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The act of allegedly de- bowdlerizing a story, but going to the other extreme instead.
It is common belief that most traditional Fairy Tales were designed to inform kids via metaphor about a potentially harsh world, in a time where children worked and traveled, and were essentially treated more like miniature adults than "kids". This is actually not the case. Original fairy tales were told by adults for other adults as horror stories. It was not until The Brothers Grimm that fairy tales began to be reworked into a style that was suitable for children. Still, even in those stories heroes could fall victims to violence and mutilation; villains were disposed of with vivid and painful executions. The harshness of these stories explains why later publishers of The Brothers Grimm's collection toned them down for popular consumption, especially in the later Victorian era, the time period when the concept of childhood truly emerged. During this time period fairy tales were once again warped and became more like the modern versions that we know today.
However, if one follows almost any of the old fairy tales back to their roots, they'll discover that they are in fact incredibly gory. Often, these original themes are either rediscovered by adults or the new version of the story is changed by other cultures that have no connection to it. As adults, we rediscover the themes that got toned down and enjoy pointing out how creepy they sound. Then it becomes very popular to return a story to its original roots or by perverting the popular Disneyfied version unaware that they are actually returning the story to what was actually intended. Sometimes this includes throwing in more modern Nightmare Fuel. When done well, this can open up a completely new perspective. However it can also be done wrong, usually gutting a story of its nostalgia value.
Even now the modern version of Little Red Riding Hood is very different from the first recorded version of the nursery tale, Petit Chaperon Rouge (1697) which ends with both Little Red Riding Hood and her grandmother being eaten. However, going even further back folklorists have learned that witches were said to put on red caps and hoods before they went riding on their familiars to visit a magic circle deep in the woods and pay homage to the horned god, the Dark Woodsman. Knowing that Little Red Riding Hood was originally a tale about werewolves, it's very possible to extrapolate an entirely different meaning. Remember, these old stories might in fact be Bloodier And Gorier than Grimmified retellings.
A common example of Grimmification is having Little Red Riding Hood survive the well known version... but be scarred by the events — varying from just becoming jaded and cynical, to becoming completely psychotic.
A subtrope of Darker And Edgier. Commonly also includes Hotter And Sexier and Bloodier And Gorier. See also Fractured Fairy Tale. Not to be confused with Grimm's Law. The opposite is Disneyfication.
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Examples
Anime and Manga
- There's a hentai story out there (its English version called, rather uncreatively, Alice in Sexland if you're really curious about it) where, after all the rape and wanton sex Alice goes through, she finds out that she's dead and Wonderland is actually the afterlife.
- If you take out all the rape and wanton sex, it's actually a pretty good re-interpretive take on the story.
- That's a damn big IF.
- It also makes the whole thing about six pages.
- I'm certain it reaches ten!
- To be quite fair, the rape is actually played as drama, and does end up appearing extremely grimmified if you ignore the blatant amounts of porn. Or So I Heard.
- The rape is indeed played for drama, but if my sources are correct, it happens before she dies and goes to Wonderland. Everything after that is consensual.
- Well, things do get somewhat less consensual once in a while, especially once they meet the Red Queen. Still, compared to what Alice went through before coming to Wonderland, it's really more like "ravishing" then "rape." That's kinda the whole point about Wonderland: According to the Red Queen, it's the one world in an infinity of worlds that fits Alice's soul the bests.
- There is a Guro Manga based on Little Red Riding Hood, where the Hood character is an immortal loli that WANTS to be eaten by the wolf and is extremely Gorn. It's called Tokyo Akazukin.
- Kano Yasuhiro has a one-shot horror manga called Snow in the Dark. Think Snow White, but with a well-intentioned (and naturally, horribly misunderstood) Queen and a Soul Jar Snow White, who gets possessed by her evil (and dead) mother. The day is saved by a slaying/suicide. The author manages to work in a mildly happy ending anyway.
- Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade features a grimmified re-telling (or possibly the original version) of Little Red Riding Hood, the events of whom run parallel with the actual happenings of the movie.
- It is the same version that Gaiman used in The Sandman, point of fact.
- Miyuki-chan in Wonderland is an erotic, very lesbian rendition of Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. The series focuses on Miyuki, a Japanese schoolgirl who finds herself pulled into several nonsensical worlds populated by scantily-dressed females who want to have their way with her. Behold! (NSFW)
- Kaori Yuki, of course. Everything that she ever writes based on anything will always be this in her hands. Ludwig Kakumei for example is about a necrophiliac, perverted prince and has some of the most twisted versions of fairy tales ever. In the first chapter, Snow White is an incestuous bitch who liked manipulating people. And then she dies.
- In Ludwig Kakumei, Yuki keeps all the original unpleasant aspects of the original fairy tales, then adds her own, twisting the stories further and further.
- Lampshaded during the Cinderella arc, when the author mentions the stepsisters mutilating themselves. In their retelling, the shoe is to big, and said sisters tell that it's not the problem.
- There's a hentai comic in which Frosty uses a Popsicle as a penis to rape a loli.
- As in... "The snowman"?
- OK, I'll bite, what is it?
Comics
Fan Fiction
- The Death Note fanfic Poison Apple featured an Alternate Continuity thematically based around Snow White, including hearts cut out and of course, the titular poisoned apples.
Films
- You can find sexual subtext in Little Red Riding Hood if you look, and not very hard. In the film The Company of Wolves, you don't have to look at all.
- The book The Company of Wolves was based on was a collection of short stories (The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter) that essentially did this with a dozen or so different fairy tales.
- It's worth mentioning that in 18th-century France, where the tale was first collected in its modern form, the red cloak was the sign of a prostitute.
- Though in the area of Germany where the Brothers Grimm collected their tales, the red hood was part of the traditional clothing for young girls.
- The movie Snow White: A Tale of Terror.
- The movie The Brothers Grimm does this in spades. The face stealing gingerbread "girl" is particularly squicky.
- The most prominent use of this is for Alice In Wonderland: American McGee's video game adaptation and the upcoming Marilyn Manson movie Phantasmagoria. However, the original book was a satire of children's stories, and the version most people are familiar with never underwent much Bowdlerization. For some reason, people seem eager to equate the bizarre with the gruesome.
- Also, the Cheshire Cat is insanely creepy, and Alice's Adventures in Wonderland lends itself to many alternate and creepy interpretations.
- There's also a '70s-era porn version of Alice in Wonderland. Terrifying furry porn.
- Is there any other kind?
- Is that the one that's also a musical?
- Yes, and the same production company did a version of Cinderella as well - and it's hilarious. (For example, the film features a drag queen "fairy godfather" and the thing the Prince is after is well...not a shoe.)
- There's a Tim Burton version with Johnny Depp as the Mad Hatter. However, the trailer suggested that it won't be a spooky adaptation, just cheerfully bizarre.
- Early reviews are disagreeing, calling it extremely bleak, though not so much outright scary.
- The upcoming film Sucker Punch takes this to its logical extreme by turning the story into a violent, hyper-sexualized action movie. Directed by the same guy who did 300, Watchmen and the Dawn Of The Dead remake.
- The 2007 Beowulf has our hero being seduced by Grendel's mother.
Also fighting Grendel naked.
- They pull one with Watership Down. The main story itself isn't the brightest, but the movie is darker. It also suffers from Adaptation Decay.
Literature
- Gregory Maguire does this in all of his books based on fairy tales, but most of all in Mirror Mirror. Turning the Wicked Stepmother into Lucrezia Borgia, with all of the historical significance of the Borgia family, would do that. However, Lucrezia never poisoned anyone, and was quite a nice lady.
- Parodied in several Discworld books with the works of the Sisters Grim, whose tales seem to consist entirely of the bits Disney left out.
- Also in Discworld, Susan does this with the fairy tales she reads to her young charges, her version of their morals being things like "If you're a hero, you can get away with anything because no one asks any inconvenient questions."
- Andrzej Sapkowski's The Last Wish and Sword of Destiny anthologies of short stories from the Witcher Saga mostly follow the formula of the main character coming upon a somewhat altered and twisted version of a classical fairy tale, discovering the dark secret behind it all that makes it even more twisted, and seeing it to the usually-grisly end. For instance, the Beauty and the Beast? The Beauty is a particularly nasty kind of a vampire that is trying to make the Beast lose what little humanity he still has. What's perhaps even more messed up is that she is doing it out of love. As for the Beast himself, he was cursed by a priestess of a Religion Of Evil that he raped.
- Francesca Lia Block's short story collection The Rose and the Beast retells several fairy tales and, as usual for this author, stuffs them with erotica.
- Erotica is borderline Block at best. What's really her is setting them all in L.A. and describing lots of tastes and smells.
- Neil Gaiman's short story "Snow, Glass, Apples" gives a very good reason why the evil queen would want to knock off Snow White... and why she might not have been so evil in doing so. (In general, it's disturbingly common for Grimmified versions of Snow White to involve vampire motifs, what with her being a Pale Skinned Brunette and all.) Full story posted {{http://www.holycow.com/dreaming/stories/snow-glass-apples here}}.
- And let's not forget his treatment of Narnia in "The Problem of Susan".
- Tanith Lee and Angela Carter both wrote works where Grimm's and Perrault's fairy tales were retold as horror stories.
- Not all of them in Angela Carter's case, though: The Bloody Chamber starts off with one of Grimm's creepiest stories retold as French gothic horror; but Puss in Boots becomes a Restoration-style sex farce.
- Lee's version of Beauty and the Beast was a science-fiction love story; nothing horrible about it at all. On the other hand, she's another author who decided to go for the Snow-White-is-a-vampire reinterpretation.
- Anne Rice's Sleeping Beauty trilogy retold that particular fairy tale as a work of erotic horror. That Rice, whose Vampire books are squicky enough as is, chose to publish them under a pseudonym should tell the reader all one needs to know about them.
- Those were NOT erotic horror. They were gawd-awful BDSM porn novels.
- And by 'gawd-awful,' the above troper likely means 'bad excuse for BDSM porn.' The more-or-less Excuse Plot that strings the sex scenes together vanishes by the third book, and we never did get an explanation for exactly why the title character got ignored for the majority of the book in favor of, well, gay porn. Boring gay porn. Though she did get a (rather boring) lesbian orgy...which was Ikea Erotica.
- The psychotic Red Riding Hood is used in The Sisters Grimm series.
- Robin McKinley's Deerskin is partial Grimmification — the original fairy tale does involve the king's incestuous urges towards his daughter, but in Deerskin he actually acts on them. Throw in the fact that what seems to be the demon/ghost of the princess's dead mother blames her for it, and the fact that the princess miscarries her father's rape-baby and you've got something definitely not meant for children.
- The Stepsister Scheme revolves around three fairy tale princesses, and at one point the most feared assassin this side of the mountains is mentioned, The Lady of the Red Hood. She's apparently going to show up in one of the sequels.
- Waking Rose is a modern day version of Sleeping Beauty in which the protagonist, Briar Rose, is attacked and put in a coma by a group of corrupt doctors who kill people in long comas and sell their organs on the black market.
- Beastly is a modern day adaptation of Beauty and the Beast - in which the "Beauty" (a poor girl named Lindy Owens) lives alone with her sleazy drug-user father who ultimately basically sells her into slavery to the "Beast" (a teenage boy under a spell) after trying to break into the Beast's house to steal stuff. And later, the Beast has to rescue Lindy from another drug dealer, who implies that her father sold her to him as well, most likely for prostitution.
- The Snow White, Blood Red series of anthologies have quite a few stories that invoke this trope, although there are also plenty that don't.
- For example, Esther Friesner wrote a version of Snow White where the "evil stepmother" was actually quite a religious woman who sent Snow away to keep the king from sexually abusing her.
- Roald Dahl's Revolting Rhymes is all over this trope as may be expected from the page quote. A handful of examples:
- It has Little Red Riding Hood as a femme fatale with a pistol always ready in her knickers
- It points out that Goldilocks is a thief (not really subtext that though)
- The prince in Cinderella is revealed as a psychopath and she marries a jam-maker instead
Live Action TV
- This editor recalls an episode of Tales From the Crypt that told the story of Sleeping Beauty with a twist: she was a vampire who lured unsuspecting would-be suitors to their deaths.
- That was in the animated series.
- Buffy the Vampire Slayer had an episode where Hansel and Gretel were evil creatures who fed off of paranoia and hatred. They would appear, fake their own deaths, and then use this as an excuse to rile a town up to a witch hunt. Both Buffy and Willow were nearly burned at the stake, by their own mothers.
- In Supernatural the season 3 episode "Bedtime Stories" deliberately invokes this trope, with a comatose girl imagining Grimmified versions of a couple fairy tales to be wrought upon poor, innocent bystanders, prompting Sam to give a speech about how the "original" Grimms' tales were much darker and edgier.
- Syfy is fond of movies like Alice and Tin Man which Grimmify traditional stories.
- They have a new one coming out based on Little Red Riding Hood, appropriately called Red, where the titular character is the descendant of the original, and her family works as cops by day, werewolf hunters by night.
Music Videos
- The music video for Rammstein's Sonne has a darker take on Snow White: here's she's a gold dust addict who abuses the dwarfs (played by the six band members).
Tabletop Games
- Grimm, by Fantasy Flight Games. It's a bit complex, but essentially, the Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm were already sanitized from the true events, and due to the influence of a magical book and a mysterious woman called Melusine, they have been given a sort of eternal life in an alternate reality. Since its formation, every fairytale ever imagined or read has been added. How much of the nastiness of the setting is simply because the truth behind the tales — where there was truth — was nastier than what passed into fiction, and how much is because of the influence of the Rotten King — Humpty Dumpty, now existing in a maddened and twisted state of Undeath due to the unsuccessful efforts to restore him as he was before his fall — is not entirely clear.
- Warhammer 40000 tries to do this to itself every new edition, but it mostly ends up as differently Grimdark than more Grimdark. Thanks to influences such as Gaunts Ghosts and Ciaphas Cain, the setting went somewhat lighter in 4e, every race was given a win condition, which sometimes was a bit grating. 5e makes it clear that the Imperium is still the biggest and strongest faction in the galaxy and may have Retconned some of the 4e changes.
- Then there's Wonderland, a horror RPG for the JAGS universal system. Wonderland is real, but it's an otherspace where logic and reason completely break down and the major personages of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland are basically the Great Old Ones, seeking to reduce humanity to its base elements so they can figure out why we keep mucking up the universe with higher reasoning. Oh, and Wonderland also takes the form of a mental illness not unlike schizophrenia, only you can physically interact with the "hallucinations" and "go down the rabbit hole." And did we mention it's contagious?
- The World of Darkness is pretty much obligated to darken and twist every fairy tale element it comes across. Changeling The Lost
excels at it is all about this. The intro to one splatbook involves several classic fairy tales with a World of Darkness twist - the Big Bad Wolf is a werewolf, Snow White becomes a vampire (of course), all told to impress a True Fae...
- The card game Scary Tales revolves around twisted versions of fairy tale characters fighting over the crown of the late king.
Theatre
- Stephen Sondheim's musical Into the Woods, a deconstruction of fairy tales, spends its first act telling the combined stories of Jack and the Beanstalk, Little Red Riding Hood, Rapunzel, and Cinderella, along with an original story along the same lines about a baker and his wife that want to have a child and live next door to the witch from Rapunzel. Then the second act examines the aftermath of everyone's selfish behavior and the bloodshed that ensues.
- It also uses the less extreme version of the standard Grimmification of Little Red Riding Hood — her song "I Know Things Now" being even more blatantly about lost innocence than the original story was.
Video Games
- American McGee's Grimm is a platform game where you perform a literal version of this: the player character is a sarcastic, ugly little dwarf named Grimm who's tired of "cutesy" fairy tales, so he goes around messing them up and making them gruesome and scary again. He takes on various tales from The Brothers Grimm, from classics like Cinderella and Puss in Boots to more obscure tales like The Girl Without Hands and A Boy Learns What Fear Is.
- Puss in Boots was actually written by Charles Perrault.
- He also (accidentally) subverted this when he got to Red Riding Hood. It manages to be Lighter And Softer (if you ignore the random curse words) than the original by having the wolf get a mercy killing via ax to the stomach: a far better fate than drowning in a well or starving to death. The original is far darker (no friendly woodsman for one).
- Ahem. American McGee's Alice? The definitive Grimmified take on the characters and setting. Curiouser and curiouser that it was not included here...
- Alice doesn't have any kind of gorier history, since it had been written in the Victorian era in the first place.
- The God of War series is an (arguably effective) Grimmification of Greek myths (and several sword-and-sandal movies) wrapped around a new storyline. While a lot of things are gorier, some things were bowdlerised, or at least abandoned due to squick: the fact that several Olympians are married to their sisters, for example. Zeus in the second game, however, is not an exaggeration. He was that much of a bastard.
- Ares, Theseus, Perseus, however, they definitely get the Grimmification. Athena gets reduced to The Chick — especially since SHE may/may not be prophesied to kill Zeus, depending on which text you read!
- That particular prophecy has been filled in games with Kratos.
- Who is himself a very bad expy of Cratos, the Titan embodiment of strength in Greek myth.
- Bulleta/B.B. Hood of Darkstalkers is implied to be Red Riding Hood in the Ax Crazy category, motivated by a combination of sheer self-serving greed and her traumatic experiences to hunt monsters.
- The indie game The Path is a psychological horror game inspired by Little Red Riding Hood. You take one of six sisters based on the character (including innocent little Robin and gloomy Goth Ruby) on a path through "the woods". Despite you being instructed to "go to grandma's house, and don't stray from the path", you're supposed to wander off the path, confront the metaphorical (or sometimes literal) wolf, and quite possibly get scared out of your mind.
- Text adventure game Bronze by Emily Short is an adaptation of the Beauty and the Beast story where the Beast has inherited a Deal With The Devil from his predecessors, and the servants of the castle are spirits rather than metamorphosed living people. Also, one of the possible endings lets the player break the curse by killing the Beast.
- Fairytale Fights, ohhh so much.
Web Comics
- Red from No Rest for the Wicked is literally Ax Crazy and Back From The Dead: she also got better. There are a number of wolf skins in her cottage, though according to her, the wolves left the forest when the moon disappeared.
- No Room For Magic plays this concept for laughs. Hoodie is somewhere between The Ditz and a Cloudcuckoolander because, after eating her grandma, the wolf decided to raise her. Hoodie is completely oblivious to this fact, even when "Grandma" does things like eat her homework.
- Red from Ever After is very much on the Ax Crazy end of the spectrum, using a saw as her Weapon Of Choice. Her introduction scene has her taking the saw to the guards and one of the nurses of the asylum in a bloody rampage before being subdued by Puss-In-Boots. Thanks to Dr. Crooked, they get better.
- Not even Frosty is safe, it seems.
- VG Cats LOVES grimmifying cute everybody's-happy tales for shock value. Heck, about a third of all their comics involve this nowadays.
- Parodied in The Non-Adventures of Wonderella, where one grimmification is exchanged for another.
Web Original
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