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Of Fiery Friends and Faltering Fairy Tales

"What's your favorite fairy tale?"

I'm always a little conflicted when someone casts that question upon me. On the one hand it tells me I'm dealing with a wondrous spirit who still loves to be enchanted, while on the other I'm always a bit cautious. Fairy tales are tricky business – for they often contain overly conservative morals – and you never know when your conversationist is going to leave you in the woods for supporting the wrong worldview. This is why I love a good subversion of fairy tale tropes. Thankfully, the forest of fairy tale subversion films has been lusciously blooming for ages – think Shrek (2001), Stardust (2007), and Tangled (2010) – and because I adore all of these features I was very excited to see a new Netflix release with the tagline 'this is not a fairy tale'. The new Juan Carlos Fresnadillo feature Damsel (2024) achieves exactly what that tagline suggests, but maybe it should have been more careful what it wished for.

Upon the first half an hour, the movie features exposition plenty, and mostly everyone we meet reveals themselves to fit a classic fairy stereotype. There's the broke king who must marry off his daughter, there's the morally ambiguous stepmother, and there's our lead princess Elodie, played by Millie Bobbie Brown. The royal fellowship sails south in its entirety, for Elodie must wed a prince to settle her family's debt. As it turns out, prince Charming isn't such a good lad, and he tosses Elodie into a dragon's den.

Although I desperately wished to be captured by the movie's magic, I simply couldn't get behind it's burning unoriginality. At times I wished for a snow queen to come kiss my head so that I might forget having seen every scene before time and again. Sadly, destiny didn’t agree to that.

I must admit to the delight Damsel's dazzling dragon's den sequence – which takes up nearly half of the movie – brought me, ironically because it doesn't try to subvert any tropes. It sees Elodie trying to trudge her way out of the grasp of an angry serpentine (Shoreh Aghdashloo), and that's the whole plot for the next hour of runtime. Once the movie accepts it's better as standard monster horror, it absolutely excels. It's simple, suspenseful, and at times wonderfully campy.

Then Damsel draws to an end, or at least it seems that way, except it goes on because it suddenly remembers that once upon a time, it paid heed to a wretched royal drama plot. It aims to take hold of this once more, but this falters for reasons twofold. One, the movie simply seems incapable of handling fairy trope subversion, hence the setup never developed enough for it to resolve in a satisfactory way. Two, the film abandoned having-a-plot half an hour in, when said plot literally threw the main character off a cliff and walked away. In an attempt to wrap it up regardless, the tale continues with a very strange twist of events. Elodie befriends her intergenerational-genocidal captor, and the now Stockholm-syndrome-celebratory movie aims to set the skies aflame with a Targarianesque trope, which falls flat on its face completely. The ending is clearly meant to be euphoric, but for every problematic trope it questions (yes, Morally Ambiguous Stepmother is now Kindly Stepmother and Greedy King Father sacrifices himself to save his not-such-a-damsel of a daughter) it invents two new ones.

I guess the tagline does ring true, but not in the way the filmmakers might have hoped. Although I love a good fairy tale, as well as a good 'this-isn't-a-fairy-tale' fairy tale, Damsel is neither. It's like a witch's spell befell the film, and an oh-so-simple monster movie took on the false appearance of complex high fantasy. Upon my guess, Damsel’s solemn destiny is to forever gather dust on Netflix's shelves. Which is probably for the best, because here’s a proper cautionary tale: mention this as your favorite fairy tale, and it's bound to get you killed.

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Of Angels, Demons, and Unlikely Kinship

In the beginning, I dwelt the gardens of a Protestant primary school.

My mother served me apples, however, and having received such human upbringing I never did devote myself to the Lord. I just couldn’t grasp how God could create something so delightfully flawed as humanity only to judge it for being its perfectly imperfect self. Sauntering vaguely downwards on the wings of the atheist exodus, I took refuge in the wonderful worlds of Greek and Norse mythology. I never doubted the non-existence of those deities, and found the definite truth of their fiction to be much more compelling than the possible fiction of Biblical truth. That made me wonder: would the Biblical stories that befell me as a child be just as worthwhile if I treated them as myth? Good Omens – the 1990 novel written by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman – taught me the answer to that question is an absolute, religiously capitalized ‘Yes’. Through a comic reimagining of the Christian canon, Pratchett and Gaiman preach the tales that raised me are still – in the words of the demon Crowley – flaming like anything. 

Good Omens follows the angel Aziraphale and the demon Crowley, the respective representatives of Heaven and Hell on Earth. Throughout the centuries these entities have grown rather fond their home (and of each other, although they’d rather not confess to that). When Crowley is asked to deliver an infant Antichrist to an order of satanic nuns he is far from ecstatic, because this child’s arrival marks the beginning of the end of the world. Hoping to prevent him from causing Armageddon, demon and angel join forces to raise Satan’s son as ethically neutral as possible. Through a poetically human error, the two lose sight of the Adversary and they embark on a wild quest to find the hellish Prince in hopes of canceling the apocalypse. The child – whose name is Adam – has been raised by regular people in the town of Tadfield, England, and finds himself rather confused when he gains the power to alter reality in any way he wishes. Crowley, Aziraphale, and Adam are joined by a wild dramatis personae that includes witches and witch hunters, horsepersons, hellhounds, and Hells Angels, as well as a full chorus of Atlanteans, Americans, and Aliens.

Although the book takes its liberties in adapting the Biblical canon, it does include many of the aspects of the ‘real’ Armageddon. It is said the final battle between Heaven and Hell will take place here, which will be satanic in origin. The Antichrist is said to deny the Father and the Son, and he will be accompanied by the four horsemen of the Apocalypse – War, Famine, Pestilence, and Death. All of these are present in Good Omens – although the novel claims Pollution took the place of Pestilence after the invention of penicillin. It's said the kings of the East will march to battle against the kingdom of the Antichrist (Aziraphale is the angel of the Eastern Gate), and in the end the Lord will prevail. In a way, the Lord does prevail at the end of the story. Adam has to choose between his devilish destiny and the love of his friends, and he – having been raised on human kindness – chooses love. He ends Armageddon by altering reality so that Satan was never his father (a clever play on ‘denying the Father’), and in this way love prevails. If anything, the novel preaches that no one is inherently good or evil, and that love is stronger than hatred. And isn’t that what God is all about?

With Good Omens, Pratchett and Gaiman question many aspects about the Biblical worldview, including free will, the nature-nurture debate in relation to good and evil, and the utility of dichotomous thinking. In line with their gospel, the two authors avoid taking sides in these debates through a simple trick: with every question Crowley asks, Aziraphale answers that God’s Great Plan is ineffable. In other words, anything that happens in the story might have been intended all along, and none of us readers – whether we be Christian or not – can ever argue against God’s logic. The book does a miraculous job at questioning the Biblical canon in a playful and lighthearted way, and it invites us to do the same. In this way, the novel does exactly what I needed it to do: it makes the stories that raised me fun again, and it dares us to believe love will indeed be victorious. It mythicizes the Bible, and in this safe space of fiction we might just get the revelation that eating an apple every now and then is perhaps not such a bad thing.  

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Of Nether Folk and Trusting Ghosts

“I always thought The Netherlands sounded like a magical realm made up by Tolkien.”

Being a huge folklore dork from the ever-so-grounded Nether realms, I took it as a big compliment to my native land when an English stranger said this to me a few moon cycles ago. The Low Lands are not typically thought of as being particularly magical – the only thing of mythic proportions being the rural realism that still haunts these crowded plains – but the idea that there is no Dutch folk tale tradition couldn’t be further from the truth: the magical creatures of the Netherlands are just particularly good at hiding themselves. I find it important that their stories are heard, and Groninger native Marlene Bakker seems to agree. By reimagining a long history of Othering women, pagans, and minority language speakers through her 2023 song ‘Witte Wieven’, Bakker does a fantastic job of showing us why the Dutch need to learn to listen to their foggy folklore.

As its title suggests, the song is a meditation on one of the better known creatures from the Low Saxon mythos. Witte wieven (‘white women’, although the original meaning was probably ‘wise women’) were believed to be ghostly female entities living in burial mounds in the northeastern Netherlands. Although stories vary from region to region, the general consensus is that wieven are the spirits of deceased pagan priestesses who wander around their graves in white burial shrouds. The wieven were worshipped in pre-Christian times, and in return they helped women in labour and farmers with their crops. With the word of God, however, these kindly spirits were outcast as heathen, and with that their ghostly garden found its grave. The townsfolk turned to telling tales of evil ones who dwelt the hills around their homes, leaving the once-so-valued wieven viewed as nothing but vicious ‘Others’; voiceless, seductive, and never to be trusted.

Bakker’s song returns soul to specter by giving these creatures a voice once more. A review by the CGTC (Centrum Groninger Taal en Cultuur) describes the song as being about the fear of women, and relates it to the real-life witch hunts that took place in Westerwolde, East-Groningen. Bakker masterfully reimagines the wieven by reflecting on them from contrasting perspectives; that of the fearful townsfolk in the verses, and that of the women themselves in the choruses. Where the pre-chorus cautions us to “never go into the woods past the deposit house” because “witte wieven haunt there,” the choruses ask us to consider the feelings those we fear. “Who of you is not afraid?” one of them asks. “My burial shroud is much too long. I wander through the night, trapped in time, until the sun shines on me.”

The bit about the burial shroud is telling of Bakker’s desire to understand the wieven, as it refers to the tale of the only wief ever heard to speak. As the story goes, a farmer once noticed that a wief kept stumbling over of her gown. She proclaimed “Mien henneklaid is mie te laank!” (“My burial shroud is too long for me!”) so the man decided to help her by cutting it short. After this, she gratefully rewarded him with a life of good fortune. By including this quote, Bakker manages to humanize the creatures once more: she gives them back their voice, their kind-hearted nature, and the human ability to struggle. But she also accomplishes something more subtle.

Bakker wails her words the Low Saxon dialect spoken in Groningen, just like the wife who couldn’t walk without the farmer’s kindness. There’s a parallel to be drawn between the histories of the wieven and Low Saxon tongues. Where the wieven were ruled out with the organization of religion, these dialects faced a massive, forceful decline with the advent of the Dutch language’s unification When performing her songs live, Bakker always introduces her songs in common Dutch, allowing all of her audience members to be familiarized with the oppressed. By shedding light on forgotten women from a forgotten folklore in a forgotten language, Bakker raises a significant, unresolved history of repression from the earth’s mounds and lays it bare for questioning.

‘Witte Wieven’ remains a cautionary tale, but not the one we’ve grown accustomed to. Rather than teaching us fear, it warns us to be wary of fear itself. It highlights a history the Dutch may rather have forgotten, and in doing so, it frees a dangerous discourse of Othering women and their wisdom from its prison of time – which, from a realist point of view, was only ever immortal in fiction anyway. This shows us that if there’s anything we shouldn’t trust, it’s a country that chooses to bury its magic for the sake of being ‘down to earth’. If we are to learn anything from Bakker, it is that thinking about folklore matters. It’s good to sing these songs, it’s good to celebrate and explore the history the Dutch do have. Thankfully, Bakker’s song manages to make the land I call my home a little more like the Tolkienesque realm my British stranger already believed it to be.