While most horror films these days pile on the jump-scares or attempt to provide more cerebral terrors, few borrow elements from fairytales, where much horror has been found for hundreds of years. As cautionary fables, fairytales from all over the world, particularly in Europe, have been dark stories designed to instruct children not to stray from paths, not to venture out alone at night, and not to talk to strangers.
Horror films that draw on fairy tale themes can effectively use imaginative methods to terrify audiences, especially in the area of creature designs and strong environmental visuals. With the release of Gretel and Hansel, a retelling of the Brothers Grimm fairytale, lets look at 5 fairy tale horror films fans love & 5 they don’t.
LOVE: THE HALLOW
For fans of Irish folklore, The Hallow weaves a tale rich in Celtic mythology. It follows a plant conservationist as him and his family move into a home near a wood, inhabited by all manner of fairy folk. But these fae aren’t the sort of nice pixies you read about in stories.
These faeries, along with banshees, gremlins, and other woodland creatures begin to terrorize the household, playing mean-spirited pranks on them that turn deadly. Featuring gorgeous cinematography and compelling visual effects, it will change the way you think about Tinker Bell.
HATE: LITTLE RED RIDING HOOD
Little Red Riding Hood may be a beautiful film to look at, but it showcases style over substance, and the horror lies in its lack of any dramatic tension, which is criminal in a story about werewolves! Helmed by the director of Twilight, it featured a love story once again surrounding supernatural creatures.
Valerie loves both Peter and Henry, but she can only marry one. Just as she’s made her choice, a werewolf attack results in her sister’s murder. Father Solomon (Gary Oldman) comes to save the day and the script, but he may be too late for both.
LOVE: THE COMPANY OF WOLVES
The concept of turning the wolf antagonist of Little Red Riding Hood into a werewolf was done to perfection in the ’80s with The Company of Wolves, Neil Jordan’s majestic gothic fantasy film with just enough chaos and terror to give it a place in the horror genre.
It centers on Rosaleen who is on the cusp of womanhood, and her grandmother (played with campy gusto by Angela Lansbury) who weaves her tales of masculine fiends, scenes from which unfold in an anthology Rosaleen becomes a part of. Beware men whose eyebrows meet!
HATE: THE LURE
There are fans who love The Lure, but mostly there are fans who love to hate Agnieszka Smoczynska’s bizarre take on Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid. In this horror film there are two mermaids, Golden and Silver, who come ashore to a town in ’80s Poland.
They fall in with a nightclub crowd at the local cabaret, where they also fall in love; one with a man, the other with the taste of human flesh. Many of the classic elements from the fairytale are used (one does gain legs, in a particularly gruesome fashion), but there are too many areas where the suspension of disbelief draws viewers out of the film.
LOVE: GRETEL AND HANSEL
Like the change of name suggests, Gretel and Hansel is a traditional German folktale and that takes a slight detour from the Brothers Grimm story. Gretel is the older sibling who takes her younger brother Hansel into the wood and encounters the old crone’s house, in a horror film that doubles as a coming of age fable.
While much emphasis is put on Holda the Witch, it’s in an intriguing way, aided by the emphasis on her backstory (which she was never given in the original tale). Make no mistake she still wants to devour the children, but now there’s context to her cannibalism.
HATE: TALE OF TALES
With the talents of John C. Reilly and Salma Hayek, Tale of Tales ought to be a finer film than it is, but it seems to sag under the weight of its own expectations. It presents as a mini-horror anthology of three tales that intersect at the convergence of sanity.
Three rulers of three neighboring kingdoms each have an obsession to grapple with; a king who is obsessed with sex, one who is taken with a peculiar animal, and a Queen who must have a child at all costs. There’s necromancy, dragons, witches, and buckets of blood, but somehow none of it seems to come together in a cohesive storyline.
LOVE: PAN’S LABYRINTH
Guillermo del Toro’s gift for blending fairytales and horror is as masterful as his creature creation, both of which are on display in the beautifully ghastly Pan’s Labyrinth. In it he focuses on a young girl named Ofelia, who has accompanied her mother (and her mother’s new husband) to flush out rebels in Nazi-occupied Europe.
Ofelia’s new step father is a brutal sadist, and to escape the horrors of witnessing his war crimes, she dives into Pan’s Labyrinth, a mystical place full of fairytale creatures. Some are kind, and some are not so kind, but she finds the courage to solve their riddles while simultaneously finding the courage to help free her mother from her captivity.
HATE: FREEWAY
A modern take on the Little Red Riding Hood fable, Freeway features Keifer Sutherland and Reese Witherspoon as a sadistic pedophile and a young teen just trying to get to her grandmother’s house. The premise, while disturbing, isn’t the main complaint of the film.
The plot surrounding Witherspoon’s Vanessa leaving her prostitute mother’s house after a drug raid, only to fall into the hands of Sutherland’s child-counselor-turned-serial-killer, plays out like the disgusting happenings of the sleaziest guests on a daytime talk show.
LOVE: SNOW WHITE: A TALE OF TERROR
Like Angelina Jolie was perfectly cast to play Maleficent, so Sigourney Weaver was perfectly cast to play the Wicked Queen in Snow White: A Tale of Terror in 1997. The film offered a dark gothic fantasy take on the Snow White fairytale, with a strong emphasis on horror.
Weaver stole the film as the insane and evil Queen obsessed with the beauty of her step-daughter, but what makes her performance so vivid is the slow process she adopts to get to her madness, and the depraved depths she goes to once it’s revealed Snow White is not the perfect heroine we know and love.
HATE: GINGERDEAD MAN
What happens when you mix sugar, spice, and the ashes of a dead serial killer? A very campy horror film that isn’t as palatable as its recipe would suggest. Gingerdead Man seems like a movie that would have worked better in theory, until the outcome involved a giant gingerbread man wielding a kitchen knife.
When a witch decides to resurrect her dead son with a gingerbread recipe, he comes back in the form of deranged cookie, intent on murdering the young girl who got him executed for his crimes. Sadly, the film lacks any real frights, and that’s the way the cookie crumbles.
