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Grimm Pictures: Fairy Tale Archetypes in Eight Horror and Suspense Films. By Walter Rankin. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company, 2007. 217 pp., photos, notes, bibliography, index.
Walter Rankin's work represents an accessible, affectionate account of a variety of horror films in which, despite their lack of overt fairy-tale plot, he traces parallels to fairy-tale motifs and structures. He is centrally concerned with the common violence he finds in modern horror films and in fairy tales by the Brothers Grimm, and argues, "This violence coupled with a strong moral ties the Grimm tales to our modern horror and suspense films in provocative and profound ways" (13). This discussion appears to be rooted in the author's own fondness for fairy tales and for the horror film, and the somewhat anecdotal introduction both characterizes horror in terms of Rankin's own enjoyment of fear and attempts to account for its profound effect. The book's analysis is rooted in popular culture, responding to films that speak to a wide authence rather than to art-house productions, but the work's assumptions about fairy tale or film as folk- cultural capital remain largely unexamined.
The dual nature of Rankin's project as both horror film and fairy-tale analysis, as well as its partial address to the film fan as much as the critic, tends to diversify the book's critical weight, and its critical framework suggests that the author is ultimately less concerned with fairy tale than with film itself. Fairy-tale criticism is present mainly in the oft-cited works of Maria Tatar and Jack Zipes, with minor references to a far from representative sample of other fairy-tale critics. Such references are rather fragmented, used to support the argument at hand rather than offering any sustained engagement with the critics' own arguments. They are often outweighed by the work's rather broader invocation of film criticism and by its tendency to pad the direct comparison of film...