5 Films/TV Shows that took inspiration from Fairy Tales

There are many films and tv shows that adapt their storylines from fairy tales, sometimes quite literally. For example, Once Upon a Time (2011-2018), an American fantasy adventure series, which utilizes all the classic fairy tales like Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, and Cinderella, etc. However, once they ran through those stories, they began incorporating Disney stories like Frozen, which, if I'm being honest, is where they lost me. Another example is Grimm (2011-2017), an American detective drama based on The Grimm Brother's fairy tales, showing the darker side of the tales. I would recommend it if you are a fan of fantasy shows.

With films, of course, there is an infinite amount of adapted fairy tales. Let's be honest, the amount of Cinderella's we have at this point is a bit of a joke. Filmmakers have a wide variety of choices to interpret a tale, from its folktale routes, its fairy tale retellings, and any of its cinematic predecessors. Some adapt them quite literally, and some take specific things from the tales and then integrate them into an original idea. For example, setting it in modern-day New York about a waitress down on her luck, until she meets a handsome businessman who falls in love with her and gives her a life of luxury, and they live happily ever after. I just made that up, but I swear that film exists somewhere.

However, some films and shows are very selective and subtle with their storytelling that one might not even realise they have been adapted from a well-known fairy tale.

1. Ex Machina (2014) Dir. Alex Garland / Bluebeard

This one blew past me when I watched it for the first time. I never made the connection between Ex Machina and its fairy tale counterpart until I was doing research for my dissertation. Ex Machina is a sci-fi thriller subtly adapted from the tale of Bluebeard.

For those not familiar with this tale, Bluebeard is about a young maiden forced into marrying a wealthy nobleman. When he goes away on a trip, he gives her a set of keys to every room in the manor house but tells her not to use one in particular, or else she will face his wrath. Once having explored the manor the young maiden could no longer contain her curiosity, and so she goes to the forbidden chamber. When she enters she is overcome with fear at the sight of blood and corpses; Bluebeard's ex-wives. The ending of this tale differs depending on which story you read; in one she is saved by her brothers, in another by her mother, in a few she saves herself, and in most of them, Bluebeard is killed for his crimes.

Ex Machina is about a computer programmer who, after winning a contest, is invited to his CEO's estate to test an artificially intelligent humanoid. The resemblance of the tale lies in the narrative structure. Caleb is taken to his CEO's estate – Bluebeard's manor - with a key card that only opens certain doors – the set of keys - and after exploring unauthorised areas – the forbidden chamber - finds five previous A.I.'s that have been deactivated – killed - by the CEO, Nathan.

Nathan, of course, acts as the Bluebeard character, a wealthy man who lives in complete isolation, creating A.I. humanoids (all female), and disposing of each of them when they do not pass his tests, much like Bluebeard killing his wives when they disobeyed him. The company Nathan owns is even called Blue Book, which makes me question how I didn't notice the Bluebeard tale when I watched it the first time around.

Caleb and the A.I. humanoid, Ava, both act as the protagonist of the Bluebeard tale - the young maiden. Caleb is the one taken to an isolated estate and told what rooms he may enter, and Ava is the one who uses her own intelligence and cunning to manipulate Caleb into helping her escape her prison, and ultimately Nathan, who she then kills to finally be free.

2. Buffy the Vampire Slayer (S3 E12) "Helpless" Dir. James A. Contner / Little Red Riding Hood

In the television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer, there is an episode where Buffy loses her slayer powers (strength, endurance, etc.) and has to battle a fierce and insane vampire as a rite of passage for her 18th birthday. However, unbeknownst to her, her watcher Giles is injecting her with muscle relaxants and adrenaline suppressors. The creator of the show, Joss Whedon, and the director of the episode James A. Contner, merge this storyline with that of Little Red Riding Hood, specifically the original folktale.

In the original oral folktale, she escapes by saying that she has a call to nature and needs to be excused, to which the wolf allows but ties a rope to her ankle, which Little Red Riding Hood then ties to a tree, buying herself enough time to escape. So as opposed to her being eaten and/or saved by a woodcutter (depending on the version you read), she uses wit and intelligence and outsmarts the wolf.

The first, rather obvious, reference to the tale is an early scene in the episode where Buffy is harassed by two men and runs away from them wearing a red hoodie. Later in the episode after finding out that Giles has been drugging her, she arrives home to discover that her mother has been kidnapped by the insane vampire - Kralik. He lures Buffy to an abandoned cottage where he is holding her mother hostage, much like the wolf and Red's grandmother.

Buffy bravely goes to the cottage to save her mother, and after being beaten up and psychologically tortured she finds a way to defeat him without using physical force. She notices the vampire desperately reaching for pills after suffering severe pain in his head. She steals the pills from him and makes him chase her, buying her enough time to switch out the water in his glass for holy water, which Kralik drinks to wash down the pills, and dies. Thereby saving herself and her mother with intelligence and survival skill.

3. Ondine (2009) Dir. Neil Jordan / Undine

Ondine is a good example of a film that blurs the boundaries of real-life and legend. The film is about a fisherman, Syracuse (played by Colin Farrell), who lives in a small village on the Irish coast with his daughter Annie, who suffers from kidney failure. One day, while out on the boat, Syracuse finds a woman caught in his net, alive but unconscious. He manages to revive her and takes her to his home after she refuses to be taken to hospital. Later, at his daughter's dialysis appointment, he tells her about the woman, in the form of a fairy tale story. Annie believes the woman to be a selkie, a mythical sea creature who can shed its skin and become human when on land.

Neil Jordan adapts this story from two sources: the German folktale Undine, and the Scottish myth of selkies. He incorporates folktale figures and elements of the selkie myth - for example her siren song. Syracuse takes Ondine out on the boat with him while he is fishing, when Ondine suddenly starts to sing, coincidentally causing him to catch an incredibly large haul of fish, when earlier in the film it is established that he had been struggling to catch any. Another element he uses is a selkie's sealskin. In the legend, it is said that a selkie cannot return to the water without her sealskin, and in the film, Annie, who becomes very attached to Ondine, finds it and hides it so that she won't leave them. However in the end it is revealed that Ondine's real name is Joanna and that she is a drug mule from Romania, and her 'sealskin' is actually a bag of heroin.

The German folktale Undine is a story about a water nymph who marries a young knight to gain a soul and live her life as a human on land. Jordan incorporated this into the ending of his film. After a terrible ordeal with the drug dealers that finally track Ondine down, they are all found and arrested, causing Ondine to face deportation. In one of the final scenes, Annie reveals that Syracuse saves Ondine from deportation by marrying her, which therefore frames the end of the story with a common folktale trope of sea creatures – in this case, selkies - finding love and happiness with landsmen.

4. The Handmaid's Tale (2017-present) / Little Red Riding Hood

Your first thought may be the red hooded capes. You would only be partly right, yes that is one of the similarities, but it is certainly not the only one. The Handmaid's Tale, based on Margaret Atwood's novel with the same name, shares many motifs from the tale of Little Red Riding Hood.

The Handmaid's Tale is set in a dystopian society that has been built following a major decline in fertility rates, where they kidnap and force remaining fertile women to be child-bearers for Commanders and their baron wives.

The novel – and therefore the television series – interlaces fairy tale, mythical, and biblical intertext. The biblical intertext is explicitly commented on in the story, as the religious extremists who took over society use the bible as a way of retaining order and as a guideline for their way of living. The story they hold most sacred is the story of Jacob, Rachel, and Bilhah. Rachel could not bear children but envied her sister Leah who could, and so was given Bilhah – a handmaid – so that she could bear Jacob's children by her, which is the whole premise of The Handmaid's Tale.

In addition to that, Atwood also uses the ancient myth of the Triple Goddess, a religious deity that symbolises the stages in the female cycle: the Maiden, the Mother, and the Crone. In The Handmaid's Tale, they represent; the handmaids (maidens), the wives (mothers), and the Marthas (crones) – the Marthas are housekeepers and cooks, usually of older age.

This brings us to the fairy tale intertext. Like Little Red Riding Hood, Offred and the other handmaids are identified by their clothing, as are the wives who dress in blue, and the Marthas in grey (a dull green in the book). As the mother tells Little Red in the fairy tale "Do not stray from the path!", the handmaids are told likewise, they are not allowed to stray out of sight, they must walk the path to the store and back again, where they can be constantly seen by the Eyes (military).

Critics and folklorists have made studies on the sexual connotations of Little Red Riding Hood, in many retellings and adaptations, she is commonly written as a young girl on the cusp of womanhood, and often seen as a symbol of fertility – hence the red hooded cape. So in some adaptations, the wolf is actually written as a werewolf and is introduced as a handsome stranger who lures Little Red Riding Hood off the path and is meant to represent her transformation from a child to a woman. A good example of this is Neil Jordan's film The Company of Wolves (1984).

In The Handmaid's Tale Atwood presents Offred as an already eaten Red Riding Hood (fairy tale), a raped maiden (myth), and a biblical Bilhah (biblical). Following that train of thought, the Commander would be the wolf and Jacob, and Serena would be the mother and Rachel.

In keeping with this, critics have analysed the tale of Little Red Riding Hood as a story of rape. If we were to follow Charles Perrault's version of the tale (the first to be written and published), Little Red Riding Hood is seen to be at fault for her own demise. Perrault frames the story as a cautionary tale for little girls 'not to stray from the path', or something bad will happen to them. This pretence is heavily featured in The Handmaid's Tale.

In the first episode of the series, there is a scene where the women are being trained in their duties as future handmaids at the Rachel and Leah Centre, and Janine is sat in the centre of the room, with all the other handmaids surrounding her, telling them about when she was gang-raped. To which Aunt Lydia replies "Who led them on? Whose fault was it?" and when Janine does not answer she asks the rest of the women whose fault it was, to which they all point at Janine and chant "Her fault". Essentially the women are gaslighted into believing that any sexual abuse they had encountered in their life had been their fault.

5. Star Wars: A New Hope (1977) Dir. George Lucas / The Wizard of Oz

Like Ex Machina this one threw me quite a bit, I don't think I would have ever made the connection had I not read about it doing research for my dissertation. If you think about the narrative, the characters, and even some of the visual elements, Star Wars: A New Hope has been analysed to have a comparable narrative structure, as well as comparable character archetypes, to The Wizard of Oz (1939). I know that The Wizard of Oz was actually a novel, but nevertheless, it shares the same themes, motifs, settings, and character archetypes as a fairy tale.

Starting with some of the more obvious similarities, Luke and Dorothy both live with their Aunt and Uncle on farms - albeit in very different worlds - and both are wishing to leave their sheltered homes for something more. Their worlds are then turned upside down with a tornado and stormtroopers killing Luke's family, which forces them out of their equilibrium and onto a new path – for Dorothy that was quite literal. Along the way they both meet cooky characters; Dorothy meets the scarecrow with no brain, the tin man with no heart, and the Lion with no courage; Luke meets the gold robot C-3PO, the rolling droid R2-D2, and the Wookie warrior Chewbacca (and Han and Leia of course, but they're human).

One of the more visual similarities is Obi-Wan Kenobi's and the Wicked Witch of the West's robes, when the witch is melted only her robe remains, as does Obi-Wan Kenobi's when he is killed by Darth Vader. Both scenes are quite famous in terms of iconic film moments.

Star Wars: A New Hope has even been written several times by critics as a fairy tale. Although there are clearly comparable elements between A New Hope and The Wizard of Oz the main thing that sets them apart is the ending, where Dorothy gets to click her ruby slippers and return home, Luke no longer has a home to go to but finds a new family in the friends he met along the way and looks forward to his next adventure.

If you were to analyse a film closely enough you are likely to find some trace of fairy tale intertext. The fairy tale narrative is the earliest form of written narrative structure, and before that, they were told orally as folktales. Therefore the folktale predates the written word, and thus the narrative structure has been significant in all forms of writing.

Do you know any other films that were inspired by fairy tales?