Once Upon A Time…
Whether we learned them from a book or from Disney movies, many of us experienced classic fairy tales through rose-colored glasses. Whether it’s Pinocchio’s torturous ordeal or the dark truth about Snow White, many of the fairy tales we loved were actually far more sinister than we remember.
Rumpelstiltskin
What with all the baby-peddling, Rumpelstiltskin is pretty disturbing on its own. But few remember that in the original version, after the imp is fooled by his one-time victim, he gets so angry that he tears himself in two. That’ll teach ‘em!
Cinderella
Cinderella is one of the more vividly-depicted adaptations of a fairy tale for Walt Disney. Who could forget the sight of the evil stepsisters jamming their big feet into the glass slipper? Well, in the original version, it’s so much more gruesome.
Walt Disney, Cinderella (1950)
The Real Cinderella
In the original version of the story, the stepsisters began to hack away at their feet to make them fit the glass slipper, even drawing and filling the thing with blood. But somehow, that’s not even their worst punishment.
TSTS Sheng, CC BY-SA 2.0, Wikimedia Commons
Don’t Mess With Her Man
As if losing their chance at the prince isn’t bad enough, when the stepsisters attend Cinderella’s wedding, doves fly down from the sky and peck their eyes out.
Walt Disney, Cinderella (1950)
Snow White And The Seven Dwarves
The first big Disney adaptation of a fairy tale, the 1937 film set the stage for decades of Disney movies that came after it. It also, then, was among the first films to completely defang and sanitize the original story it was based on—a 19th century German fairy tale.
Walt Disney, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937)
The Real Snow White
In this version, when the queen/her stepmother decides to go after Snow White, she tells the huntsman to not only track her down, but also take her life. Even more twisted? She demands that he cut out Snow White’s liver and lungs and bring them back so she can eat them. Yikes.
Walt Disney, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937)
Snow White’s Temporary End
In one version, when the queen finally gets to Snow White, despite the dwarves’ attempts to protect her, she takes her life. Then, a prince falls in love with her after stumbling upon her corpse in the forest—but it gets worse
Walt Disney, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937).
Snow White’s Obsessed Stalker
The prince—who has never met Snow White, lest we forget--then carries Snow White’s body around with him for weeks. Eventually, one of his servants gets sick of it and hits her, dislodging the poison apple in her throat.
Walt Disney, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937)
Snow White’s Revenge
Well, at least she finally gets back at her stepmother in the original version—even if it gets gruesome. The stepmother attempts to attend Snow White’s wedding, but her groom, the prince, comes up with a punishment.
Walt Disney, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937)
Snow White’s Overkill
The prince punishes Snow White’s stepmother by putting her feet in a pair of red-hit iron slippers. He then makes her dance until she collapses and dies. What a way to make your wedding memorable!
Walt Disney, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937)
Little Red Riding Hood
The tale of Little Red Riding Hood is pretty dark on its own. In fact, it’s dark enough that one could assume Walt Disney avoided adapting it for a reason. But when you really get into the nitty gritty details of the European fairy tale, the whole thing is really quite gruesome.
The Real Little Red Riding Hood
In early versions of the tale, the wolf dismembers and skins Little Red Riding Hood’s grandmother. Later, when she arrives, he serves her grandmother’s flesh. It’s no wonder various adaptations have turned the wolf character into a serial killer.
Special Collections Toronto Public Library, Flickr
Mulan
There’s real emotional drive in the film version of Mulan. If you don’t cry at the song “Reflection,” you’ve gotta be made of stone. But in the real version of the story, there’s a twisted element to her family dynamics that is…disturbing, to say the least.
The Real Mulan
In the original version of the story, Mulan comes home from battle, only to find that her beloved father has passed on and that her mother has remarried—but that’s not the worst part.
Mulan’s Indecent Proposal
Her mother has married a nobleman—but it’s no happily ever after. The new husband wants Mulan to become his concubine. Surprisingly, it still gets worse from here.
Mulan’s Dark End
Faced with the prospect of becoming her stepfather’s lover, Mulan takes her own life out of despair. A bit of a different ending from the one you remembered from the Disney movie…
The Frog Prince
“It started out with a kiss, how did it end up like this…”
In the original version of this fairy tale, all it takes to turn the frog back into a prince is a kiss—spawning thousands of iterations of the phrase “You’ve gotta kiss a few frogs to find your prince”. Well, as it turns out, it was actually much more difficult for the princess in this tale.
MCAD Library, CC BY 2.0, Wikimedia Commons
The Real Frog Prince
In the original version of the fairy tale, the princess has to go above and beyond to turn the frog back into a prince. She is supposed to cut off his head for it to happen—here’s hoping she paid attention during the dissection section of high school biology.
Eventually, she settles for throwing him against a wall to break the spell.
Alice In Wonderland
Unlike other entries on this list, this bizarre fairy tale has more interpretations than it does different versions. While many associate it—mostly anachronistically—with substance use, there’s a creepier edge to it that comes from Lewis Carroll’s real life.
Jonathan Brady - PA Images, Getty Images
The Truth About Alice In Wonderland
Some believe that Alice in Wonderland is a roman a clef, and that all the characters represent real people in Carroll’s life. Alice may have been based on Alice Liddell, a real girl that Caroll knew—but their relationship has caused controversy.
UniversalImagesGroup, Getty Images
The Real Alice
Carroll was close friends with Liddell and her family until they suddenly cut ties with him—some believe, because he’d told her parents he wanted to marry the 11-year-old. Carroll would’ve been 31 at the time.
Sleeping Beauty
Even in modern versions of this story, like the Disney film adaptation, the whole “kissing an unconsenting sleeping woman” was pretty problematic—not to mention how terrifying they made Maleficent. But the original was so much worse.
The Real Sleeping Beauty
In the earliest version of the story, a medieval courtly romance called Perceforest, the princess falls into an enchanted sleep while her love interest goes off into the forest. When he finds her, asleep, he does the deed with her—did I mention she’s asleep?—and she gets pregnant. Eventually, she gives birth, and eventually, sometime after that, her baby wakes her up.
What a…happy ending? Oh wait, that’s not the ending.
Walt Disney, Sleeping Beauty (1959)
Sleeping Beauty, The Child-Rearing Years
Some versions of the story have a part two, where a woman from the prince’s past tries to have the princess’s children cooked and served for dinner. Weird they didn’t include that in the movie…
Walt Disney, Sleeping Beauty (1959)
Puss In Boots
No, it’s not just a Shrek spinoff about a smooth-talking cat. Sure, he is certainly smooth-talking in the original European fairy tale, which was first published in Italy in the 16th century. In fact, he’s probably too smooth—to the point of being a grifter.
Universal History Archive, Getty Images
The Real Puss In Boots
In the original fairy tale, Puss in Boots is a scammer—but hey, at least he also seeks to better the life of his master, who is impoverished. One of the ways he does this is by stripping the man naked and convincing him to pretend to be a Marquis. Not so bad…but it’s the way this anecdote ends that’s disturbing.
DreamWorks, Puss in Boots: The Last Wish (2022)
That’s One Way To Fix Someone Up
The cat convinces the unclothed man to get into the king’s carriage. The king’s reaction is truly bizarre. Upon seeing this naked imposter, he offers the man his daughter’s hand in marriage.
DreamWorks, Puss in Boots: The Last Wish (2022)
The Little Mermaid
Disney took some real liberties when it came to adapting fairy tales in the 1980s and 1990s—and for those of us who grew up loving The Little Mermaid, the real version is pretty horrifying.
Walt Disney, The Little Mermaid (1989)
The Real Little Mermaid
In the original Hans Christian Andersen story, the Little Mermaid’s transformation is pretty terrifying. Though she’s beautiful, she constantly feels the pain of her lost tail and her feet feel like she’s walking on knives. They also bleed.
The Little Mermaid’s Life On The Surface
After they meet, the prince asks the Little Mermaid to dance for him, which she does, even though it causes her intense pain. He also makes her sleep on the floor outside his bedroom. And then, things get even weirder.
Walt Disney, The Little Mermaid (1989)
The Plot Thickens
When the prince marries someone else, the mermaid’s sisters make a deal with the sea witch, giving her their hair in exchange for a dagger the mermaid can use to get rid of the prince and return to the sea. However, she can’t bring herself to do it, so she turns into seafoam.
Walt Disney, The Little Mermaid (1989)
Rapunzel
Another classic fairy tale about jealousy over looks/physical features. What exactly are we trying to teach our kids with these? Well, in the original version, things end pretty badly…and not for the villain.
The Real Rapunzel
First, there’s the fact that, like in Rumpelstiltskin, a man tries to bargain by giving away his first-born baby. Then, years later, that baby becomes Rapunzel—and the prince first gains access to her tower by pretending to be the sorceress who’s raised her. Intruder alert! Oh yeah—she gets pregnant from one of these encounters as well.
The Prince’s End
After the sorceress kicks Rapunzel out for being an unwed mother, she fools the prince into climbing up Rapunzel’s hair, which she’s sheared off. She then blinds the prince. Talk about adding insult to injury…
Pinocchio
A puppet come to life. A kindly woodcarver named Geppetto. Some delightful, if harrowing, adventures. Well, the real story of Pinocchio is really nothing like the Disney film of the same name.
The Real Pinocchio
In the original story, which was first published in 1883, the puppet runs away from Geppetto and is picked up by the cops. They assume that the puppet-boy has been abused and arrest Geppetto—and it gets worse from there
ATIS547, FlickrThe Original Pinocchio
After a talking cricket—the basis for Jiminy Cricket, of course—lectures him, Pinocchio tosses a hammer at him and accidentally kills him. He then accidentally burns off his own feet, bites off a cat’s paw, and is hung from a tree at one point. It’s all quite a nightmare.
Aladdin
We know the character of Aladdin from the compendium One Thousand and One Nights, a collection of Middle Eastern folk tales—often called Arabian Nights, part of the title of its first English edition. The book produced a number of notable stories, including “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves” and “Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp”. However, most of us know it from the 1992 film.
The Wrightwood Group, The Making of Aladdin: A Whole New World (1992)
The Real Aladdin
The original Aladdin is set in China, and there’s not one, but two genies—and they have to fight each other. When Aladdin has to face down the story’s antagonist, a sorcerer, he recruits his wife, the Sultan’s daughter, to use her, ahem, “woman’s wiles” to trick him.
On top of that, he kills two people—the sorcerer, and the sorcerer’s brother. A little more bloody than the Disney version!
The Wrightwood Group, The Making of Aladdin: A Whole New World (1992)
The Goose Girl
This old fairy tale starts out with a familiar formula—a maid falls in love with a prince. But that’s where it gets weird.
The Real Goose Girl
In order to get close to him, she swaps places with a princess—but to cover her lie, she kills a talking horse. For her hubris, she ends up meeting a dark twist of fate.
The Goose Girl’s Punishment
Once her ruse is discovered, she’s punished by being stripped and thrown into a spike-filled barrel, and then rolled around for good measure. Unsurprisingly, she perishes from this whole process.
The Ugly Duckling
Speaking of fairy tales featuring anatidae (that’s the biological family that makes up duck, geese, and swans), the tale of the Ugly Duckling reads like an anti-bullying manifesto. Well, in the OG version…there’s just even more bullying. And all his geese and duck friends end up slaughtered.
Bluebeard
Fairy tale—or horror story? In this story, the namesake character’s wives keep disappearing. His newest wife gets a little too curious about the corridors in her new home while he’s gone, and discovers he’s killed them all. Sorry, who is this so-called fairy tale for? Children?
The Three Little Piggies
In the end we know, the three pigs defeat the wolf—but in the original version, not everyone makes it out alive.
Walt Disney, Three Little Pigs (1933)
The Real Three Little Piggies
When the wolf does blow their house down, the first two piggies don’t actually make it, and it’s only the third that survives the wolf’s attack.
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