6 Dark Fairytale Films (for people who can't handle horror)

A list of frightening, often graphic, films you might be able to handle, all of them inspired by myth, fairytales, and gothic horror.

For the first few years of my life, I grew up with a stay-at-home dad who worked in the film industry as a composer and a mother who was on tour or often came back very late from work. So I spent lots of time with papa, who was giddy as a schoolboy to have someone to play with, show his prog-rock records to, and watch movies with — movies most people, and definitively my mother if she had known, would have considered age-inappropriate. Am I terrified of spiders because I saw Arachnophobia at age 7? Absolutely. Am I frightened still every time I hop in the shower because I watched Psycho at 5 years old? What do you think. The list goes on. And yet there is nothing I loved more than these playdates with papa, they’re the reason I grew up to adore cinema, even though they turned me into a highly impressionable person. Unfortunately as a result, I simply can’t handle horror — and that makes my movie nerd heart break a little, because I know I’m missing out on so much. I am trying to graduate from that shortcoming. My entry point into handling horror was through dark fairytales. If it has the aesthetic of Gothic fantasy, my post-scary-movie insomnia gets reduced from one week to two nights — a manageable improvement. Here is my list of frightening films you might be able to handle if you are apprehensive like me — all of them inspired by myth, fairytales, and gothic horror.

Crimson Peak (2015) — Guillermo Del Toro

The movie that opened me up to giving horror a chance. When I was a teenager, I was completely obsessed with Gothic literature — The Monk, Dracula, Carmilla, Wuthering Heights, and anything by Lovecraft and Poe. So this is the film I was waiting for: in the aftermath of a family tragedy, an aspiring author is torn between love for her childhood friend and the temptation of a mysterious outsider. Trying to escape the ghosts of her past, she is swept away to a house that breathes, bleeds — and remembers. Ah, how perfect. It has it all, the ghosts, the decaying manors, the perversity, the murders, the toxic families, the true love against all odds. This is my guilty pleasure par excellence. Del Toro’s film is a sensory explosion that follows all the tropes of the Gothic novel to a tee. It is extremely indulgent and unabashed, reveling in every cliché. Also it has a cast of stars, including Jessica Chastain, Tom Hiddleston (arguably in his best role), and a drop-dead gorgeous, spellbinding Mia Wasikowska. Maybe start with this one?

Sleepless nights: 1

Suspiria (1977) – Dario Argento

Papa once called me a party-pooper for making him stop Suspiria before it even started: I couldn’t handle the opening credits. The absolutely terrifying opening credits with brilliant music by prog-rock band Goblin. Recently, when I saw it was playing at my local cinema’s “midnight favorites” series, this was my opportunity to save face. And I loved it. Suspiria is a gothic horror fairytale, inspired by Thomas de Quincey’s Suspiria de Profundis, about a young American woman battling occult forces in a prestigious German dance school. What makes the graphic scenes watchable and the terror bearable is Dario Argento and director of photography Luciano Tovoli’s masterful symphony of contrast and vibrating color. What inspired their aesthetic was the Technicolor pop in Disney’s Snow White, to whom lead actress Jessica Harper bears a great apropos ressemblance. Tovoli explains “Technicolor lacked subdued shades, was without nuances—like cut-out cartoons,” and that’s exactly what they wanted! To achieve this effect, they used outdated anamorphic Technovision lenses and Technicolor’s dye-transfer printing process, dragging the viewer through the labyrinth of hypnotizing sets by Giuseppe Bassan into a whirlwind of violent reds and blues, a completely parallel world of witchy, fairytale fantasy.

Sleepless nights: 1

Freeway (1996) – Matthew Bright

Not “horror” but this movie is insane and I’m always surprised when people haven’t seen it. Definitely a dark fairytale. It’s a super violent, unhinged, irresistibly “white trash” modern retelling of Little Red Riding Hood, starring Reese Witherspoon as Red — a fourteen year old illiterate girl from Southern Los Angeles — and Kiefer Sutherland as the wolf — a professor who picks her up while she’s hitchhiking trying to run away from social services and attempts to molest and murder her. The whole thing produced by Oliver Stone. And let me tell you, it’s such a thrill to see Red Riding Hood kick the big bad wolf’s arse — very cathartic. It’s gratuitously graphic, it’s campy, it’s totally outrageous and irreverent. It’s so over the top and ridiculous that the violence is just one more element of the circus — a brilliant circus with high levels of skill and virtuosity. This very odd movie was unsurprisingly not a box office success, but it was an instant hit with the critics and has since achieved quite a cult following. Young Witherspoon is hilarious and mesmerizing, her performance is a tour-de-force, one could watch the film for this reason alone. How have you not heard of this?

Sleepless nights: 0

Sleepy Hollow (1999) — Tim Burton

As a child, I became obsessed with Disney’s 1949 Adventures of Ichabod, narrated and sung by Bing Crosby, and it became a ritual for us to watch it at least every Halloween. The original 1820 story by Washington Irving is basically about a bad prank played on Ichabod Crane, a lanky venal schoolmaster, by a stronger rival as they both try to woo the richest girl in Tarrytown, NY, a village that lies in one of the spookier parts along the Hudson River. Tim Burton keeps the spooky setting, the Gothic elements, the witchiness of the American East Coast, and the headless horseman — and gets rid of everything else. Oh, and he keeps Ichabod — played by Johnny Depp, of course — but turns him into a nerdy police constable infatuated with forensic science but squeamish at the sight of blood. Great touch. Sleepy Hollow becomes a paranormal investigation into romantic American folklore. It’s beautiful, dark, funny, it’s a ghost story told by the fire. I wish Tim Burton made more of these extremely stylistically serious films and fewer quirky ones. This type of material is where he truly shines — Vincent, Edward Scissorhands, Nightmare before Christmas, and my personal favorite Big Fish all capture the residual melancholy of Gothic America. Sleepy Hollow, of course, is the epitome — it’s Edgar Poe, it’s the Salem trials, it’s the Revolutionary War… it’s every angsty adolescent’s dream (I think).

Sleepless nights: 1

The Witch (2015) — Robert Eggers

Subtitled “A New England Fairytale”, this is my favorite director Robert Eggers’ debut, starring Anya Taylor-Joy in her first feature film. Eggers delves into Salem-style folklore with a mixture of scholarly accuracy and a keen understanding of myth and fairytale. Set in 1630s New England, a Puritan family is banished from their settlement over a religious dispute and forced to relocate to a farm near a secluded forest, facing starvation without the help of their community. It rapidly becomes clear that something supernatural is lurking in that forest and hell-bent on destroying them, while all the blame falls on the teenage daughter. The on-screen absence of the monster makes the film that much more terrifying, it keeps you wondering which kind of shape or face could possibly go with that bump you heard in the night. As usual with Eggers, and fairytales in general, this is much more than just a horror film: it’s a strange coming of age story about individuation and freedom, and unexpectedly moving. It’s nothing new, I’m always “all in for Eggers”, you should watch his entire filmography. He has directed four feature length films by age forty, and they are all flawless. How does he do it?

Sleepless nights: 1

Midsommar (2019) — Ari Aster

We should all have a friend who forces you to watch movies you don’t want to watch. I’m a lucky girl, I have a few — and evidently I’m turning into one myself. I really did not want to see this movie, I had a nightmare just watching the trailer. I was dragged to it kicking and screaming. I ended up seeing it twice. The plot: a group of American anthropology students travel to Northern Europe to visit a rural Swedish mid-summer festival. What begins as an idyllic retreat quickly devolves into an increasingly violent and bizarre competition at the hands of a pagan cult. Aesthetically, it’s giving strong Wicker Man vibes, but again, as most films I get obsessed with, it’s in fact a parable in disguise. Ari Aster hilariously declared that his film was about a “bad breakup” and though this is absolutely true — I can’t see how a breakup could be much worse — it’s really about the coming of age of the heroine, brilliantly interpreted by Florence Pugh. It’s also a very deep and disturbing social commentary that sets two extreme ways of life against each other: American individualism and a pagan community — loosely modeled after Rudolph Steiner’s Anthroposophy — where the individual doesn’t exist at all outside of the group. The lost and mistreated heroine who longs for family and empathy finally embark on a quest to find herself while navigating these extremes. Ari Aster is undoubtably a master of horror¹, but — very much like Eggers — he digs much deeper than the jump-scare slasher films. The original score by Bobby Krlic, a.k.a the Haxan Cloak, is absolutely sublime and Pawel Pogorzelski’s cinematography is jaw-dropping. This is the first horror movie I’ve seen that is bathing in glorious, blinding sunlight. This film is a masterpiece.

Sleepless nights: 4

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There are more dark fairytale movies I could have included. Coppola’s magnificent Dracula is a personal favorite, Jeunet’s City of Lost Children is a masterpiece, though not exactly horror. And there are oddities like Snow White, a Tale of Terror which is almost a B-movie, but starring an entrancing Sigourney Weaver. Little Otik, a Czech horror retelling of Pinocchio by Jan Švankmajer is high on my list of films to watch. One of my new year resolutions — inspired by the recent Robert Eggers Nosferatu — is to watch one horror film per month, so please leave me your suggestions in the comments!

1. I was forced to watch Hereditary by the same pushy friend and… no can do.