Author: Zach Irving

By Alex Alford

I love horror movies. The ghosts, the gore, and the scares have always resonated with me in a way I cannot explain. As we began reading fairy tales, I was struck by how macabre many of them were. These stories were dealing with cannibalism, serial killers, and evil curses… I thought these elements made them much more interesting, and surely, that was the goal of writers in the 1600-1800s: to make these stories entertaining for children and adults alike. These stories reminded me of a horror movie I had seen recently. Midsommar (2019) is a film by writer/director Ari Aster that details what happens when several unsuspecting American students venture to a Swedish summer solstice festival that happens to be run by a cult. The movie itself is fantastical, and Aster himself has described the film as “more of a fairy tale than anything else.” In this video essay, I’ve broken down Aster’s observation, exploring what exactly it is that makes this harrowing movie a modern-day pastiche of classic fairy tales.

Full script below:

“When was the last time you were scared by a fairytale?

About his 2019 horror film Midsommar, writer/director Ari Aster is quoted as saying, “I see the film as a fairy tale more than anything else.” However, anyone who knows exactly what Midsommar is about may tend to disagree. Midsommar tells the story of a group of American graduate students who travel to a summer solstice festival in Sweden put on by the Harga, a small, isolated community where nearly everyone is related. Over the course of the week, all of the friends are murdered as sacrifices for the festival except for one, Dani, who is crowned festival queen and indoctrinated into the community as a new member. It’s a hauntingly beautiful film, a horror that takes place during broad daylight. It disturbs you, it makes your stomach churn, and it sticks with you for weeks after viewing. This isn’t exactly the same reaction I had last time I watched Sleeping Beauty.

But let’s take what Aster said and consider it. What does Midsommar share with fairy tales that other horror movies don’t?

The most immediate explanation for Aster’s claim is the film’s style. Shot in the Swedish countryside, this film is nothing short of beautiful. There are lush forests, beautiful pastures, cows, and quaint wooden cottages. The characters dress in robes, participate in feasts, and technology is all but absent from the film. This film relies very heavily on production design to create a fantastical environment. Characters don gowns made of flowers, do ritualistic dances around a totem pole, play flutes, and ride in carriages. From the murals that feel as though they were painted 200 years ago by folk artists, to the fact that the Harga people themselves prefer runes as their form of written communication, everything about this movie feels distinctly old-world – it feels like once upon a time. However, the events that unfold – murder, incest, suicide, and deceit – do not. None of the fairy tales I read as a kid dealt with anything remotely like this. “Little Red Riding Hood” and “Cinderella” were about stranger danger, kindness, and forgiveness. Not lust, loneliness, and paganism.

However, this might just be because I was reading the wrong versions.

Those who have seen Disney’s “Cinderella” might remember that nothing really happens to the stepsisters. However, in the Brothers Grimm version, the sisters cut off their heels to fit into the shoe, and at the end have their eyes pecked out by birds as punishment for their transgressions. I mean, have you ever seen the Brothers Grimm Movie? That thing was nightmare fuel for me as a little kid. If you’ve read the original “Little Mermaid,” by Hans Christian Anderson, you know that at the end of the story, the little mermaid is forced to choose between killing the prince or killing herself and ultimately commits suicide, spending the rest of her life in purgatory. In one of my favorite fairy tales, “Fitcher’s Bird,” a young maiden uses magic to bring her sister’s dismembered bodies back from the dead, then burns the sorcerer who killed him alive.

Most fairy tales in their original versions are quite scary. Even modern retellings keep some of these attributes – after all, no one can deny that “Hansel and Gretel” is a story about cannibalism no matter how cute the gingerbread house is. At their core, one could say that fairy tales are the original horror stories. These tales have always been a bit horrifying, and it’s only through adaptations to film (mostly by the Walt Disney company) that the stories became sanitized for children and are viewed by society as ’sweet and beautiful.’ This is because 200 years ago, kids weren’t coddled in the same way they are now. These stories were to teach morals, justice had to be served, and, at the end of the day, these gruesome tales made for great entertainment for both children and adults alike.

Both Midsommar and many original fairy stories find their roots in folk horror. Folk horror is a subgenre that deals with settings that feel “old world” – cottages in the woods, small villages… isolated Swedish communities. They often deal with the topic of religion (like many Grimm fairy tales), and we see play into Midsommar heavily. It’s a type of Paganism really, an anti-church that the Brother’s Grimm would probably cringe at, as many of their stories featured Christian symbolism, imagery, and morals. Folk horror concepts often come from ancient folklore. In the development of Midsommar, Aster studied folklore from Swedish, German, and English cultures. Folklore, by definition, is a verbal art. Fairy tales, much like Midsommar itself, find their roots in verbal folklore – stories told by women in villages to children and families around a campfire. Stories that ebbed and flowed with the time and passing of generations of kinsfolk until someone, usually a man, wrote them down.

Fairy tale scholar Vladimir Propp asserts that all folklore and fairy tales follow similar tropes and a specific structure. Using Propp’s fairytale functions, we can actually analyze Midsommar to see if it is a fairytale on a quantifiable level.

Nearly every fairytale starts with ABSENTATION, AKA the death of parents, and Midsommar is no exception – Dani’s parents and sister die at the beginning of the film, and thus she becomes a poor maiden. Not materialistically, but rather emotionally. From there, Dani heads out on a grand voyage to a faraway place – a new kingdom, as it were – Sweden. Dani’s courted by a false hero – her horrible boyfriend Christian, who spends his time disregarding her feelings and gaslighting her. Dani is rescued by a dashing Prince, Pele – however, the dramatic irony is that he’s a member of the villainous community that’s murdered Dani’s friends. However, the community crowns Dani as Queen. She’s elevated from emotional poverty to royal status, like so many rags to riches tales we’ve seen before. The community also helps expose her boyfriend’s transgressions, and they dress him in a bear suit before setting him on fire and burning him alive. Through this, he quite literally becomes the beast of the story.

Through these tentpole moments, we see that Midsommar, unlike other recent folk horror movies such as Robert Eggers the witch, successfully turns a folk horror film into a startlingly true-to-form medieval fairy tale. When one hears Aster say something such as Midsommar is “The Wizard of Oz for perverts,” one might go into the film believing it to be a parody of folklore and pagan customs. However, what one instead finds is a pastiche of the highest degree – a celebration of the macabre elements that so defined original fairytales. Hundreds of years ago, fairytales used ghastly depictions of violence to teach children not to talk to strangers. Following after classic fairytales, Midsommar, too, comes with a moral. In a modern twist, Ari Aster teaches us in the most harrowing way that cutting toxic people out of one’s life and surrounding ourselves with those who truly appreciate us is one of the hardest but most important forms of self-care.

For better or for worse.”

By Dylan Rivers

I was inspired to do this vlog by a conversation. The pandemic had been raging for about 7 months at the time, and the light at the end of the tunnel was not yet visible. While sharing smalltalk, my classmate mentioned how weird it felt to go to the grocery store. It got me thinking.

I spent my summer working in a grocery store. I needed the money, and it was one of the few places that was actually hiring. Looking back, I realize I took the job for another reason: to feel normal. I had a schedule that involved going outside of my own home, and despite the plexiglass at the checkstand and the storewide mask mandate, I could interact with people on a weekly basis. Of course, I was still hyper-aware that the virus was present, but it softened my mindset of being “quarantined.”

Then I moved back to California. Suddenly, my job became school which I Zoomed into from my closet, and my social interaction was playing video games with my similarly isolated roommates. However, we still needed food. Going to the grocery store became a surreal experience. It was an adventure on its own because it was our only real glimpse into the world beyond our duplex. It was boring, yet every time I went shopping for next week’s meals, I couldn’t help but feel fear.

This is the same fear I have felt since March. It is the same fear that was with me during a 36 hour whirlwind that brought me from Madrid to LA, and it is the same fear I have about returning to my family for the holidays when the only safe place in the country seems to be our island state. The story we call 2020 has been defined by this fear, and it has made a fairytale feel like a nightmare.

If my study of stories has taught me anything, it is that fear can be overcome. The pandemic has reminded me how young and helpless I still am, but it has also shown how resilient and mature I can be. Fear is necessary in fairy tales because it gives way to hope. Like fairytales, 2020 has shown us that there is a shining castle at the end of the mangled, oppressive woods. We just might need a GPS to get us through this last mile.

By Victoria Moser

As we have seen throughout the semester, stories change depending on who is telling them. The same basic story, when told by different authors, can leave audiences with different impressions about the characters, takeaway themes, and reactions to the tale – all while maintaining nearly the same plot points.

A classic example of this is the many versions of the tale “Little Red Riding Hood.” Most who are familiar with the classic tale would identify the Wolf as the obvious villain, and Little Red Riding Hood as the hero. As we have seen from the many adaptations and variations of the story, however, every version of the tale is not this clear in the distinction between the hero and the villain. The line between hero and villain has become blurred in some adaptations of the tale, and in others, the roles completely reversed from their original designation. Most of these extreme differences can be traced back to the author’s intentions – what they wanted you to take away from their version, and their motive for telling the story. Charles Perrault, for example, who wanted to assign his own moral to the story about exercising caution with strangers, portrays Little Red Riding Hood as naïve and childish, and in essence, blames her misfortunes on her own poor decisions – supporting his motive of teaching children, especially young girls, to be cautious of those they meet.

Through examination of the circumstances in which these tales were written and an analysis of the variations within each, we have learned to become responsible readers of fairy tales – to use everything we know from outside the tale to inform our reading of everything inside the tale. Considering that stories exist all around us, this skill does not just apply to our reading of fairy tales. We are constantly interacting with different types of stories throughout our day – in the news, in ads on television, in conversations with friends. But just as we learned how to be responsible readers of fairy tales, we must also be responsible “readers” of these other types of stories in our lives – the news story that’s biased, the ad that’s selling us something, the friend’s story that has another side we’re not hearing – because all stories have authors, and all authors have motives.

Leading up to the 2020 election season, I, like everyone, was inundated with constant political ads, showing up seemingly everywhere I turned. I soon began to realize that just as with fairy tales, these ads represent variations of the same story being told by different authors and for different motives, where details are highlighted, inserted, or removed in order to change the audience’s perceptions in support of a specific goal. Each ad turns one candidate into the hero, while declaring the other the villain, and just as with the tale of “Little Red Riding Hood,” when these variations begin to contradict each other, it can seemingly blur the lines between hero and villain.

To demonstrate how our reading of fairy tales can translate to our reading of the world around us, I have created two political campaign advertisements for a fictional race for the position of Mayor of the Forest between Little Red Riding Hood and the Wolf. For these ads, I have pulled from the facts and events of the same tale, but from two different perspectives and in support of two different motives. I created these ads to showcase the power of spinning a story in support of different goals, with the hope that seeing this power in action will protect us from falling victim to it in our own worlds. Then, we can all be responsible “readers” of the stories that exist all around us.

By Zach Irving

I took our original project idea to heart and decided to pair a series of observations made around my yard with some related reflections on various fairy tale themes. I am not a photographer, and thus there are no photos. But, for one of the more magical moments, I did find a related and very heartwarming and hilarious video: Sandhill Cranes Flight Training. You will know from reading the appropriate point to watch it.

It was winter last week and I felt like I was summering in the Hamptons. I’ve never been there, but the sun was that perfect strength where you want to take off your shirt not for relief but for warmth, and somehow, I imagine that’s what it’s like. We don’t really get winters in Florida so much as days here and there that make you forget you’re in Florida. The only observable change of season is a sort of general loss of saturation in the trees and the grass – few feel the need to give up their leaves. As a result, I’ve never experienced a true winter setting, with the cold and the snow as background to daily life rather than vacation destination.

In “The Little Match Girl”, Hans Christian Anderson takes winter to its extreme. The cold is bitter, and the darkness is cold. It numbs and it howls, and, in the end, it kills. And this is not an unfair view of winter. For those without a hearth and home, it is deadly. A winter which spares you at first might ruin your crops and starve you in the end. We now know that lack of sunlight can literally make you depressed. The Norse, familiar with winter, thought of hell as everlasting ice, not fire. Winter is, after all, the retreat of the sun – the life giver. I sympathize with this perspective, but sometimes, when each year is the same, unbroken by the seasons, I find myself wishing my winters were wintrier.

There’s something beautiful about the real cold, the kind with ice and snow. People routinely brave the cold for a chance to see glaciers and mountains, and the more inhospitable they are the more beautiful they seem. Acres of unbroken ice make Antarctica one of the most stunning places on Earth. Snow White, fairest in all the land, is so because her skin is white as snow. Her paleness should, by association with winter, frighten and repulse us (Neil Gaiman explores this connection in “Snow, Glass, Apples”). Instead, her skin makes her special. Pure white skin is rare, like diamonds or gold. And it is also delicate, ruined by exposure to sunlight. And I think this is how I feel about the winter. It comes once a year, and in many places never. It is melted away quickly by the sun. Like Snow White’s voyeurs, we want to view the strange and fragile creature while we can – and for only so long as it remains strange and fragile. Too long of a winter, or one that makes us fragile instead of it, is feared rather than desired.

But it was not winter today and I sat in the back patio looking over the yard. The birds arrived around 12:45, with something red darting across the scene and pre-empting the arrival of three cranes who stalk our yard. I have a somewhat tense relationship with the cranes which stems from several prior encounters I had while painting our side fences. Our right fence, in the front of the house, runs through a slight ditch which fills with water regularly during the summer season. Much of the cranes’ day is spent in this area, pecking in the puddles for whatever it is they eat. My project thus took me directly into what they perceived as their territory. Indeed, these cranes appeared to lack even the most rudimentary grasp of private property, and my attempts to explain that I needed only to access our fence and did not mean to evacuate them from the premises, fell flat. As I crept closer, the cranes performed a sort of pre-fight maneuver in which they make loud noises and attempt to appear as big as they can. I did my best to offer no response. Eventually they gave up their spot, but we repeated this encounter for several days.

The cranes were now in the back yard, however, and unaware of my watching them. The three of them form a family unit, two parents and a smaller child. The largest one is carrying out a bizarre exercise wherein he jumps about two feet off the ground and flaps his wings with great force but little speed. It is distinct from the aforementioned fighting maneuver. Periodically the young crane copies him. The other one continues to eat. I am just about ready to give up on interpreting the affair when it occurs to me that I am watching the young crane learn to fly. Unlike smaller birds, cranes launch themselves from the ground instead of from a tree, and so they apparently need to actually learn how to do so. The little crane gets a couple feet off the ground but cannot sustain it. They give up eventually. Progress, perhaps, but not success.

After watching this I felt strangely like I had intruded. The scene felt like private, family business. Like watching a father and son have their first drink, or someone else’s baby take its first steps. One of those moments that makes you see the human in the animal. Fairy tales do something similar: a wolf which talks and plots in “Little Red Riding Hood”, pigs and frogs and dogs which turn into people after a kiss. But these animals are really humans in disguise; often speaking, and always with the capacity for rational thought. By portraying them as animals we associate them with the natural world, which we separate them from ourselves. This allows us, especially as children, to comprehend those parts of ourselves most animal-like: our willingness to destroy and consume, our anger and our appetites. We can more readily see a wolf as evil, a pig as dirty, a frog as grubby. What fairy tales do is to make us see the animal in the human, not the other way around.

I remember as a child being irrationally afraid of animals, thinking that if I ever laid eyes upon a snake or spider or bear my death would soon follow. I was even afraid of the crane at first, with its sharp beak and loud noises, and took extra care to always cede the playground to them. But as I aged my fear of the natural world began to mellow. For the most part, if you don’t bother animals, they won’t bother you – an oft repeated sentiment which never sunk in for young me. This tendency, to fear animals more than man, is partially refuted by tales which tell us man can be evil too. But that animals are not something to be feared is always left out. Even the animal brides are always humans in disguise, or at the least, turn into them.  It could be that I never read the animal bride tales as a child, and so never saw the animal’s redemption. I think this is an unhealthy fear, and I worry that fairy tales exacerbate it.

The most fearsome of all fairy tale villains is the man-eater. Commonly represented by ogres and giants, and almost never by humans (even Bluebeard does not eat his victims), the man-eater plays off two deep-seated fears. Most plainly, of death and dying. But why does being eaten afterwards bother us so much? It is because it demonstrates a fundamental lack of respect. Bluebeard has the decency to at least admire his collection of dead women, to recognize them as human, and thus, not as food. But a man-eater has no such qualms. It is no accident that they are generally giants. The giant is bigger and stronger than us, and he eats us because to him, we are food. We observe the same relationship with many animals, where the big (us) swallows the little (cows, pigs, etc.). And we are very afraid that we might not actually be the biggest ones around. This fear of being small and worthless is what makes the man-eater and the giant so much worse.  

I decide to take a short walk out to the lake. As I dangle my legs over the edge of the dock, I see out of the corner of my eye some forest rustling. I turn and spot a racoon approaching the water’s edge. He does this curious thing with his hands in the water, as if he were trying to wash his hands but no one had ever shown him how. When he sees me he freezes. His racoon mother must have told him that predators can’t see without movement. Annoyed at the interruption, he leaves.

The raccoons are robbers. Specifically, they rob our cat. And they have developed a systematized approach to this robbery. At the time of approach (8 o clock, on the dot), we are either in the living or dining room. They check each room for us, leaving a lookout posted at the window in case we should check for them. Meanwhile, the other raccoons (there is always at least two, and up to four), approach the cat feeder and eat as fast as they possibly can. It’s easy enough to scare them off, with a clap or a stomp, and they scamper away like in a cartoon, looking back over their shoulder instead of at the road ahead.

It’s a hilarious routine, but I feel weirdly guilty about scaring them off. It isn’t like we don’t have food to spare, and their success rate is so low that they must be quite desperate to keep coming back. And our cat doesn’t seem to mind – she sits on the couch and watches them unbothered. But it just feels like we’re being robbed, and like the proper response to that is to chase off the robbers. Not to mention, making it easy for them to steal, or, worse, actively feeding them, will only encourage them to come back, unknown diseases and all. But running them off always makes me feel like a giant. And while I don’t ever want to meet a giant, I don’t want to be one either.

By Ian Gray

My parents are my best friends

Or is it were?

I do not know

It is hard to say anymore

Did Snow White like her parents?

Her dad was absent

Her mother was dead

Her stepmother wished her dead

What did she feel as she ran? 

Through the woods

Far from a life she knew

Far from a life that nearly killed her

Would she have run if she knew?

The frightening woods

Her stepmother’s relentless pursuit 

A poison apple

I knew something was wrong

Why did I not ask?

A scared student

A scared son

Would Gretel have known?

Even if she did not hear

By the look of her mother

The pain of her father

Could they have talked?

Before the abandonment

Before the hunger

Before the witch

Where did they find hope?

Pebbles on a path

A scrawny bone

Her quick shove

We sat in the kitchen

Was the food supposed to be comforting?

A father no longer invincible

A son no longer a child

Does cancer have a place in fairy tales?

Only a sorcerer could concoct such a curse

A scientific reality

And a scientific mystery

Would Bluebeard’s wrath be this frightening?

A sorcerer can be outsmarted

A sorcerer can be stabbed

His house does fall

Where does one stab illness?

An invisible enemy

Arriving in silence

Leaving silence

I thought we would thrive together

Did he look forward to the future as much as I?

I wanted to be a team

Working, laughing, living

How did Jack’s father die?

I want Jack’s curiosity

His courage

His luck

Was his void ever filled?

His empty stomach

His empty soul

A boy in need of magic

Can I still kill giants?

Because I really need to

Jack did

But not everyone does

I need a promise

Is it too abstract a request?

A promise to hold

A promise kept

From where do promises come?

To where do promises go?

Are they steady and unchanging?

Or dynamic, full of life’s complexity?

I will be a promise

Standing firm for my family

Listening to life’s lyric

Holding tight, never letting go

---

In the summer of 2016, a week before Ian started his senior year of high school, his father was diagnosed with cancer. Treatment began shortly thereafter. His father spent Ian’s 18^th birthday in the hospital fighting to survive a major surgery, which he did. The cancer, however, returned a few months later, and a couple weeks before Ian’s high school graduation, his father died. 

Ian considers his biggest blessing in life to be his parents. His admiration for his mother grows every single day as she continues to lead him and his two younger sisters. Ian strives to make his parents proud and be a son deserving of such wonderful parents. 

Ian is inspired by fairytales, magic, and the inherent promise buried within fairytales. Though there are many ways one could describe this promise, Ian’s father got to its essence in his consistent, steady reminder, “God is still on His throne.”