Fairy Tale and Film

Notes to Chapter 4
11. Campion returns to this theme of male violence in her series 
Top of the Lake
, 
in which a female detective uncovers not only an incestuous father but a 
corrupt police chief involved in sexually exploiting young women – and 
guilty of murdering at least one victim. Both men use the sedative Ruphinol 
to immobilise their victims, and evidently assume they can get away with 
their crimes, yet the tables are turned by the end of the series. Placing a gun 
in the hands of both the incest victim and the detective (a former victim of 
violent sexual assault subsequently threatened by her duplicitous boss), the 
weapon is used against both these men.
12. Clover makes the same claims about impotence in reference to the slasher’s 
various male killers, who are deemed childlike, sexually repressed, and either 
mentally or physically incapable of intimacy with women, leading to the 
rage we witness on screen. 
13. Warner provides other interesting attempts to account for the mystery of the 
first wife’s ‘crime’, including the idea that she was a ‘bluestocking’, angered 
by her husband’s drunkenness on their wedding night, who dyed his beard 
blue in revenge! (1995: 247).
14. I discuss this film in more detail in the fifth chapter of 
Misfi t Sisters
(Short, 2006) in which it is argued that Starling’s gender and age grant her 
a privileged ‘female gaze’, inflecting her ability to decipher the clues in 
Frederika’s bedroom.
15. J. Hoberman (1991) retitles the film ‘Nancy Drew meets the Minotaur’, 
contrasting the mythic beast-man with the film’s monstrous villain.
16. 
Jagged Edge
makes an interesting contrast to 
Fatal Attraction
(Adrian Lyne, 
1987) which casts Glenn Close as a dangerous villain, despatched by the 
good wife. A particularly nasty example of a backlash film, the modern 
Gothic, in this case, does not blame the duplicitous husband for endangering 
his family with an affair and it is the single career woman who is unremit-
tingly demonised instead.
17. As Larsson fans will know, 
Men Who Hate Women
was his original title for the 
first Millennium book, a title that makes his gender politics clear.
18. The idea of a serial killer used satirically is prefigured in Chaplin’s 
Monsieur 
Verdu
(1947). Based on the real-life French killer Henri Landru, who killed at 
least 12 women for their money, the character is transformed by Chaplin’s 
film into a black comedy. If the context of losing his bank job due to the 
Depression and having to care for an invalid wife and son are intended to 
create sympathy for the character, a culture of greed motivates 
American 
Psycho
’s yuppie killer, with female victims, in both cases, paying the fatal 
price. We might also note a disturbing penchant for romanticising killers in 
teen series such as 
The Vampire Diaries
, in which the heroine’s attraction to 
murderous men is championed rather than critiqued. 
19. This brilliant punch-line concludes Thurber’s 1936 version of ‘Little Red 
Riding Hood’, titled, ‘The Girl and the Wolf’, in which our heroine saves 
herself by taking an automatic out of her basket. See Zipes (1993: 229). Roald 
Dahl pays Thurber suitable homage in his version:
The small girl smiles. One eyelid flickers.
She whips a pistol from her knickers.
She aims it at the creature’s head
And 
bang bang bang
she shoots him dead. (1992: 40)

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Notes to Chapter 5 
187
20. In the Iroquois tale ‘The Horned Snake’s Wife’, the heroine escapes with 
help from a spirit god and acquires special powers, ridding the world of 
‘bad-hearted creatures’ (Matthews, 2000: 55). In the West African tale ‘Keep 
your Secrets’, collected by Angela Carter, the heroine is saved by heeding her 
mother’s advice and not trusting her new husband unduly. Offering a lovely 
retort to ‘Bluebeard’, female duplicity is thus understood to be an essential 
survival strategy (2012: 68–9).