Grimm Pictures: Fairy Tale Archetypes in Eight Horror and Suspense Films (review)

Walter Rankin’s work represents an accessible, affectionate account of a variety of horror films in which, despite their lack of overt fairy-tale plot, he traces parallels to fairy-tale motifs and structures. He is centrally concerned with the common violence he finds in modern horror films and in fairy tales by the Brothers Grimm, and argues, “This violence coupled with a strong moral ties the Grimm tales to our modern horror and suspense films in provocative and profound ways” (13). This discussion appears to be rooted in the author’s own fondness for fairy tales and for the horror film, and the somewhat anecdotal introduction both characterizes horror in terms of Rankin’s own enjoyment of fear and attempts to account for its profound effect. The book’s analysis is rooted in popular culture, responding to films that speak to a wide audience rather than to art-house productions, but the work’s assumptions about fairy tale or film as folk-cultural capital remain largely unexamined.

The dual nature of Rankin’s project as both horror film and fairy-tale analysis, as well as its partial address to the film fan as much as the critic, tends to diversify the book’s critical weight, and its critical framework suggests that the author is ultimately less concerned with fairy tale than with film itself. Fairy-tale criticism is present mainly in the oft-cited works of Maria Tatar and Jack Zipes, with minor references to a far from representative sample of other fairy-tale critics. Such references are rather fragmented, used to support the argument at hand rather than offering any sustained engagement with the critics’ own arguments. They are often outweighed by the work’s rather broader invocation of film criticism and by its tendency to pad the direct comparison of film and fairy tale with detailed discussion of related texts over a broad range of times and genres.

Each of the eight chapters offers direct parallels between particular fairy-tale narratives and horror films ranging from Rosemary’s Baby (1968) to the far more recent What Lies Beneath (2000) and The Ring (2002). This represents a choice of films that do not attempt to explicitly retell a fairy tale, but whose plots Rankin proceeds to link, occasionally somewhat tenuously, to fairy-tale structures and archetypes. While each film is associated with a single, primary fairy tale, comparisons are far more wide-ranging, encompassing related and variant tales as well as popular texts, other films, legend, and mythology. This makes for rich and rather satisfying reading, but the effect is also a bit scattered: fairy tale operates as a unifying theme, not the sole concern of analysis, and the discussion at times strays into a simple listing of related fairy tales rather than sustained analysis.

The various chapters represent an interesting and not always obvious choice of horror films. The first chapter is on The Silence of the Lambs (1991), which gives rise to an intriguing discussion of cannibalism as a fairy-tale motif, as well as a survey of Little Red Riding Hood allusions and versions in the popular media. Rankin’s points about literal and psychological forests, the voyage of discovery and the fascination with the monster at the heart of the journey are cogent and satisfying, as is the following chapter, which links Scream (1996) to “Brier Rose.” Here he investigates the implications of the passive female heroine and the destruction of her suitors, and the sleep/death parallels he finds are interesting and well sustained. The film’s self-consciousness about narrative expectation also links well to fairy tale’s instantly recognizable structures. The third chapter explores The Ring as “Rapunzel,” a somewhat counterintuitive equation that works surprisingly well. The chapter relies appropriately enough on Japanese folkloric versions of “Rapunzel” as well as adaptations of Western folklore and a discussion of changeling children. Rankin fascinatingly illuminates the film by...