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adarkrainbow · 7 months

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Spooky season fairytales (2)

If there are two "Halloween fairytales" among the great and well-known classics, it would be "Hansel and Gretel" (see my previous post), and "Snow-White".

I have to admit that Snow-White has strong connotations with winter, and has been interpreted many times as a winter or spring tale (the spring interpretation being part of this wave of analysis which has every female fairytale protagonist saved from death or sleep be a symbol of spring - Sleeping Beauty, Little Red Riding Hood, and many more). But when you think about it, Snow-White is the perfect Halloween tale. It involves kind of "resurrecting" the dead. It involves a witch as an antagonist. It is centered around an apple, which is THE Halloween fruit. It relies on the use of disguises. It has a magical mirror - and Halloween was a night for divination by mirror and other mirror-rituals. EVERYTHING IS HERE!

And it also helps that surprisingly, it got the horror treatment many, many times. More than actual horrifying fairytales. But I'll blame this on the first movie in my "Spooky watch-list":

DISNEY'S SNOW WHITE!

Why is it on a list of creepy, dark and horror movies you ask? Because this movie, despite being incredibly sweet and a childhood classic, was also frigginly terrifying. It traumatized entire generations of children - kids had to be removed from theaters due to some of the creepy sequences. And still today horror pieces take inspiration from Disney's movie!

Three specific sequences form the "horror trio" of this movie. 1) The scene of Snow-White fleeing the hunter in the forest, and her terror-induced hallucinations which make the forest a place of horror. 2) The scene of the Witch-Queen going in her skeletons-flled dungeons, brewing deadly poisons, and ESPECIALLY the scene of her painful and frightening transformation into the old hag. The old hag herself is a terrifying visual which defined the image of a witch for most of the 20th century, and stayed a children's bogeywoman for generations. (By extension the Magic Mirror itself is a very creepy element of the movie, with its eeriness and uncanniness) 3) The sequence going from Snow-White's death to the death of the wicked queen. This climax of the movie is also yet another scene of great terror for any little kid.

Overall, it is ironic, but Disney's Snow-White stays one of the creepiest and more frightening faithful retellings of the Grimm fairytales - at least for a third of the movie. The rest is just wholeness cuteness and beautiful animation.

Of course, nowadays when you search for "dark fairytale movies", you will always end up hearing about 2012's "Snow-White and the Huntsman". One of the two Snow-White movies released on this year, alongside "Mirror Mirror" - and the two competing in very different lanes, since Mirror Mirror was a more light-hearted, humoristic, and "traditional fantasy" take on the fairytale, whereas "Snow-White and the Huntsman" was a "grimdark" take on the story, which marked the grimdark genre of the 2010s clearly embodied by the televisual success of "Game of Thrones".

I also like to draw a parallel between this movie and "Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters", which form the two "adult dark action-fantasy" fairytale movies of the 2010s. Not that they are identical, far from it - "Witch Hunters" is a fast-paced, video-game-like, "punch-em-all-kill-em-all-and-big-explosions-everywhere" type of "dark fantasy action movie", with a lot of humor (or of attempts at humor), while this movie truly goes for gritty fight scenes, vicious war depictions, and is dead-serious in its treatment of the story as a grand epic about survival in the wilds, the destruction of nature, evil sorcery and kingdom-destroying conflicts.

If you ask me, I understand why the reception of this movie was very divisive, and why it was a success despite everybody mocking it or hating it at the time of its release. This movie is a true "neutral" piece. It is an admirable movie - because it has absolutely stunning visuals, impressing special effects, and it is a gorgeous movies with some fascinating and clever ideas. It does take inspiration from the Disney movie "Snow White and the seven dwarfs", very clearly, but the way it twists these references into proper horror material or true dark fantasy matter (such as the "dark forest") is done very well. But it is also unfortunately a forgetable movie by many aspects. For example, I personally did not care about the two titular characters (Snow-White and the Huntsman) which did not felt like actual characters, but more like simple "plot-puppets", here to clearly fulfill a very archetypal and stereotyped fantasy plotline filled with rushed elements and extremely-thin character development. Hopefully not all the characters are bad - and in fact, beyond the stunning visuals, there is one character this movie should be seen for.

Ravenna, the evil queen. She is definitively one of the "best" part of this movie (though definitively one of the most evil and vile characters of fairytale movies) - everything about her from her concept (the queen of Snow-White turned fantasy evil overlord/inhuman witch-queen) to her crazy outfits passing by her impressive magic spells and the way her actress truly offers an intensely deranged embodiment of narcissistic evil... This is one of the more monstrous and frightening depictions of the evil queen I saw and I am all here for it. Two scenes in particular stand out for me: the poisoned apple scene (which is a true twist that does come off as very well executed) and the concept of the "magic" mirror and how it works.

Unfortunately, for an excellent half of the movie, there is another that is... at best average, at worst boring - hence the "neutral" of this movie. And of course, there is also the very awkward fact that instead of hiring dwarf actors for playing the dwarfs, they hired big-named actors of average height who were then "shrunk" by special effects... A very bad move that did not go unnoticed at the movie's release and does hit a bit more this very ambitious but ultimately half-working piece. Go watch it for Ravenna, for the Dark Forest, for the Sanctuary and the Magic Mirror and the poisoned apple scene... But the rest you can skip without losing much.

However, "Snow White and the Huntsman" was certainly not the first attempt at making Snow-White a dark and mature fantasy movie. Oh no! There was a predecessor long before it - a movie that should not be forgotten and did mark the history of Snow-White adaptations. I am talking of course of the 1997's "Snow White: A Tale of Terror", still coming at the top of "dark fairytale movie" lists.

This movie as to my knowledge the first real attempt at making a horror story out of Snow-White - in a time when making fairytales dark and "edgy" wasn't a common fashion. It also stood out for many different reasons - but it most notably stood out for its treatment of the "evil queen" character, Lady Claudia, played by none other than friggin' Sigourney Weaver herself! One has to watch the movie just to see Weaver's performance and appreciate the handling of the character of Claudia. This movie was one of the first ones who tried to depict the "wicked stepmother" of the tale as an actual human being, driven to evil rather than just evil from the beginning. Claudia is a woman who is seen falling into despair and madness as she is hit with all sorts of blights, ranging from things we can relate to (an impossible relationship between step-daughter and step-mother) to absolutely awful things - and this all serves to draw an explanation as to where her narcissistic vanity and where her hatred from Snow-White comes from, instead of just cartoonish petty jealousy. And once the human side of the character has been fully established, we delve into a terrifyingly inhuman one, as she becomes a dreadfully powerful wicked witch - to tell you the scope of this movie, the first two attempts at murdering Snow-White, the comb and the corset, were replaced here by Claudia summoning NATURAL DISASTERS.

Mind you this movie is far from being perfect - and while it is admirable in term of fairytale movies, it is definitively not working great as a movie simple. For the most part it works and is absolutely "gorgeous" (sometimes in the most repulsive ways): you have good acting, cool ideas and concepts, fascinating costumes and set pieces (the "magic mirror" is immensely cool), some good practical special effects, and very cunning use and display of character psychology and character growth (I especially appreciated the twist of Snow-White, here Lilly, trusting the obviously monstrous and frightening old woman, because she learned from experiences to not trust appearances and that ugliness doesn't mean evilness).

But all that being said, there's flaws. Already if you are an animal lover be careful: there are some visuals that can be harsh, and there are some animal stunts that seemed dangerously unsafe (I unfortunately could not find information on if animals were actually hurt). Outside of that, the climax of the story and grand final does seem a bit confusing and throw-around a bit, with some stuff coming out of nowhere, some things never explained (and not in the good "mysterious" way, in the "I want the visual and the idea but I don't know how to fit it in" kind of way), and there's some moments where you sense they truly wanted to go far with the shock value (*cough cough* the father tied to the upside-down cross* cough cough*). Plus there's the whole rushed relationship between Lilly (Snow White) and the outlaws (seven dwarfs - except here only one is a dwarf). You start with a point A (Lily is the terrified hostage of outlaws that are not pleasant nor kind) and you have a point C (Lily is now a good friend of the outlaws and admired by them, and even has a romantic tension with one of them - you can guess which, he's the one they purposefully made sexier than the other), but the point B about the development of such a character growth is missing.

Overall it feels that this movie was a project too ambitious for its means and for its time - but we won't hold a grudge towards it, because for its two thirds it stays a brilliant and truly strong piece of dark fairytale storytelling with excellent ideas (that were truly new and groundbreaking at the time of the movie's release), and while the last third is confused, rushed and incomplete, you still feel the heart and the intentions there.

However if I end up learning animals were actually hurt during the making of the movie, I'll really be pissed off (I am especially thinking about the horse stunts at the beginning, which didn't look really safe).

Not a movie, but to conclude this post I HAVE to mention Neil Gaiman's brilliant and disturbing shot story "Snow, Glass Apples". Released in 1994 - and it is no spoiler what the story is about now - it is not the first time someone reimagined Snow-White as a vampire (Tanith Lee did it before in her "Red as Blood" book), but it is certainly the most popular take on this idea and what in fact made this concept more well-known in popular culture.

Beware however - because this isn't just about Snow-White being a vampire, and the "stepmother" an actual benevolent queen and good witch, in a simple twist of the original tale. Oh no... It is a dark and depraved (in a good way) piece that depicts Snow-White as a old-fashioned vampire, in the style of the original Dracula and the folk monsters that came before him. We are talking of a frightening nightmare, of a village-decimating plague, of a repulsive undead succubus, of a blood-sucking beast in human shape...

One thing I do find fascinating with this story is that in its depraved elements, it ends up being an eerie echo to the first chapter of "Ludwig Revolution". Those that read the manga will know what I am talking about.

If you do not want to read the short story (despite it being actually available for public freely right here), there is a brilliant and gorgeous comic-book adaptation by Colleen Doran released in 2019. The beautiful, detailled, richly ornated, carefully-crafted art of Doran serves to better highlight the Gothic morbidity and the repulsive folklore behind this tragic and poetically bleak retelling, by adding fairytale colors to the nightmare, and freezing the horror in a stained glass.

#spooky season fairytales #spooky season #dark fairytales #horror fairytales #snow white #fairytale movies #horror movies #neil gaiman #snow glass apples #a tale of terror #snow white and the huntsman #disney's snow white

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