Hey there, little Red Riding Hood – The Movie Filter

Like a scary story or a joke, the mechanics and archetypes of fairytales are so familiar that their impact is not so much in what is told but the way it is told. Spinning well-known yarns in novel ways has been the glorified task of moviemaking for generations. This month director Catherine Hardwick follows her teenage freak-out Thirteen, skateboarding love letter Lords of Dogtown and the blockbuster original Twilight with a sensually suspenseful vision of Red Riding Hood starring Amanda Seyfried and Gary Oldman.

With this film, the Shrek era’s sarcastic remixing and satirizing of traditional folklore is supplanted by an edgy fairytale fever. Darker visions like Snow White & The Huntsman and The Brothers Grimm: Snow White are in the works, and The Wizard of Oz will receive updates soon, too: both a Robert Downey, Jr.-led Oz: The Great and Powerful and Robert Zemeckis’ motion-capture remake of the 1939 classic. Even Disney’s new Wii game Epic Mickey is set in a meta-wasteland.

A year ago, Tim Burton’s trippy Alice in Wonderland revisited Lewis Carroll’s beloved character on the verge of marriage. Burton’s Alice realizes her childhood nightmares are now all too real in adulthood as Johnny Depp’s Mad Hatter steals the show, suffering the ill effects of mercury poisoning. This version was more causally complex than any retelling before it.

Early fairytales were imaginative warnings about puberty, popularity or pride, the dark of the woods, the company of strangers or the inevitability of death. They fell out of favor with Enlightenment Age grown-ups long before the Brothers Grimm bowdlerized them and Walt Disney created hit movies for kids.

So are fairytales for adults again? Based on the amount of hair gel Seyfried’s beau sports in Red Riding Hood, the latest crop, at least, is for young adults.

But how a pop culture steeped in secular relativism shows increased interest in centuries-old morally concrete fables is intriguing. Hollywood deals with this by internalizing or demystifying the classic external tormentor. “The werewolf is someone in this village,” Oldman’s monster-hunter warns in Red Riding Hood. In 1984, the ravenous wolf and the heroine merged completely in Neil Jordan’s post-virginal fever dream The Company of Wolves. M. Night Shayamalan’s The Village unmasked its woods-dwelling demon as a power-grabbing ruse to keep young villagers fearful of the outside world.

But are the gender themes of classical fairytales lost on a generation of young women who not only choose their own partner—but several, if they wish? Twilight heroine Bella Swan has two suitors, a vampire and a werewolf, and the choice is all hers. Like the young women Hardwick’s film targets, the classic Red Riding Hood travels the wood alone, and this empowerment engenders a fair warning about the wolf that wants a peek under her apron.

Charles Perrault put it best in the version of Red Riding Hood he adapted for French aristocrats at the turn of the 18th century. “’Tis simple truth,” he wrote, “sweetest tongue has sharpest tooth!”

Red Riding Hood debuts in theaters March 11.