Facing Your Fears: Navigating Social Anxieties and Difference in Contemporary Fairy Tales

Abstract

In the 20th and 21st centuries, the rise of audio-visual media, particularly cinema and television, brought about new visual techniques and storytelling conventions that have transformed the way fairy tales are adapted for the screen. Initially adapted for a younger audience, newer adaptations often return to the darker and more horrific elements of the source texts; this includes body horror and an emphasis on physiological differences. This article employs structural, cultural, and folkloric interpretive lenses for the analysis of three contemporary, audio-visual fairy tales to discuss the way contemporary fairy tales include disability and difference as social constructs that are shaped by cultural attitudes and anxieties. The stories’ plots are driven by the protagonists’ “otherness”, and these texts feature transformations that provide clues to understanding current standards of beauty and normality. I argue that newer adaptations place an emphasis on finding resolutions to difference that challenge the traditional idea that if one has a face or body that strays from the standard of the norm, one must die, relegate oneself to the margins, or join others like oneself.