DEEP DIVE: Dark Fairytales: Part 2

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

For Part 2 of our Dark Fairytales Deep Dive, we venture further into the strange, violent, and sensual world of the fairy tale, drawing on stories by Charles Perrault, Giambattista Basile, and Hans Christian Andersen.

Bluebeard revisits Perrault’s tale of a young bride who discovers the horrifying secret hidden within her husband’s castle, exploring curiosity, power, marriage, and fear. Tale of Tales brings several stories from Basile’s seventeenth-century collection The Pentamerone to life in all their grotesque and unpredictable strangeness, filled with monsters, transformations, impossible desires, and dangerous bargains. The Lure radically reimagines Andersen’s The Little Mermaid as a dark musical about two carnivorous mermaid sisters navigating sexuality, love, appetite, and the painful desire to become something else.

Together, these films take us deeper into a tradition in which beauty and horror, desire and danger, transformation and loss are rarely far apart—and remind us that fairy tales were never quite as innocent as we remember them.

We will meet to discuss our thoughts on Wednesday, October 14, 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.

BLUEBEARD (2009, Catherine Breillat, France)
Bluebeard follows a young girl drawn into the story of a wealthy nobleman whose previous wives have mysteriously disappeared. Based on Charles Perrault’s seventeenth-century fairy tale, the film strips away much of the Gothic spectacle usually associated with the story and focuses instead on curiosity, power, fear, and the unsettling dynamics of marriage. Director Catherine Breillat approaches the tale with characteristic restraint, allowing its violence and sexual menace to emerge gradually rather than through conventional horror. Quiet, eerie, and psychologically charged, Bluebeard turns a familiar warning about forbidden knowledge into a meditation on innocence, desire, and the danger hidden inside seemingly ordinary relationships.

• Watch on Kanopy with a Denver Public Library card
• Watch for free on Tubi (with ads)
• Rent on Prime Video

TALE OF TALES (2015, Matteo Garrone, Italy)
Tale of Tales weaves together three stories of kings, queens, monsters, and impossible desires, each drawn from Giambattista Basile’s seventeenth-century collection The Pentamerone. Rather than smoothing out the strangeness of these old tales, director Matteo Garrone embraces their grotesque humor, sudden violence, sensuality, and dreamlike logic. Across stories of obsession, beauty, transformation, and parental control, the film reveals a world in which wishes are rarely granted without consequence. Lavish, bizarre, and often unsettling, Tale of Tales captures the fairy tale as something older and stranger than modern fantasy: a place where wonder and cruelty exist side by side.

• Watch on Kanopy with a Denver Public Library card
• Watch for free on Tubi (with ads)
• Watch on Shudder
• Rent from Prime Video

THE LURE (2015, Agnieszka Smoczyńska, Poland)
The Lure follows two mermaid sisters who emerge from the sea and are taken in by a Warsaw nightclub, where their beauty, voices, and predatory appetites quickly make them part of the act. Loosely adapting Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid, director Agnieszka Smoczyńska transforms the familiar story into a strange mixture of horror, musical, romance, and dark fantasy. Beneath the film’s glittering surfaces and absurd humor lies a story about desire, identity, sexuality, and the painful wish to become something other than what you are. Seductive, violent, and defiantly unusual, The Lure restores much of the danger and sadness that has always existed within Andersen’s tale.

• Watch on Criterion
• Watch on HBO Max
• Watch for free on Tubi (with ads)
• Rent from Prime Video
• Rent from YouTube