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This is a watch at home, discuss in person event.

For our next two-part Deep Dive, we’re exploring the darker side of fairy tales: stories of transformation, desire, violence, beauty, and danger that were often far stranger and more unsettling than the versions most of us encountered as children.

Part 1 brings together three films that return to classic fairy tales and reimagine them for adults. The Company of Wolves transforms Little Red Riding Hood into a dreamlike Gothic tale of sexuality, adolescence, and predation. The Juniper Tree draws from one of the Brothers Grimm’s darkest stories to explore grief, jealousy, and the supernatural. The Ugly Stepsister turns Cinderella inside out, using grotesque body horror to examine beauty, desire, and the lengths people will go to become worthy of being chosen. Together, the films reveal how much darkness was already lurking beneath “once upon a time” — and how filmmakers have continued to reshape these old stories to reflect new fears and desires.

We will meet to discuss our thoughts on Thursday, September 17, at Edgewater Public Market. We will likely be at a picnic table outside, but please watch the comments for our exact location. Please try to watch all three before attending.

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Here is the list of films with instructions on how to find them.

THE COMPANY OF WOLVES (1984, Neil Jordan, United Kingdom)
The Company of Wolves follows a teenage girl whose dreams transform the familiar story of Little Red Riding Hood into a strange, sensual world of wolves, werewolves, and dangerous encounters. Drawing on Angela Carter’s revisionist fairy tales, the film uses the story less as a warning about literal monsters than as a way of exploring adolescence, sexuality, desire, and the fears surrounding them. Director Neil Jordan fills the film with Gothic imagery and nested stories, creating the feeling of a fairy tale constantly changing as it is told. Dark, playful, and deliberately unsettling, The Company of Wolves reveals how much violence and eroticism can lie beneath the surface of a story we think we already know.

THE JUNIPER TREE (1990, Nietzchka Keene, Iceland)
The Juniper Tree follows two sisters who flee their home after their mother is accused of witchcraft and burned at the stake. Seeking refuge with a widowed farmer and his young son, the sisters become entangled in a fragile new family shaped by desire, jealousy, grief, and suspicion. Based on one of the Brothers Grimm’s darkest fairy tales, director Nietzchka Keene strips the story down to something stark and elemental, using the medieval Icelandic landscape and supernatural imagery to create a world suspended between reality and folklore. Haunting and quietly unsettling, the film explores the violence within families and the uncertain boundary between witchcraft, imagination, and belief.

THE UGLY STEPSISTER (2025, Emilie Blichfeldt, Norway)
The Ugly Stepsister retells Cinderella from the perspective of Elvira, one of the stepsisters usually cast as a villain in the familiar story. Desperate to compete with her beautiful new stepsister for the attention of a prince, Elvira undergoes increasingly extreme attempts to transform herself into the woman she believes she must become. Drawing on the darker elements of the Brothers Grimm version of the tale, writer-director Emilie Blichfeldt turns Cinderella into a grotesque body-horror story about beauty, desire, competition, and the painful demands placed on women’s bodies. Disturbing, darkly funny, and deliberately excessive, the film asks what becoming a fairy-tale princess might actually cost.

Related topics

Events in Edgewater, CO
Classic Films
Cult Films
Foreign Films
Indie Film
Watching Movies

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