(via thatguywiththeglasses.) 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 is saved, but she goes through even worse shit afterwards. some of these are pretty tame, some aren't. regardless, i think in honor of what might be another disney classic based on a fairy tale, i present to you the ten classic fairy tales that were originally disturbing: (i'm just going to credit google images for the pictures...)
10. THE FROG PRINCE.
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 the 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.
09. BEAUTY AND THE BEAST.
in the disney version, belle's father is imprisoned for trespassing. belle goes off looking for him and finds he is imprisoned for life by the beast. she decides to bargain with him to take her father's place. she develops a crush on him, he loves her, he turns into a prince. most 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 hard life already involved not having any parents? that's pretty unforgivable, right? well, not according to belle.
08. PINOCCHIO.
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. however, this 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. jimmy cricket, orignally nameless, is at least a century old in the original and tells pinocchio to obey geppetto and makes comments on how pinocchio is only made of wood. afterwhich, pinocchio accidentally kills him with a hammer. while geppetto is in prison, pinocchio is forced to beg for food on the street, with no success. at one point, he has freezing cold water dumped on him and in attempts to warm up, accidentally burns off his feet. after geppetto is released, they live together to finally... continue living in extreme poverty. surely there's a happy ending to this depressing story. wrong. in the original version, pinocchio ends up dying a gruesome death, hanged for his many faults.
07. RUMPELSTILTSKIN.
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 the falls into 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.
06. HANSEL AND GRETEL.
hansel and gretel get lost in the woods when their trail of breadcrumbs gets eaten. they find a house made of good, 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, but still pretty harsh.
in an earlier french version, it wasn't the witch's house they found, it was a normal red house some woman lived in. she told them they could stay there, but would have to hide from her husband, Satan - who'd want nothing more than to eat them. they thought that sounded good, and stayed. despite their hiding, the devil could still smell them because they were Christians. of course. 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 which he tests by having her cut off the tips of her fingers, which she faked for a while - but got caught. he makes a sawhorse and tells the boy to get on so he can slowly bleed to death. the boy acts like he doesn't know how, so the devil has his wife demonstrate. hansel and gretel quickly tie her to it and cut her throat with the saw and escape to take care of the parents that abandoned them.
05. THE LITTLE MERMAID.
it starts out similar to the disney version. ariel 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 shore. she waits there until a temple girl finds him and takes him in. she's convinced she has fallen in love with the prince. in the original, she exchanges her tongue for a chance at getting the prince and a soul (for some reason mermaids don't have souls) and not her voice. drinking the potion made by the sea witch made her feel like a sword was passing through her and walking on a bed of knives. she will only get a soul if the prince loves her and marries her, the reason being - part of his soul would flow into her. otherwise, at dawn on the first day after he marries another woman, the little mermaid would die and turn into sea foam. soon the time comes when the king decides the prince is going to marry the neighboring king's daughter. the prince tells the mermaid he does not love her, that he can only have the temple girl that he thinks saved his life. he also tells the 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 (whoa, twist.)
the prince and the princess get married and the little mermaid's heart breaks. she thinks about all that she has given up in order to be with him and to gain an eternal soul. before dawn breaks, her sisters pay her a visit and give her a knife given by the sea witch in exchange for her hair. if the mermaid murders the prince with that knife, she will become a mermaid again instead of sea foam. but she can't do it, so at dawn, she throws herself into the sea and her body dissolves into foam. not so much "horrifying" as it is depressing. ahh, love.
04. SNOW WHITE.
along the same lines of sleeping beauty, with more of an emphasis on an evil step-mother. she wanted her dead because snow white was prettier. there were dwarfs, singing and dancing, blah blah - she puts snow white into a coma until a prince wakes her up, because that will somehow solve all the queen's problems. snow white's original age was seven, which is disturbing all on its own. 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 is actually snow white's jealous birth mother. in other versions, the step-mother is a cannibal and wants to eat snow white's organs.
03. 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 the ball. there, the prince falls for her and dances with her until her curfew where she runs out the door leaving behind a slipper. he searches far and wide for the girl that fits into that slipper and finds his way to her house. the step-sisters have big feet, cinderella does not. the end.
in the original, the sisters actually manage to fit into the slipper. the first step-sister cuts of her toe, but birds point out the blood dripping from the show and he returns the false bride to her mother. the second step-sister cuts off her heel, which results 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 the lives, because walking around on bloody stumps wasn't enough.
02. SLEEPING BEAUTY.
she's placed into a coma and awakened by a handsome prince. part one of the original. part two, they get married in secret and have a son and daughter, which he kept secret from his mother, the queen - because she was an ogre that hungered for human flesh. (what?!) once he took the throne, he moved his family in and left it in the care of the ogre queen while he went to make war with his neighbor, smart move.
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 decided to replace the boy with a lamb in special sauce, which worked in fooling the ogre queen. she then demanded the girl, which was replaced with a young goat prepared in the same sauce. she soon realized the kids had survived and built a pit in the courtyard filled with deadly creatures to kill the king's wife and children. but the king returned before they all got murdered and the ogre queen committed suicide by plunging herself into the pit.
in a french version, a kiss doesn't wake beauty, he finds her sleeping and rapes her while she's still asleep and she becomes pregnant with twins. she wakes up when one of them starts sucking on her finger to remove the flax that was keeping her asleep. the king, married to someone else, finds out beauty woke up, but decides to keep it a secret. when his wife finds out, she insists his children be killed and cooked and fed to the king while she taunted him. after that, it's basically the same as the english version.
01. 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 the wrong directions. he gets there first and eats the grandmother and then the girl. a hunter appears out of nowhere and cuts the wolf open, freeing the uninjured girl and grandmother. there are nicer versions, but that's the one i grew up with.
in the original, more cannibalism. except this time, it wasn't intentional. earlier versions 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 his disguise and tries to escape by telling him she needs to take a shit (that's not even a joke), but he eventually eats her anyway. no hunter. the end.
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