Fairy tales for all
Witches, wolves, and wicked stepmothers, oh my! They are the stuff of legend, and a goldmine for Hollywood, which regularly taps a seemingly insatiable public appetite for fantasy and folklore. The recent big budget remakes “Red Riding Hood” and “Snow White and the Huntsman” are just two of the countless film adaptations of the seductive and savage tales by brothers Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm. The forthcoming film “Witch Hunters” recasts Hansel and Gretel as young adult bounty hunters seeking revenge on evil witches as payback for their traumatic time in the deadly gingerbread house. What makes such stories — at times beautiful, at times horrific — so enduring? Can the lure of children’s tales originally brought to life around the hearth in spoken form — what John Updike called “the television and pornography of an earlier age” — and later in the pages of elegantly illustrated books, survive the onslaught of technology? Maria Tatar,...