And Then Giddy Helen Drowned in a Well

And Then Giddy Helen Drowned in a Well:

In his influential 1976 book The Uses of Enchantment, psychiatrist Bruno Bettelheim claimed that children need the horror in fairy tales to help them process their Freudian fears of abandonment, pain, and extinction. Regardless of the average tot’s death instinct, children’s stories from Jack and Jill’s violent tumble down the hill to R.L. Stine’s Goosebumps series have happily obliged. The latest round of big-screen fairy tales, including three upcoming Snow Whites and Catherine Hardwicke’s Twilight-esque Red Riding Hood, market themselves as unusually dark, but good luck matching the grisly source material in which wolves eat children and queens dance themselves to death in red-hot iron shoes.