Aguilera 1 Princesleah Aguilera 20 September 2016 Project One ENGW 2325-01 I.
Introduction
Dating back to the beginning of the 20th century, the most famous yet infamous short stories made the baseline of what all other fairytales should correspond too. The Brothers Grimm wrote a whole century worth of fairytales that are being kept alive today. Memorable stories like Cinderella, Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, Rapunzel, and Little Red Riding Hood that are classified as fairytale or folklore by readers in the twenty-first century. My question to the readers is, why can’t these stories be categorized under the horror fiction genre that the Brothers Grimm had originally intended them to be? The Brothers Grimm intentions are to scare, teach, and show a way that these fairytales can also be a gory reminder that happy endings come with consequences. Although the magical realm does reduce the gore, the horror aspects of these stories are more dominant than people choose to remember. Society decides that all the gory details aren’t made for fairytales and that the Brothers Grimm are, not wrong, but mistaken in including characteristics that make the stories a peculiar horrific version of fairytales. This question will be answered through generic participation by attempting to place the folkloric fairytale stories Cinderella, Rapunzel, Little Briar Rose, Little Red Cap, and Little Snow White into the fiction horror genre. The Brothers Grimm made the stories with the intention of scaring and teaching. why did we as a society decide to adapt their stories and make them folkloric fairytales? Can these fairytales be changed and read as horror fiction instead?
II.
Generic Participation
In Horror Fiction: An Introduction by Gina Wisker, horror is classified as a feeling more than a realistic genre. Wisker attempts to give horror fiction an actual a genre definition, but does not succeed. “Horror fiction tends to gain its effects from this imaginative strategies – pace, characterization, narrative, settings, perspectives, both its tone and appeal lie along an axis from the realistic to the supernatural, fantast, and weird” (5).