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
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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