Little Red Riding Hood: Victimage in Folktales and Cinema—A Case Study

In this paper we attempt to interpret Little Red Riding Hood’s most famous variants in light of its recent film adaptations. With reference to René Girard’s theory of sacrifice, we will argue that the latest one of these, Catherine Hardwicke’s 2011 adaptation offers the chance to see in Perrault’s “Little Red Riding Hood” the result of a diachronical evolution in four steps of the misrecognizing narration of a collective lynching, a full-fledged scapegoating of an anonymous villager accused and persecuted as werewolf. We will find further support in Vladimir Propp’s and Alan Dundes’s contributions.