Fairy Tale and Film

Houses of Horror 
119
are rewarded, leaving us with a happy ending. However, the horror film 
is not bound by the same tendencies and often refuses to mollycoddle 
viewers in this way. Similarly situated as a ‘fantastical vehicle’ – yet 
enjoying greater freedom in terms of addressing an adult audience (and 
choosing its subject matter accordingly) – the genre serves as one of the 
few repositories our culture permits for revealing the more unpleasant 
aspects of human nature and asking some potent questions about our 
conception of normality – as well as its aberrations. Who tends to be 
assigned greater responsibility for raising children, for example, and 
who assumes the greater burden of blame in any accusations of parental 
misconduct are just some of the issues recent horror has involved itself 
with – often reprising, as well as occasionally repudiating, familiar fairy 
tale tropes.
Maternal malevolence is one such theme, established as archetypal 
and therefore presumed to be ever-present, yet, as Warner eloquently 
attests, ‘an archetype is a hollow thing, but a dangerous one, a figure or 
image which through usage has been uncoupled from the circumstances 
which brought it into being and goes on spreading false consciousness’ 
(1995: 239). The fairy tale’s tendency to foreground maternal villainy 
can be accounted for in various ways: from editorial policies that saw 
flawed fathers effaced from collections to arguments that, as the pri-
mary care-giver, mothers make a more apt target for hostility.
10
‘Hansel 
and Gretel’ (ATU 327A) illustrates the gender discrepancy at work, 
blaming the mother for conceiving the plan to abandon their children 
in the woods, when starvation looms, whilst making the father a reluc-
tant accessory. No grudges are held towards him when the children 
return, and the mutual elimination of witch and mother clearly nomi-
nates the preferred parent. Even when fathers are presented at their 
worst, seeking to sexually abuse their own daughters in tales such as 
‘Donkeyskin’ (ATU 510B), fairy tales often find a way to blame moth-
ers for such crimes, with dying queens inadvertently condemning their 
daughters by urging their husbands to remarry only someone in their 
likeness.
11
Fathers thus tend to eschew parental responsibility, through 
either evasion or absence, proving so ineffectual in tales like ‘Cinderella’ 
and ‘Snow White’ that they may as well not exist. ‘The Juniper Tree’ 
(ATU 720) pushes paternal innocence to its limit when a resentful 
stepmother murders her stepson and serves his remains to his unwit-
ting father. Despite these efforts to obscure her villainy, the boy gains 
revenge from beyond the grave. With the help of his stepsister, Marleen, 
who buries his bones under a tree, alongside his mother’s remains, he 
is magically reborn as a bird and secures various gifts for his family: a 

---

120 
Fairy Tale and Film
handkerchief for the sister who resurrected him and a gold chain for his 
father (who devoured him with gusto!), and drops a millstone onto 
his killer. Order is thus restored; the bird resumes human form and the 
family (minus the stepmother) sit down to eat together. Paternal neglect 
is happily forgiven, a virtuous female redeems her mother’s crime, and 
supernatural means ensure that justice is served. Horror has provided 
some fascinating new takes on this theme (neatly encapsulated by the 
tale type ‘A Child Returns from the Dead’ (ATU 769)), often challenging 
the tendency to let male parents off the hook. 
The mistreated child, returning from the dead, appears in a number 
of Japanese horror films. In 
Ringu
(Nakata Hideo, 1998) a girl is deemed 
unnatural by her father, accused of bringing bad luck, and thrown into 
a well by her mother and left to die. In 
Ju-on
(Shimizu Takashi, 2000) a 
young boy is killed at home with his mother when his father discovers 
her crush on a teacher and goes berserk. These wrongful deaths each 
result in a curse that unleashes an invincible evil in the world. Although 
the female investigators who unearth these crimes seek to lay unhappy 
souls to rest (in similar vein to Marleen), this attempt at appeasement 
fails to work (a funeral for