Fairy Tale and Film

Fairy Tale and Film
and sound ... in granny’s bed, between the paws of the tender wolf’ 
(1984: 159).
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Instead, although Rosaleen (Sarah Patterson) starts to 
undress, we are given no bed scene. Having kissed the huntsman, she 
shoots him, turning him into a wounded wolf, arousing compassion 
rather than carnal interest. Soothing him with a story about a wolf-girl, 
Rosaleen is transformed into a wolf herself and runs off with her new 
companion as her parents arrive. The film dismantles its own narrative 
at this point as a pack of wolves enter the dream-world and pull an 
outsize dollhouse apart. The last scene shows the heroine’s contempo-
rary counterpart waking to see a wolf crashing through her bedroom 
window and screaming at the sight. Carter objected to this hysterical 
reaction, which dramatically deviates from both her story and her 
original screenplay, and Zipes describes the scene as a ‘revolting contra-
diction’ of her aims.
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Others have sought to resolve the inconsistency, 
with Bacchilega asserting that the intruding wolf may be read as the 
heroine (1997: 70), while Kim Snowden suggests the sleeping Rosaleen 
may eventually be devoured and incorporated by her ‘powerful sexual 
desiring Other’ (2010: 175). Ultimately however, while the film’s end is 
undoubtedly flawed, its most disappointing departure from the original 
story is the scene it ignores. Jordan may show us a young woman who 
finally runs with the wolves yet omits the catalyst behind her bes-
tial transformation and thus removes what was most powerful about 
Carter’s version: the validation of Red Riding Hood as a sexual being.
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Warner aptly describes Carter as ‘a fantasist with a salty turn of mind, 
a dissident with a utopian vision of possibilities’ who ‘practised through 
her writing a constant stretching of the permitted, of the permissible. 
Taboo was her terrain, nothing was sacred’ – as was evident in making 
her heroines carnal creatures. ‘Her Beauties choose to play with the 
Beast precisely because his animal nature excites them and gives their 
desire licence’ (1995: 195, 6, 308). Warner notes various literary precur-
sors in which beastly transformation similarly liberates heroines (such 
as Basile’s ‘She-Bear’ and D’Aulnoy’s ‘White Cat’) yet also estranges 
them, ‘the change of appearance casts the heroine out of family, out 
of the fold, and even out of society’ (355). Orenstein discerns a simi-
lar denouement in 
The Company of Wolves
, observing that ‘Rosalee’s 
coming-of-age is not without cost – her grandmother dies, she becomes 
an outcast, transformed into a she-wolf, and must flee her own family’ 
(2003: 167). We might ask how much Carter’s bold questioning has 
continued in film. 
Freeway 
(Matthew Bright, 1996), 
Hard Candy
(David 
Slade, 2005) and 
Ginger Snaps
(John Fawcett, 2000) can all be seen as 

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Postmodern Revisions 
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modern-day versions of ‘Red Riding Hood’ that explicitly confront the 
notion of female victimhood, yet while the first two films cast their 
female protagonists as table-turning avengers, eliminating predatory 
men, the latter places Carter’s sexually assertive wolf-girl in a horrific 
coming-of-age tale that vilifies female sexual maturation (which can 
be read either as a critique of the genre’s abjection of women or as a 
corroboration of this idea). Ginger’s threat is deemed so intolerable 
that she is eventually killed by her sister, who succumbs to ‘the curse’ 
herself in the sequel, while the final instalment, in tracing their vulpine 
natures to their ancestors, suggests wolf-women cannot be tolerated in 
any age.
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‘Red Riding Hood’ has proved especially fertile for revisions – 
given its symbolic appeal and the potential to dramatically reinterpret 
the central dynamic between woman and wolf – yet while Tanith Lee’s 
short story ‘Wolfland’ (1983) affirms, in kindred spirit to Carter, the 
benefits (and necessity) of becoming wolf-like, cinematic treatments 
evidently regard this idea with some hesitancy. When revamped Reds 
prove able to look after themselves, like Ginger,