Red Hoods, Dark Woods Part II: Once Upon A Time…

Throughout the years many filmmakers have adapted various versions of Little Red Riding Hood for cinema, most to investigate or exploit its coming of age subtext. In the early Eighties Irish filmmaker Neil Jordan collaborated with English writer and novelist Angela Carter on an adaptation of her book 'The Bloody Chamber.' 'The Bloody Chamber' is a collection of fairy tales, including Little Red Riding Hood, which Carter had reworked, reinterpreted and filtered through a 20th Century feminist viewpoint to give them a fresh and provocative perspective. Their resulting collaboration was 1984’s strikingly beautiful and dreamlike The Company of Wolves, a film that unfurls as the fever-dream of a young woman experiencing menstruation for the first time. Boasting a narrative of stories within stories and dreams within dreams, The Company of Wolves retains its haunting power even now, with its rich and intoxicating atmospherics. Angela Lansbury starred as the Grandmother who warns her young granddaughter Rosaleen (Sarah Patterson) to be wary of men who are ‘hairy on the inside’ and whose eyebrows meet in the middle. The tales they tell each other form the bulk of the movie, unspooling as striking vignettes ruminating on aspects of (female) sexuality and the myriad tribulations faced by young women as they enter adulthood. 

Lycanthropy has been used as a metaphor for the onset of puberty in a number of films before (I Was A Teenage Werewolf, 1957 and Teen Wolf, 1985), but aside from The Company of Wolves, it is rarely presented from a female perspective. In John Fawcett's cult teen horror Ginger Snaps (2000), a sly, post-modern twist on the werewolf film, Red Riding Hood becomes the wolf. Written by Karen Walton, Ginger Snaps tells of a young woman (Ginger, played by Katherine Isabelle) who is attacked by a werewolf on the night she begins to menstruate, and begins to transform into a monster. Her younger sister Brigitte (Emily Perkins) races to find a cure, but Ginger finds herself embracing what the curse has unleashed within her... Links between the menstrual cycle and lycanthropy interweave to form a twisted tale of monstrous pubescence filtered through a chilling body-horror narrative. The scarlet hooded cloak of the folktale is replaced by Ginger's flowing red hair, and her transformation into a werewolf serves as a darkly humorous and eventually horrific metaphor for her painful journey to adulthood. 

Sisters Ginger and Brigitte, Ginger Snaps (2000)

Walton's screenplay, by turns scathing and moving, slyly highlights the parallels between menstruation, adolescence and lycanthropy, and along the way the theme of betrayal is explored, as the sisters are betrayed by their peers, their own bodies and a patriarchal society that subjugates women. As Ginger states ‘a girl can only be a slut, a tease or the virgin next door’. Ginger Snaps succeeds as both an edgy, feminist allegory and as a moody werewolf tale with way more bite than most. The story is expanded in two further films, the sequel Ginger Snaps Unleashed, in which Brigitte goes on the run while desperately trying to find a cure for her own burgeoning lycanthropy, and Ginger Snaps Back: The Beginning, a period horror in which ancestors of the two sisters befall a similar fate in a story concerned with ancestral heritage, predestination, and the persecution of women in patriarchal communities.

In 1996, Matthew Bright’s indie film Freeway updated and reinterpreted Red Riding Hood as the story of a troubled teenaged girl (Vanessa, portrayed by Reese Witherspoon), on her way to stay with her grandmother after her addict mother and abusive step-father are hauled off to prison. Naturally, she has a run in with the ‘big bad wolf’ – Kiefer Sutherland as a mentally deranged serial killer targeting young women on the titular freeway. Unfolding as a wickedly off-kilter road movie, Freeway also provides damning social commentary on the US’s justice system and how it mistreats the young people caught up in it.

Still from 'Trick 'r Treat'

Giacomo Cimini’s 2003 film Red Riding Hood, re-imagined the tale as the misadventures of a young girl acting as a vigilante, delivering violent justice to thieves, rapists, murderers and thugs with the aid of her imaginary, wolf mask wearing friend, George.

Also made in 2003, Little Erin Merryweather updates the tale to feature Red Riding Hood as a serial killer who was abused as a child: the 'big bad wolf' in her past being her abusive father. She works as a fairy tale-obsessed librarian on a college campus and preys on male students; stalking them through nearby woods, stabbing them to death and sowing stones up inside their bellies. The film, directed by and starring David Morwick boasted the tag line 'A flash of red... Then you're dead', and craftily subverted the norm by playing around with gender conventions resulting in a film about a group of young men who are stalked by a female killer.

The Ellen Page starring Hard Candy reinvented the story for the iGeneration, with a self-appointed vigilante ‘red riding hood’ figure tracking down sex offenders and child abusers through online chat-rooms and extracting brutal justice. The Syfy commissioned series, Red: Werewolf Hunter also put a slyly subversive spin on the tale. The series follows the exploits of the modern-day descendant of Red Riding Hood, portrayed by Felicia Day (Vi from Buffy the Vampire Slayer), who brings her fiancé home to meet her family and reveal to him their occupation as werewolf hunters. Trouble ensues, however, after he is bitten by a werewolf and the pair must go on the run, with Red having to protect him from her werewolf-slaying family. Ultra low budget slasher Rotkäppchen: The Blood of Red Riding Hood mixed erotic stylisation with gory violence in its retelling of the tale as directed by Harry Sparks in 2009.

Still from 'Brothers Grimm'

Catherine Hardwicke’s Red Riding Hood - written by David Leslie Johnson (who also wrote the creepy and disturbing The Orphan) - is loosely based on the original literary fairy tale “Le Petit Chaperon Rouge” (Little Red Riding Hood), as adapted by Charles Perrault from earlier folk stories, and elements from the version by the Brothers Grimm, “Rotkäppchen” (Redcap). With its supernaturally charged story boasting werewolves and angst-ridden teens embroiled in a quivering love triangle, Red Riding Hood has already drawn comparisons with Hardwicke’s adaptation of teen-vampire romance, Twilight. It would be easy to dismiss Hardwicke as a peddler of pallid, gothic-hewn romances for lovelorn, awkward 'tweens'; easy, were it not for the fact that she also co-wrote and directed the hard-hitting and wayward teen drama Thirteen.

Hardwicke has a penchant for stories that revolve around marginalised young people, particularly young women, who undergo tumultuous strife and heartache in order to find their own identities and voices. The character of Red Riding Hood after all, depending on what variation of the tale you look at, was resourceful, independent, head-strong and resilient. The perfect heroine for a modernised gothic horror flick. In some versions it is she who saves herself and her grandmother from the big bad wolf, not a woodsman. Each version acts as a thinly veiled metaphor relaying the pain and potential dangers young women face as they mature into adulthood.

It is fair to say that the figure of a red-hooded girl picking her way cautiously through deep dark woods while being silently stalked by a ravenous wolf, still haunts popular culture today and drips with sexual undertones. It is one of the most effective expressions of the ultimate loss of innocence. From Roald Dahl’s ‘Revolting Rhymes’ through countless music videos by the likes of Evanescence and Cathy Davey, to explicit references in horror movies such as Trick 'r Treat and The Brother’s Grimm, to darker, more adult takes on pre-Perrault versions of the tale, such as Neil Gaiman’s reinterpretation in ‘The Sandman’; the girl with the red riding hood actually cuts a pretty impressive swathe through pop culture and media.