In her essay “Fairy Tale is Form, Form is Fairy Tale,’ scholar Kate Bernheimer lays out the defining characteristics of a fairy tale. She argues that fairy tales don’t need backstories, character development, or explanations for why things are happening. They don’t even need to be ed down through centuries, as long as they contain four elements: flatness, abstraction, intuitive logic and normalized magic. Fairy tales, Bernheimer says, by rationality, speaking directly to the subconscious using symbols and archetypes. And the deepest depths of our subconscious minds are where monsters dwell.

The Ugly Stepsister, which premiered at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, is part of a horror tradition that draws from the resonant symbolism and psychosexual anxieties of classic fairy tales. In the film, writer-director Emilie Blichfeldt uses the tale of Cinderella to explore the cruel demands that patriarchal beauty culture places on women. “By empathizing with Cinderella and mocking the stepsister, we have been deceived into betraying the stepsister—and ourselves,”  Blichfeldt says. “The time has come to dwell on the moment that has, until now, ed without empathy, care, or reflection: a young girl, so desperate to fit an impossibly small shoe, severs her own toes.”

The connection between the Brothers Grimm and gore is well established, and it’s a rite of age to discover that the original versions of traditional fairy tales are more violent and sexual than their Disney counterparts. Telling us about her influences, Blichfeldt cites the “beautiful but camp” 1973 Czech film Three Wishes for Cinderella as her entry point into Eastern European fairy tale cinema, leading her to darker interpretations from filmmakers like Juraj Herz and Walerian Borowczyk. “I love them for how they play with the real versus the constructed,” Blichfeldt explains. “We were always searching for this feeling: the real with the unreal, beauty with horror, naïveté with brutal reality.”

Films from Herz and Borowczyk appear on our list celebrating the genre below, as they do in Blichfeldt’s list of inspirations for The Ugly Stepsister. But, inspired by writer Kier-La Janisse’s approach to folk horror in her documentary Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched, we’re expanding our scope to include dark fairy tales from Guatemala, Chile, Nigeria, India and Japan along with European and American interpretations. Using Bernheimer’s criteria as guideposts, we present a bloody and beautiful slate of films that take elemental human fears and desires and transform them into movie magic.

Bluebeard (2009)

Catherine Breillat’s adaptation of the French tale about a serial wife-murderer is suitably psychosexual, a companion piece to Breillat’s Fat Girl that confronts the dark side of adolescent female sexuality. Marie-Catherine (Lola Créton) is smarter and braver than the rest, agreeing to marry hulking nobleman Bluebeard (Dominique Thomas) even though several of his wives have already disappeared. There’s an element of morbid fascination to the mystery of Bluebeard’s castle, and the chamber at its center that must not be opened under any circumstances. The metaphor for forbidden desires is obvious, and Breillat explores the theme in unflinching style.

Border (2018)

The Apprentice director Ali Abbasi’s sophomore feature has the attributes of a modern-day fairy tale, using everyday magic to explore the boundaries not only between countries but genders as well. The film chronicles the trans-species awakening of Tina (Eva Melander), a customs agent who’s believed for her entire life that she was born with a chromosomal defect. Then she meets Vore (Eero Milonoff), who tells her that she’s not an imperfect human. She’s a troll. Scenes of ionate, liberatory troll sex follow, as does a chilly crime-thriller subplot where Tina uses her olfactory superpowers to sniff out a child sex abuse ring. (This is a Swedish film, after all.)

The Company of Wolves (1984)

Although not as transgressive as some of the films on this list, Neil Jordan’s The Company of Wolves also has a rich vein of psychosexual subtext thanks to its source material: The Bloody Chamber, a 1979 collection of revisionist fairy tales by feminist writer Angela Carter. Carter’s take on Little Red Riding Hood forms the backbone of the film, which blends heady symbolism with the effects-forward artistry of ’80s creature features: Big bad wolves and their huge, hairy paws are especially prominent, and their presence is both frightening and seductive. Add Angela Lansbury as the grandmother (you know, with the big eyes and the big teeth?), and you’ve got a work both comfortingly familiar and thrillingly forbidden.

Freeway (1996)

This ’90s-does-’70s artifact comes from a bygone era, when The Jerry Springer Show was number one in the ratings and Reese Witherspoon still had a Southern accent. Specifically, this lurid take on Little Red Riding Hood is aping the crude pleasures of a trashy ’70s B-movie, full of underage hitchhikers and girls in orange jumpsuits pulling each other’s hair. Witherspoon is a world-class screamer, and her shrillness serves her well when she meets the winkingly named Mr. Wolverton (Kiefer Sutherland) on the road to Grandma’s house. It’s not for the easily offended, but it’s still charming in its own vulgar way.

Immoral Tales (1973)

They take the form of fables, but there’s no moral instruction in this collection of vignettes from art-smut auteur Walerian Borowczyk. The acts depicted here are lascivious, and the imagery sensual: think close-ups of moist, full, barely parted lips. But the striking imagery and lush costuming can’t hide the fact that this is a soft-core movie. The throughline to The Ugly Stepsister is clear in the cinematography, not to mention the explicit anatomy shots. Two versions exist, the longer of which includes the perverse and shocking The Beast, later built out into a feature. Go for the 105-minute cut if you’d rather avoid the bestiality angle.

Innocence (2004)

There’s nothing overtly sinister about the fantasy world that revolves around a cryptic school for girls in Lucile Hadžihalilović’s underseen Innocence. In fact, the dappled green light and bubbling creeks are quite peaceful. But danger hums in the background, suggesting that these innocents are being trained for some sort of sinister purpose. Beautiful, morbid images—color-coded hair ribbons, carved wooden coffins—accumulate, along with menacing story beats: A girl leaves and never comes back. A ballet instructor has a panic attack. Something—a wolf, or maybe just a man—looms over the story. And every pretty rock has worms underneath.

Kwaidan (1964)

Based on a collection of folktales, Kwaidan looks to the past both in form and in content. Director Masaki Kobayashi takes inspiration from the formal staging and stylized movements of traditional Japanese theater, which combine with intuitive symbols to otherworldly effect. And unlike filmmakers who rely on loud sound effects, Kobayashi uses silence to transport us to the land of the dead. Tales of betrayal make up the first half, a pair of stories about faithful wives and jealous spirits; the second is dominated by Hoichi the Earless, following a blind monk who performs nightly for an audience of ghosts.

La Llorona (2019)

The political undertones of most fairy tales have long since faded into history. Not so with Jayro Bustamante’s La Llorona, which takes the Central American legend of a ghostly figure who drowns children in rivers and turns her into an eerie reminder of recent atrocities. Here, the weeping woman comes to haunt a former Guatemalan military commander hiding out in his family home as he awaits trial for genocide; the atmosphere is heavy and overcast, drenched in the grief of 100,000 mothers. The arrival of an Indigenous maid with long, black hair foretells spooky events to come, building to a terrifying finale driven by supernatural rage.

Little Otik (2000)

Possession meets a puppet show in Jan Švankmajer’s stop-motion/live-action hybrid fantasy from the homeland of fairy tales, the Czech Republic. The film is loaded with intuitive symbolism, beginning with the image of a man fishing babies out of a barrel, wrapping them in newspaper and handing them to expectant mothers. There’s danger as well as curiosity, and an internal logic that defies reality: The title character, a tree root that a childless woman raises as her own, comes to life through the power of sheer desire. Eventually, magic collides with drab reality, epitomized in a scene where the “baby” snares a child-welfare worker in its brittle, rootlike claws.

Mami Wata (2023)

The sorcery in C.J. “Fiery” Obasi’s West African fairy tale is on-screen as well as in the story. Inspired by the folkloric figure of the same name (a water spirit who brings both great riches and great danger), the film takes place by the sea, and the black-and-white cinematography captures a breathtaking array of tones and textures using water and sand. The spellbinding visuals create a spellbinding atmosphere for the story, a power struggle between two noble sisters that has the abstraction and intuitive logic of a fairy tale. One difference is that, here, the threat is colonial rather than psychosexual—although it has plenty of those elements, too.

Pan’s Labyrinth (2006)

Horror and wonder are bedfellows in Guillermo del Toro’s world. But the influence of folklore on his work has never been stronger than in Pan’s Labyrinth. Many the dark beauty of the film’s creature design, particularly the Pale Man: a pallid, eyeless monster with eyeballs in its palms portrayed by prosthetic-suit specialist Doug Jones. Revisiting it nearly twenty years on, what stands out about this original fairy tale set in Fascist Spain isn’t the magic, as masterfully realized as it is. What resonates is just how sad it is—the story of an innocent girl who retreats into a world of fantasy when her reality becomes too much to bear.

The Red Shoes (1948)

Based on the 1845 fairy tale of the same name by Hans Christian Andersen, this classic from Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger also uses fantasy as a vehicle for ravishingly beautiful visuals. Here, it’s the saturated, layered look of three-strip Technicolor, utilized in an impressionistic color scheme. The story around the fairy tale is more grounded, following a ballerina (Moira Shearer) forced to choose between the love of a man and her love of her art. But the seventeen-minute dance sequence that anchors the film transports it into the timeless realm of once upon a time, introducing an element of horror through a pair of crimson slippers that force their wearer to dance herself to death.

Rumpelstiltskin (1995)

If you get weary of art films, consider this ridiculous mid-’90s take on Rumpelstiltskin, which removes spinning straw into gold and replaces it with a Howard Stern-esque shock jock. Ambient misogyny aside, Rumpelstiltskin is ridiculous fun, full of cheesy one-liners and absurd scenarios: Take the scene where the titular imp is hurtling down a mountain highway behind the wheel of an out-of-control semi, honking and cackling. A clever dune buggy maneuver sends ol’ Rumpy over the side of a cliff, and just before the truck explodes he quips, “Fucketh me!” It’s that kind of movie, for when you’re in that kind of mood.

Tumbbad (2018)

There is a moral to the story in this Indian cult-classic-in-the-making. Two, really: The film is a warning about the dangers of greed, while its production process is a lesson in persistence. Tumbbad took almost a decade to complete, and it’s fitting, given the generational sweep of the story, that its creation has a wide scope as well. There’s a castle, and a loincloth full of gold; the special effects are grisly, and the imagery grotesque, reaching across millennia to evoke a goddess whose womb births monsters. But beware, reckless treasure seekers: Their touch makes you immortal, but at a price.

Viy (1967)

This Soviet horror-fantasy hybrid looks back to an era in Russian history when the Orthodox Church held immense power over the lives of ordinary people. The CC, meanwhile, was violently atheist, which means that the “wisdom of the proletariat” is used to justify telling this folkloric tale of a philosopher-monk who must spend three nights praying over the corpse of a beautiful young woman. At sundown, the chapel turns into a phantasmagoric spook show, brought to life through stop-motion puppetry and inspired set and makeup design. The monk is terrified, but viewers will be delighted—the imagery here rivals Nobuhiko Obayashi’s cult classic House.

The Wolf House (2018)

The simplicity and intuitive symbolism of fairy tales informs this dark stop-motion fantasy, which combines The Three Little Pigs with a dark chapter in Chilean history. The animation style is unique, blending two-and three-dimensional figures rendered with splattered paint and grotesque papier-mâché. The sound is disturbing (think pigs squealing as they’re being slaughtered), and the story is unsettling as well. It begins with the archetypical “once upon a time,” and its elemental story—a girl escapes from a colony, is pursued by a wolf and hides with two pigs in their house in the forest—reveals terrifying truths about manipulation, abuse and coercive control.