Fairy Tale and Film

5
Houses of Horror: Domestic Dangers 
and Man-made Monsters 
1. Bruno Bettelheim’s 
The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance 
of Fairy Tales
(1977) is a pioneering work in this regard, drawing attention 
to the usefulness of fairy tales in aiding a child’s emotional development, 
enabling them to ‘master the psychological problems of growing up’ (6) 
while additionally helping traumatised children to realise their experiences 
are neither unique nor insurmountable. Although often criticised for 
displaying too great a debt to Freudian psychoanalysis, Bettelheim references 
some interesting interpretations of classic fairy tales by his patients, 
including admiration for Rapunzel and Gretel as heroic female figures who 
survive abusive experiences. Others have continued to draw upon the fairy 
tale’s therapeutic potential, including Alison Lurie’s work on incest survival 
in fiction and experience.
2. Dundes makes this claim of ‘The Girl without Hands’, asserting that as she 
is ‘guilty of the original incestuous thought’ she is punished accordingly 
(1987: 61). For an eloquent refutation of the idea that abused girls are really 
to blame for their father’s incestuous desires, and the flawed logic of trans-
posing Freud by situating the cause of incest with its apparent victims, see 
Tatar (1992: 125–6). In the same book Tatar makes similarly short shrift of 
the narrative tendency (in tales such as ‘Catskin’ and ‘Donkeyskin’) to blame 
dead mothers for inciting incestuous desires in their husbands, asking them 
to choose a replacement modelled only in their image and thus making their 
daughters a victim of their mother’s vanity rather than their father’s mon-
strous desire. An interesting summary of the various interpretations made of 
the ‘unnatural father’ theme, and accompanying problems with the psycho-
analytic school, can be found in Jeanna Jorgensen’s online article (2012).
3. As Wood contends, ‘the connection of the Family to Horror has become over-
whelmingly consistent’, noting that the genre’s various monsters, including 
psychotic killers, demonic entities, monstrous children and cannibals, are 
‘all shown as products of the family’, suggesting that this very institution 
demands reassessment (1984: 181, 187).
4. See Williams (1996), in which he claims that even in a conservative climate 
the family remains a problematic institution whose legitimacy is questioned 
in horror. Chika Kinoshita aligns Wood’s theory with contemporary Japanese 
horror (2009: 107).
5. See Clover (1992) for further discussion of this theme. Although she discusses 
films such as 
Deliverance
(John Boorman, 1972) and 
I Spit on your Grave
(Meir 
Zarchi, 1978) as examples of a redneck menace in the wilderness, the idea 
has continued with films like 
Wrong Turn
, a rare contemporary example that 

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188 
Notes to Chapter 5
shows Clover’s Final Girl to be alive and well, even in an age of greater nihil-
ism. Other narratives, such as Rob Zombie’s 
House of 1000 Corpses
(2003) 
and its sequel 
The Devil’s Rejects 
(2005), offer a murderous redneck family 
in preference to their ‘normal’ victims, reiterating horror’s age-old interest 
in subverting our understanding of monstrosity. The UK’s cycle of ‘hoodie-
horrors’ might be seen as an Anglicised variant of the same anxieties about 
a feral underclass, moving a threat formerly associated with rural areas into 
urban locations.
6. Campbell outlines the key mythic stages of this journey – departure, initia-
tion and return – in his famous work