Severed Limbs and Monstrous Appetites: (Re)Defining Fairy-Tale Horror from the Seventeenth Century to the Present

Contemporary cinema and literature have frequently combined fairy-tale and horror elements, introducing twentieth-century horror visuals into fairy-tale narratives and reinterpreting characters and settings of the fairy-tale tradition through a horror lens. Examples include Gothic retellings of the ‘Snow White’ story, such as Michael Cohn’s Snow White: A Tale of Terror (1997), or the various horror adaptations of ‘Hansel and Gretel’, including Pil-Sung Yim’s film Hansel and Gretel (2007). Similarly popular has been the transformation of Little Red Riding Hood’s wolf into a werewolf, featuring in Angela Carter’s short stories ‘The Werewolf’ and ‘The Company of Wolves’—part of her collection The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories (1979), which reworks classic fairy tales from a Gothic horror perspective—but also in Catherine Hardwicke’s 2011 film Red Riding Hood. If horror and the fairy tale are so easily intermingled, can horror then be considered as a distinctive feature of the literary fairy tale? In ‘Bluebeard’ (1697), after all, Perrault creates an atmosphere of mystery and expectation of violence before describing Bluebeard’s closet, which contains the numerous corpses of his murdered wives, whose clotted blood covers the floor. Blood, bodily mutilation, and body parts are in fact extensively represented in fairy tales. Before Disney’s sanitized film adaptations, tales such as the Grimm’s versions of ‘Cinderella’ and ‘Snow White’ (1812) depicted horrific images, such as severed limbs, cannibalism, and other types of bodily violence. As far as cannibalism is concerned, the Grimm’s ‘Hansel and Gretel’ and Perrault’s ‘Le Petit Poucet’ are among the most famous stories, but cannibalistic acts or desires are also central in lesser-known tales, such as Perrault’s version of ‘Sleeping Beauty’ or the Grimm’s ‘The Juniper Tree’. What are the roles, functions, and meanings of horror in a fairy-tale narrative? This Special Issue of Literature aims to answer this question.