Fairy Tale and Film

Freeway
’s Vanessa or 
Hard Candy
’s protagonist, they are presented as virtual psychopaths, 
while a more romanticised alliance with the wolf, in examples like 
Blood and Chocolate
(Katja von Garnier, 2007), insists on de-clawing 
their heroines. 
Red Riding Hood
(Catherine Hardwicke, 2011) reiterates this tendency. 
Although it seems to take inspiration from Carter’s writing and 
The 
Company of Wolves
(revealing the extent to which contemporary fairy 
tale films are increasingly referencing one another), it offers a very pale 
comparison. The adolescent heroine, Valerie (Amanda Seyfried), lives, 
like Rosaleen, in a rustic village and similarly undergoes a voyage of self-
discovery. However, her love for aloof woodcutter Peter is presented as 
slavish devotion, her initiation into sex amounts to ‘letting him have 
his way’, and the suggestion that they will become werewolf lovers has 
none of the same charge that Carter gave such a union. A dastardly 
witch-finder-cum-werewolf-hunter adds a dash of Hammer Horror to 
proceedings, but the main point is to distance the heroine from her 
parents and initiate an outsider romance designed to attract 
Twilight
fans. Realising that her father is a murderous werewolf (responsible for 
killing her half-sister, mother and grandmother) and that she shares his 
bloodline, Valerie despatches him and goes to live in her grandmother’s 
house, where she and fellow werewolf Peter can presumably enjoy some 
freedom. For all the film’s posturing about an emancipated girl, flouting 
convention to follow her heart, the heroine is manifestly uninspiring 

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150 
Fairy Tale and Film
and Hardwicke’s teen version of ‘Red Riding Hood’, despite being made 
three decades after Jordan’s film, seems far more regressive in its gender 
politics, and worryingly devoid of any feminist impulse.
The Village
(M. Night Shyamalan, 2004) similarly employs ‘Red Riding 
Hood’ motifs and sets its action in what appears to be a medieval forest, 
only to rupture the fearful fantasy created by the village ‘elders’. 
A girl’s coming-of-age is shown to be more than sexual when Ivy (Bryce 
Dallas Howard) makes her way through the forbidden forest and realises 
how much her worldview is the result of parental distortion and dis-
information. The twist in the film is the moment we learn how easily 
we have been duped ourselves – by the costumes, the ornate language 
used by the villagers, and the earnestness of their warnings about the 
world beyond. Given Shyamalan’s subsequent attempts to rework fairy 
tale tropes, this is a rare example of faultless storytelling. The heroine’s 
blindness does more than heighten a sense of dread as she makes her 
way through the forbidden woods to get medicine for her fiancé. Since 
her blindness is derived from a childhood illness, we realise that her 
parents’ generation have harmed, rather than protected, their offspring 
by lying about the world beyond their borders, the make-believe beasts 
claimed to populate the forest creating a potent allegory of Bush’s 
fear-mongering during the Gulf War.
15
The Blair Witch Project
(Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez, 1999) 
also plays with our understanding of what is real. Conflating elements 
of ‘Babes in the Wood’ (ATU 327A) and ‘Hansel and Gretel’, the film 
is set in modern America yet takes us into an enchanted realm where 
maps prove ineffectual in making sense of the terrain as three teens go 
into the woods, on a quest to substantiate a myth, and prove hope-
lessly ill-equipped. As Eric S. Mallin notes, ‘the Blair Witch exposes not 
technology’s threat but its failure, and (remaining undetected by the 
camera) she demonstrates the totemic power of the pre-technological 
past to wreak murderous havoc ... Map, compass, lighting, sound and 
camera equipment all become useless in discovering or combating her’ 
(2002: 112–13). Cannily marketing itself as found footage, we learn at 
the outset that the three student film-makers failed to return from their 
journey and their film is therefore all that remains of them.
16
Heather’s 
reliance on ‘filtered’ perception is such that she struggles to put her 
camera down, even as danger looms, finally using it to apologise for 
placing them all in peril. Like the curious girl in the Grimm tale, ‘Frau 
Trude’, fatally punished for her interest in a witch, the key figure behind 
the ‘project’ is explicitly blamed for the unfolding tragedy, unwittingly 
bringing a legend to life as reality and fantasy converge.

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