
of all, a sense of recovery and change is allowed, rather than repeating 
established patterns.
In kindred fashion to ‘The Juniper Tree’, horror has provided a num-
ber of examples where supernatural children restructure their families, 
often with disconcerting results. Unhappy child spirits claim mothers 
in the 
Dark Water
films and 
The Orphanage
, while in 
The Daisy Chain
and 
The Dark
women are fatally ousted from households by ghost girls 
who favour fathers. The fact that the sole approved carer secured by 
the ghostly children in 
Hansel and Gretel
is an innocent young man 
provides an interesting variation on this theme, securing their trust and 
encouraging them to let go of their rage, as well as their dependence 
on adults. The fable-like 
Treeless Mountain
(So-Yong Kim, 2008) also 
concerns itself with neglected children, in this case two young girls 
who find themselves adrift in the world when their parents divorce and 
their working mother is unable to care for them. A selfish aunt favours 
drinking to mentoring her charges, and happiness and safety are only 
found when they are packed off to granny in the country. Presenting 
an older woman as nurturer is a significant contrast to the usual vilifica-
tion, yet while 
Treeless Mountain
recuperates the value of older women, 
it also questions the impact of divorce on children and asks who will 
care for them.
Brigid Cherry notes that family breakdown frequently serves as ‘either 
the source of the horror or an entry point for the monster to invade’ 
(2009: 109), an observation that has been applied to horror from the 
1970s on. Just as parental separation in 
The Exorcist
(William Friedkin, 
1973) has been critically suggested as a reason for Regan’s vulnerability 
to possession, 
Carrie
also situates an adolescent ‘monster’ in the home 
of a single-parent family, and we might ask whether contemporary con-
cerns about single mothers are a means of expressing sympathy for the 
women involved, or greater concern for their children. Recent films have 
shown a number of lone mothers struggling to protect children from 
supernatural entities, yet frequently dying as a result. Maternal sacrifice 
may thus convey a sense of tragic heroism, yet the result is that moth-
ers, like fairy tales of old, are simply removed from the family. Fathers 
who assume the sole burden of parental responsibility may progressively 
affirm nurturing qualities as approved masculine traits (reflecting new 
expectations, in line with changing family structures), yet continued 
critiques of motherless households (from 
Chainsaw
’s Sawyer family to 
The Dark
) also suggest ongoing concerns about lone parents of either 

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Houses of Horror 
139
gender. Most significantly perhaps, while villainous parents have been 
countered by selfless sacrificing mothers and caring fathers, monstrous 
children appear to have intensified, some of whom cruelly replicate the 
abuse they have suffered, while others assert a simple desire to be cared 
for. Ultimately, horror’s assessment of families hovers between sentiment 
and cynicism, aware of their capacity to bring out both the best and 
the worst in humanity. The genre’s numerous dysfunctional examples 
may be interpreted as a fulfilment of Freudian beliefs yet equally seem 
to parody such ideas, making the most of horror’s subversive potential. 
As to the socio-political insights that Wood and others have discerned, 
we might note that any sympathy for marginalised subjects, including 
abused children, is often tentative at best. Far from necessarily welcom-
ing the returning repressed as a corrective to social injustice and inequal-
ity, the anger and violence displayed by ‘monsters’ may simply entrench 
their Otherness, regardless of the circumstances that created them. Films 
have pointed to social forces – as well as troubled psyches – that create 
conflict and endanger offspring, affirming that parents of either gender 
may be a villain or a hero, just as horrific actions can occur in all kinds 
of family structures – with houses of horror taking any number of forms. 
However, far from reiterating Freudian fatalism, a degree of faith is prof-
fered in our ability to survive domestic dangers and difficulties – altered 
perhaps, but not necessarily ‘damaged’. As fairy tales have long sug-
gested, problematic families may come to be expected by protagonists, 
but leaving the family home is just the start of their story.

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140
6
Postmodern Revisions: 
New Tales for Old?
Whether we term it ‘defamiliarisation’ or ‘de-Grimming’, an interest in 
revising established narratives has become increasingly popular, utilis-
ing methods often aligned with the postmodern. Cristina Bacchilega 
describes ‘postmodern’ fairy tales as stories that rework classic tales 
and tropes, distinguishing themselves from traditional tales through 
rewrites that ‘refuse to obey their authority by revising and appropriat-
ing them’ (1997: 4). This is what Angela Carter implied in describing 
her work as putting new wine into old bottles, asserting that ‘most 
intellectual development depends upon new readings of old texts. 
I am all for putting new wine in old bottles, especially if the pressure of 
the new wine makes the bottles explode’ (1983: 69). Cinema has been 
keen to extend this experiment, often playing with expectations – or 
simply playing up to them – yet even examples that mock the con-
ventions they draw upon are not necessarily as incendiary, or innova-
tive, as we might think, partly due to the growing prominence of this 
approach. Far from necessarily provoking shock in deviating from the 
‘traditional’ version, we have come to expect fairy tale films to retell 
familiar stories with a twist of some kind, as is testified by upcoming 
releases including a role-reversing