Kalina
Moderator
I saw that Disney is releasing a movie called The Princess and the Frog next month and I thought, "there's no way they're going to end it like the original." Surely enough, it's like I'm watching Shrek again in the trailer. There may be some reverse racism going on (the reason why they're making a big deal out of this movie is because it's Disney's first black princess), but that sure beats Disney's blatant racism of the past. It doesn't have a bad crew behind it, so I guess we'll wait to see if it sucks or not.
But let's go back to the original. Some fairy tales weren't originally written to entertain children before they went to bed. No, some were written to scare the shit out of kids so they would never even consider misbehaving. Others simply weren't for kids at all. I knew a few of them by word of mouth and decided to do some research to find out what I could dig up on more. As it turns out, sometimes the princess isn't saved at the end after all. Sometimes she's still saved, but she goes through even worse shit afterwards. Some of these are still pretty tame, some aren't. Regardless, I think in honor of what might be another Disney classic based on a fairy tale, I'll present to you the 10 classic fairy tales that were originally disturbing:
10. The Frog Prince
Here we go. A prince was put under a spell that turns him into a frog. A princess comes along and breaks the spell by kissing him. Short and sweet.
But in the original, the prince's spell wasn't broken with a kiss. It was broken when the princess violently threw him against a wall in disgust. That kind of kills the thought of the princess seeing his inner beauty, doesn't it?
In earlier versions, the spell is lifted when the frog gets the girl to cut off his head with a rusty sword.
9. Beauty and the Beast
In the Disney movie, Belle's father is imprisoned for trespassing. Belle goes off looking for him and finds that he's imprisoned for life by a beast. She decides to bargain with this monster and takes her father's place. She develops a crush on him, he loves her, he turns into a prince. It's along the same lines as The Frog Prince.
All of this is consistent with the original, except in an early version he explains that he was turned into a beast because he seduced an orphan. Wait, he had sex with a child whose harsh life already involved not having any parents? That's pretty unforgivable, right? Well, not according to Belle. Well, at least none of them died like in...
8. Pinocchio
I remember enjoying this cartoon. This wooden boy has a conscious he doesn't always listen to, but that results in exciting adventures. He's good at heart, so a fairy turns him into a real boy at the end.
However, it wasn't originally intended for kids. Pinocchio's hard life was harder than we remember. Geppetto goes to prison under the assumption that he abuses Pinocchio because Geppetto has a reputation for hating children. Jiminy Cricket, a nameless cricket at least a century old in the original, tells Pinocchio to obey Geppetto and comments on how Pinocchio is just made of wood. Afterwhich, Pinocchio accidentally kills him with a hammer. While Geppetto's in prison, Pinocchio is reduced to begging for food on the street, with no success. In fact, he has freezing cold water dumped on him and, in an attempt to warm up, accidentally burns off his feet. After Geppetto is released, they live together to finally.... continue living in extreme poverty. Geppetto has to literally sell his only coat so Pinocchio has books for school.
But surely there's a happy ending to this depressing story, right? Wrong. In the original version, Pinocchio dies a gruesome death, hanged for his many faults.
7. Rumpelstiltskin
I hate spelling his name, but his story was one of my favorites growing up. A miller lied to the king by saying his daughter could spin straw into gold. The king tells her to do it or she's imprisoned forever, so she makes a deal with a dwarf. He'll spin straw into gold for material things until she runs out. The last deal made was for her first born son. She marries the prince and the dwarf comes to collect. With a startling twist, she doesn't want to give up her only child to this scary dwarf! He tries to toy with her by making her guess his name to save the boy. She figures it out, he stomps around until he falls through the ground, the end.
In an early version, Rumpelstiltskin stomps until his foot gets stuck. He pulls on it so hard that he literally rips himself in half. In a few versions, the child dies anyway and her punishment is much more severe. If she couldn't spin straw into gold, she would have been skewered and stewed like a pig.
6. Hansel and Gretel
In the version I grew up with, Hansel and Gretel get lost in the woods when their trail of bread crumbs is eaten. They find a house made of food, a witch tries to eat them, they trick her, the end.
In the original, it goes into more detail as to why they get lost. Some versions pull the evil step mother card, but originally there was no step mother. They were part of a poor family and the mother persuaded the father to abandon their own children because they couldn't afford to feed them. Not the most horrifying of twists, I suppose, but still pretty harsh.
In an earlier French version, it wasn't a witches house they found. It was a normal red house that some woman lived in. She told them they could stay there, but they would have to hide for her husband was Satan and would want nothing more than to eat them... yeah. So they hear that and think it's a good idea, but it turns out the devil can smell them because they're Christians. He swiftly beats the shit out of his wife and locks up the boy. He has the girl feed her brother until he's fat enough to eat. He tests this by having her cut off the tips of her brother's fingers which she fakes, though he eventually catches on. He makes a sawhorse and tells the boy to get on to slowly bleed to death. The boy acts like he doesn't know how, so the devil has his wife demonstrate. The brother and sister quickly tie her to it and cut her throat with the saw (take that, hospitality!) and escape to take care of the parents that abandoned them.
5. The Little Mermaid
It starts out similar to the Disney version. The Little Mermaid turns 15 and decides to go to the surface. There, she finds a ship being ripped apart by a storm. A handsome prince falls overboard and she saves him by taking him to the shore. She waits there until a temple girl finds him and takes him in. She is convinced that she has fallen in love with the prince.
She originally exchanges her tongue for a chance at getting the prince and a soul (for some reason mermaids don't have souls), not her voice. Drinking the potion the Sea Witch made for this would feel like a sword being passed through her and walking on her feet would feel like walking on knives. She will only get a soul if the prince loves her and marries her, because part of his soul would then flow into her. Otherwise, at dawn on the first day after he marries another woman, the Little Mermaid will die and turn into sea foam.
The Little Mermaid drinks the potion and meets the prince, who is attracted to her even though she is unable to talk. Most of all he likes the way she dances for him (ouch), but the prince loves her like one loves a child.
The time comes when the king decides that the prince is to marry the neighboring king's daughter. The prince tells the Little Mermaid that he will not marry the princess because he does not love her. He can only love the temple girl who once saved his life. He also tells the Little Mermaid that she is beginning to take that girl's place in his heart, but it's eventually revealed that the princess is the temple girl. She had only been sent to the temple to be educated.
The prince and princess are married and the Little Mermaid's heart breaks. She thinks of all that she has given up in order to be with the prince and to gain an eternal soul and of all the pain she has suffered. She's broken-hearted, but before dawn comes and she dies, her sisters come to her and give her a knife the Sea Witch had given them in exchange for their hair. If the Little Mermaid murders the prince with the knife, then she will become a mermaid again instead of turning into sea foam. But the Little Mermaid can't bring herself to kill the man she loves and, as dawn breaks, throws herself into the sea. Her body dissolves into sea foam.
That's a lot for a quick summary, but you need to hear that much of the story just to get an idea of how sad it is. It might not be the most horrifying of fairy tales, but it is one of the most depressing.
4. Snow White
This is along the lines of Sleeping Beauty, but this had more of an emphasis on an evil step mother. She wanted her dead because Snow White was hotter. There were also some dwarfs and singing and a bunch of other stuff. She puts Snow White into a coma until a prince wakes her up, because that will somehow solve all of the evil queen's problems.
Snow White's original age was 7, which is disturbing all on its own. She still wins over the evil queen though, who was then punished in a pretty creative fashion. She was forced to step into red-hot iron shoes and dance until she fell down dead. In their first edition, the Brothers Grimm published the version they had first collected, in which the villain of the piece is actually Snow White's jealous birth mother. In other versions, the step mother is a cannibal and wants to eat a part of Snow White's body, usually her heart or intestines. I guess cannibalism was big back then.
3. Cinderella
Another wicked step mother story. Cinderella is a poor girl who is treated like a slave by her step mother and step sisters after her dad dies. Animals seem to be her only friends. Along comes a fairy god mother to give her some nice clothes and a way to get to this famous ball. There, the prince falls for her and dances with her until her clothes get close to their expiration date and she darts out, leaving a slipper. He searches everywhere for a girl that fits into the slipper (I guess he has a foot fetish and her shoe size is all he really cared about) and finds his way to their house. The step sisters have big feet, Cinderella doesn't. The end.
In the original, the sisters actually manage to fit into the slipper. The first stepsister fits into it by cutting off her toe, but some birds point out the blood dripping from the slipper to the prince and he returns the false bride to her mother. The second stepsister fits into the slipper by sawing off her heel, which results in the same way. In the end, the evil step sisters are punished for their deception by having their eyes pecked out by birds and being forced to live as blind beggers for the rest of their lives, because walking for the rest of their lives on bloody stumps that used to be feet wasn't enough.
2. Sleeping Beauty
She's placed into a coma and is awakened by a handsome prince. I won't go too into detail, but I will say that this was only part one of the original. In part two, the two of them got married in secret and had a boy and a girl, which he kept secret from his mother, the queen, because she was an Ogre that hungered for human flesh. Once he took the throne, he brought the Princess and the children to his castle, which he then left to the Queen Ogre while he went to make war with his neighbor. Smart move, right?
The Ogre Queen sent his Sleeping Beauty and their children to a house in the woods, where she ordered a chef to cook the boy. The chef, realizing that murdering children is a bit on the wrong side, decided to substitute the boy with a lamb in special sauce, which fooled the Ogre Queen. She then demanded the girl and was satisfied with a young goat prepared in the same sauce. When the Ogre Queen demanded that he cook Sleeping Beauty, she offered her throat to be slit so that she might join her dead children. The chef showed her that her children still lived, but in the process they were caught by the Ogre Queen. She prepared a pit in the courtyard filled with deadly creatures for the King's wife and Children. The King returned right before they were all murdered and the Ogre Queen threw herself into the pit and was consumed.
In a French version of the same tale dating before this one, it isn't a kiss that wakes her up. A king finds her sleeping and rapes her while she's asleep (something I'm sure any prince charming would do, right?) and she becomes pregnant with two children. She wakes up when one of them sucks on her finger to remove the flax that was keeping her asleep. The king, married to someone else, finds out she woke up, but keeps it secret. His wife hears him call out their names in his sleep and then decides the children should be cooked and fed to him while she taunts him. After that, it's basically the same as the first English version.
1. Little Red Riding Hood
The sugar-coated version of this story even scared me as a child. This little girl wants to go to her grandmother's house. On her way, she runs into a wolf that gives her wrong directions. He gets there first and eats the grandmother and then the girl. A hunter appears out of no where and cuts the wolf open, freeing the seemingly uninjured Red and her grandmother. There are nicer versions, but that's the one I grew up with.
You've probably guessed the horrible truth behind this story, right? Yep, more cannibalism, except this time it isn't intentional. Earlier versions of this tale have the wolf leave the grandmother's blood and flesh for the girl to eat, who then accidentally cannibalizes her own grandmother. Once the girl is in bed with the wolf, she sees through his disguise and tries to escape by telling him she has to take a shit (that's not even a joke), but he eventually eats her anyway. No hunter. The end.
S.O.U.R.C.E
But let's go back to the original. Some fairy tales weren't originally written to entertain children before they went to bed. No, some were written to scare the shit out of kids so they would never even consider misbehaving. Others simply weren't for kids at all. I knew a few of them by word of mouth and decided to do some research to find out what I could dig up on more. As it turns out, sometimes the princess isn't saved at the end after all. Sometimes she's still saved, but she goes through even worse shit afterwards. Some of these are still pretty tame, some aren't. Regardless, I think in honor of what might be another Disney classic based on a fairy tale, I'll present to you the 10 classic fairy tales that were originally disturbing:
10. The Frog Prince
Here we go. A prince was put under a spell that turns him into a frog. A princess comes along and breaks the spell by kissing him. Short and sweet.
But in the original, the prince's spell wasn't broken with a kiss. It was broken when the princess violently threw him against a wall in disgust. That kind of kills the thought of the princess seeing his inner beauty, doesn't it?
In earlier versions, the spell is lifted when the frog gets the girl to cut off his head with a rusty sword.
9. Beauty and the Beast
In the Disney movie, Belle's father is imprisoned for trespassing. Belle goes off looking for him and finds that he's imprisoned for life by a beast. She decides to bargain with this monster and takes her father's place. She develops a crush on him, he loves her, he turns into a prince. It's along the same lines as The Frog Prince.
All of this is consistent with the original, except in an early version he explains that he was turned into a beast because he seduced an orphan. Wait, he had sex with a child whose harsh life already involved not having any parents? That's pretty unforgivable, right? Well, not according to Belle. Well, at least none of them died like in...
8. Pinocchio
I remember enjoying this cartoon. This wooden boy has a conscious he doesn't always listen to, but that results in exciting adventures. He's good at heart, so a fairy turns him into a real boy at the end.
However, it wasn't originally intended for kids. Pinocchio's hard life was harder than we remember. Geppetto goes to prison under the assumption that he abuses Pinocchio because Geppetto has a reputation for hating children. Jiminy Cricket, a nameless cricket at least a century old in the original, tells Pinocchio to obey Geppetto and comments on how Pinocchio is just made of wood. Afterwhich, Pinocchio accidentally kills him with a hammer. While Geppetto's in prison, Pinocchio is reduced to begging for food on the street, with no success. In fact, he has freezing cold water dumped on him and, in an attempt to warm up, accidentally burns off his feet. After Geppetto is released, they live together to finally.... continue living in extreme poverty. Geppetto has to literally sell his only coat so Pinocchio has books for school.
But surely there's a happy ending to this depressing story, right? Wrong. In the original version, Pinocchio dies a gruesome death, hanged for his many faults.
7. Rumpelstiltskin
I hate spelling his name, but his story was one of my favorites growing up. A miller lied to the king by saying his daughter could spin straw into gold. The king tells her to do it or she's imprisoned forever, so she makes a deal with a dwarf. He'll spin straw into gold for material things until she runs out. The last deal made was for her first born son. She marries the prince and the dwarf comes to collect. With a startling twist, she doesn't want to give up her only child to this scary dwarf! He tries to toy with her by making her guess his name to save the boy. She figures it out, he stomps around until he falls through the ground, the end.
In an early version, Rumpelstiltskin stomps until his foot gets stuck. He pulls on it so hard that he literally rips himself in half. In a few versions, the child dies anyway and her punishment is much more severe. If she couldn't spin straw into gold, she would have been skewered and stewed like a pig.
6. Hansel and Gretel
In the version I grew up with, Hansel and Gretel get lost in the woods when their trail of bread crumbs is eaten. They find a house made of food, a witch tries to eat them, they trick her, the end.
In the original, it goes into more detail as to why they get lost. Some versions pull the evil step mother card, but originally there was no step mother. They were part of a poor family and the mother persuaded the father to abandon their own children because they couldn't afford to feed them. Not the most horrifying of twists, I suppose, but still pretty harsh.
In an earlier French version, it wasn't a witches house they found. It was a normal red house that some woman lived in. She told them they could stay there, but they would have to hide for her husband was Satan and would want nothing more than to eat them... yeah. So they hear that and think it's a good idea, but it turns out the devil can smell them because they're Christians. He swiftly beats the shit out of his wife and locks up the boy. He has the girl feed her brother until he's fat enough to eat. He tests this by having her cut off the tips of her brother's fingers which she fakes, though he eventually catches on. He makes a sawhorse and tells the boy to get on to slowly bleed to death. The boy acts like he doesn't know how, so the devil has his wife demonstrate. The brother and sister quickly tie her to it and cut her throat with the saw (take that, hospitality!) and escape to take care of the parents that abandoned them.
5. The Little Mermaid
It starts out similar to the Disney version. The Little Mermaid turns 15 and decides to go to the surface. There, she finds a ship being ripped apart by a storm. A handsome prince falls overboard and she saves him by taking him to the shore. She waits there until a temple girl finds him and takes him in. She is convinced that she has fallen in love with the prince.
She originally exchanges her tongue for a chance at getting the prince and a soul (for some reason mermaids don't have souls), not her voice. Drinking the potion the Sea Witch made for this would feel like a sword being passed through her and walking on her feet would feel like walking on knives. She will only get a soul if the prince loves her and marries her, because part of his soul would then flow into her. Otherwise, at dawn on the first day after he marries another woman, the Little Mermaid will die and turn into sea foam.
The Little Mermaid drinks the potion and meets the prince, who is attracted to her even though she is unable to talk. Most of all he likes the way she dances for him (ouch), but the prince loves her like one loves a child.
The time comes when the king decides that the prince is to marry the neighboring king's daughter. The prince tells the Little Mermaid that he will not marry the princess because he does not love her. He can only love the temple girl who once saved his life. He also tells the Little Mermaid that she is beginning to take that girl's place in his heart, but it's eventually revealed that the princess is the temple girl. She had only been sent to the temple to be educated.
The prince and princess are married and the Little Mermaid's heart breaks. She thinks of all that she has given up in order to be with the prince and to gain an eternal soul and of all the pain she has suffered. She's broken-hearted, but before dawn comes and she dies, her sisters come to her and give her a knife the Sea Witch had given them in exchange for their hair. If the Little Mermaid murders the prince with the knife, then she will become a mermaid again instead of turning into sea foam. But the Little Mermaid can't bring herself to kill the man she loves and, as dawn breaks, throws herself into the sea. Her body dissolves into sea foam.
That's a lot for a quick summary, but you need to hear that much of the story just to get an idea of how sad it is. It might not be the most horrifying of fairy tales, but it is one of the most depressing.
4. Snow White
This is along the lines of Sleeping Beauty, but this had more of an emphasis on an evil step mother. She wanted her dead because Snow White was hotter. There were also some dwarfs and singing and a bunch of other stuff. She puts Snow White into a coma until a prince wakes her up, because that will somehow solve all of the evil queen's problems.
Snow White's original age was 7, which is disturbing all on its own. She still wins over the evil queen though, who was then punished in a pretty creative fashion. She was forced to step into red-hot iron shoes and dance until she fell down dead. In their first edition, the Brothers Grimm published the version they had first collected, in which the villain of the piece is actually Snow White's jealous birth mother. In other versions, the step mother is a cannibal and wants to eat a part of Snow White's body, usually her heart or intestines. I guess cannibalism was big back then.
3. Cinderella
Another wicked step mother story. Cinderella is a poor girl who is treated like a slave by her step mother and step sisters after her dad dies. Animals seem to be her only friends. Along comes a fairy god mother to give her some nice clothes and a way to get to this famous ball. There, the prince falls for her and dances with her until her clothes get close to their expiration date and she darts out, leaving a slipper. He searches everywhere for a girl that fits into the slipper (I guess he has a foot fetish and her shoe size is all he really cared about) and finds his way to their house. The step sisters have big feet, Cinderella doesn't. The end.
In the original, the sisters actually manage to fit into the slipper. The first stepsister fits into it by cutting off her toe, but some birds point out the blood dripping from the slipper to the prince and he returns the false bride to her mother. The second stepsister fits into the slipper by sawing off her heel, which results in the same way. In the end, the evil step sisters are punished for their deception by having their eyes pecked out by birds and being forced to live as blind beggers for the rest of their lives, because walking for the rest of their lives on bloody stumps that used to be feet wasn't enough.
2. Sleeping Beauty
She's placed into a coma and is awakened by a handsome prince. I won't go too into detail, but I will say that this was only part one of the original. In part two, the two of them got married in secret and had a boy and a girl, which he kept secret from his mother, the queen, because she was an Ogre that hungered for human flesh. Once he took the throne, he brought the Princess and the children to his castle, which he then left to the Queen Ogre while he went to make war with his neighbor. Smart move, right?
The Ogre Queen sent his Sleeping Beauty and their children to a house in the woods, where she ordered a chef to cook the boy. The chef, realizing that murdering children is a bit on the wrong side, decided to substitute the boy with a lamb in special sauce, which fooled the Ogre Queen. She then demanded the girl and was satisfied with a young goat prepared in the same sauce. When the Ogre Queen demanded that he cook Sleeping Beauty, she offered her throat to be slit so that she might join her dead children. The chef showed her that her children still lived, but in the process they were caught by the Ogre Queen. She prepared a pit in the courtyard filled with deadly creatures for the King's wife and Children. The King returned right before they were all murdered and the Ogre Queen threw herself into the pit and was consumed.
In a French version of the same tale dating before this one, it isn't a kiss that wakes her up. A king finds her sleeping and rapes her while she's asleep (something I'm sure any prince charming would do, right?) and she becomes pregnant with two children. She wakes up when one of them sucks on her finger to remove the flax that was keeping her asleep. The king, married to someone else, finds out she woke up, but keeps it secret. His wife hears him call out their names in his sleep and then decides the children should be cooked and fed to him while she taunts him. After that, it's basically the same as the first English version.
1. Little Red Riding Hood
The sugar-coated version of this story even scared me as a child. This little girl wants to go to her grandmother's house. On her way, she runs into a wolf that gives her wrong directions. He gets there first and eats the grandmother and then the girl. A hunter appears out of no where and cuts the wolf open, freeing the seemingly uninjured Red and her grandmother. There are nicer versions, but that's the one I grew up with.
You've probably guessed the horrible truth behind this story, right? Yep, more cannibalism, except this time it isn't intentional. Earlier versions of this tale have the wolf leave the grandmother's blood and flesh for the girl to eat, who then accidentally cannibalizes her own grandmother. Once the girl is in bed with the wolf, she sees through his disguise and tries to escape by telling him she has to take a shit (that's not even a joke), but he eventually eats her anyway. No hunter. The end.
S.O.U.R.C.E
