Fairy Tale and Film

A Tale of Two Sisters
with other Korean horror films, such as 
the 
Whispering Corridors
series, Jinhee Choi claims that troubled female 
spirits represent an ‘adolescent female sensibility which has hitherto 
been neglected by many mainstream genres’ (2009: 56). Adam Knee 
makes a similar point about Asian horror’s wider interest in wronged 
girls, asserting that in ‘
Ringu
and many of the wave of films following 
it there is ... a vengeful desire for justice on the part of a girl or woman 
who has been wronged and it is here that the emotions of honour and 

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Houses of Horror 
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guilt in which these films are often immersed originate’ (2009: 73). 
According to Knee, the motif of ‘unruly female ghosts insisting they be 
recognised’ reflects a ‘deeper preoccupation with the status of the femi-
nine in a changing Asia’ (78), prompting us to consider how develop-
ments in education and the workplace have impacted on gender roles 
and family structures, as well as cinematic representations. Are unhappy 
spirits, and the unearthing of family secrets, a progressive attempt to 
return the repressed to their rightful place in the world and seek a more 
egalitarian future? Do these films ask us to take subordinated females 
more seriously, or do they reiterate the same old stories in either mak-
ing female ‘monsters’ too malevolent to be sympathetic, or recouping 
femininity through the most passive of gestures, self-sacrifice? Most 
importantly, where is any sense of guilt and blame finally projected? 
The dead mother and sister who haunt the family home in 
A Tale of 
Two Sisters
fail to reveal what really happened, with the circumstances 
describing Su-Yeon’s death so outlandish as to seem improbable. The 
father’s evasion of culpability is equally unconvincing. His insistence 
on keeping his second wife sedated appears sinister and controlling – 
and what should we make of his confession to being a ‘bad father’? 
Because the entire narrative is refracted through Su-mi’s viewpoint, we 
can only guess at the answers, placing us in the role of the investigating 
psychiatrist, listening to an account that fails to cohere. We are forced 
to reconsider fairy tale clichés not only about wicked stepmothers but 
about the innocent persecuted heroine also, acknowledging a transfer-
ence of blame and guilt from daughter to stepmother, while also sug-
gesting such reversals are just another evasion of what is really going 
on: a warped family portrait presented from the distorted perspective of 
a desiring daughter.
While 
A Tale of Two Sisters
hints at the narrator’s incestuous interest 
in her father, its US version, 
The Uninvited
(Tom and Charlie Guard, 
2009), makes this suggestion explicit, with Su-mi’s counterpart, Anna 
(Emily Browning), killing both her mother and her stepmother, as well 
as her sister, to have her father to herself.
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Her apparent guilt in failing 
to save her sister is thus a cover story, used to conceal the fact that she 
secretly desires her father, rehashing Freud’s transference of incestuous 
desire from father to daughter. Like 
Orphan
’s Esther, Su-mi and Anna 
are pathologised for their illicit feelings – albeit in a manner so exces-
sive it may be read as a parody of the Electra complex. In a similar 
vein, Jacques Demy’s pantomime version of ‘Donkeyskin’,
 Peau d’ane 
(1970), has been perceived by some critics as a pastiche of the original 
tale and its Freudian interpretations, although the fact that the princess 

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