Fairy tales are meant to be dark. Scrub them up, Disney-fy them, they are sweet stories which buoy the desperate, everything-will-turn-out-OK optimism we try and foist on our kids. Even so, the only reason you still remember those Grimms' and Andersen's picture books from your earliest childhood are that baneful images from those stories got planted deep in your fertile child's mind.
There's a horse's head nailed to a gateway in "The Goose Girl", but it still sings to the princess. Cinderella's wicked stepsisters cut off their heels and toes trying to fit into that insidious slipper. "The Little Match Girl" details her final hallucinations as she freezes to death in the street. In "the Red Shoes", a girl cannot stop dancing until she convinces an executioner to chop off the feet to which the shoes in question have attached themselves like malevolent parasites. Even Disneyfied, Pinocchio and Geppetto still get swallowed by a damn whale, and that's pretty creepy. One of the things Disney did best (when I was a kid; maybe they still do) was to keep one very disturbing image in each movie to balance out all the sweet la-di-da and whistle-while-you-work. My mom remembers being scared to tears by the witch in Snow White. My personal scared-crapless nightmare came from the Banshee in the otherwise innocuous Darby O'Gill and the Little People. And, like JFK and John Lennon, everyone remembers where they were when Bambi's mom got killed.
All that is preamble as to why I looked forward so long to Snow White: a Tale of Terror, a television thing that came out in the nineties and only this past week showed up on Netflix. A horror film coaxed from a fairy tale is a fairy tale taken one step further in its original direction. I was genuinely excited when I heard that last year's Red Riding Hood was in the works, and genuinely bummed when I realized the intention was not to explore the sinister implications of the original tale, but to use it as a reboot of the Twilight dynamic and reap some more pocket change from adolescent girls.
In the end, this Snow White is a disappointment as well; it's a good story but badly told. The new twists and murky corners explored are intriguing, but the dialogue never rises above a pedestrian level. Sigourney Weaver pulls out all her magnificent stops in bringing to life the world's worst stepmother, and Sam Neill is creditable in his straight-man role as little Snow's father, well-meaning enough but always a step or two behind the ladies in their Electra-complex death-match. The "dwarves" have become miners, men scarred and bent by the class-struggles of the time until they dropped out to seek their fortunes digging in the earth. The "handsome prince" is a young, aristocratic doctor who turns out to be easy prey for the dark side, as anyone reading closely always suspects those handsome princes, with their implied ficklenesses and impetuosities, might be.
The sets and costumes are richly detailed and the castle glooms and shrinks into a claustrophobic prison as the queen cuts loose to run mad within it. The terrible mirror is an inexplicable but entirely believable character on its own, a force which wreaks havoc by reaching into the minds of those who peer into it. There are lovely, baleful visuals here as well. Sometimes, though, you'll find yourself fast-forwarding through the dialogue to reach them.
Caligari, on the other hand, is one of those classics which is so strange that it feels like walking through a dream. Every time I watch it I fall asleep and have to rewind to previous scenes, not because I'm bored but because there's something wonderfully hypnotic about it, and I always put it on late at night to encourage its vulpine grip on my subconscious. Those crazy, crooked sets! Like you're walking around in a dollhouse built out of cardboard by a maniac. Conrad Veidt's first close-up as he's waking, -- that face!-- and then again when he goes into a mad lust for the girl. That sinuous way he has of walking, slithering along the wall as if still half-asleep. The Kafka-esque convention that authority figures (policemen, the town clerk) sit on exaggeratedly high chairs, reconfirming the powerlessness that is at the heart of all the myriad insanities. It's a big slice of visionary genius, and, nearly a century after it was filmed, retains the power to blow your mind. There's a classic book written (From Caligari to Hitler by Siegfried Kracauer) which discusses at length its importance in any exploration of the collective German mindset which led to the weirdness of Hitler, so I won't belabor it, but it's difficult to watch Caligari or Mabuse without picturing that blackened fury twisting beneath the surface of history, preparing to erupt.
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