Last week, Dr. Thomas Davison regaled us with a tale of a truly spooky mirror. This week, I want to take a look at a tale that features perhaps the most famous mirror of all, the fairy tale Snow White. More specifically, I want to take a look at the Michael Cohn film Snow White: A Tale of Terror which debuted on Showtime in 1997.

Over the years, there have been numerous films that put a dark twist on familiar stories from childhood. Examples include Silent Night, Deadly Night, the South Korean adaptation of Cinderella, and the recent Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey. What makes Snow White: A Tale of Terror different, is that it follows the plot of the story as collected by the Brothers Grimm rather closely.

Before I continue, I should note that the Brothers Grimm did not create the fairy tales that bear their names. Rather they collected tales that had been told verbally and put them down in written form. Many of the tales are quite old. It’s a little tricky to track down the earliest form of “Snow White,” but we know versions of the story from Italy and France predate the version told by the Grimms. Those early versions have some interesting variations. Sometimes the wicked queen isn’t Snow White’s step mother, but rather Snow White’s birth mother. Sometimes the wicked queen has no mirror, but speaks to the moon or a soothsayer. In non-Germanic version of “Snow White,” the princess often takes refuge with bandits or even the fae rather than dwarven miners. No matter the details, at its core, all versions address the question, what can drive a mother to hate their own daughter? And that question is rife with horror possibilities.

Snow White: A Tale of Terror opens before our title character is born. Her father and mother — nobles in this case rather than king and queen — are in a carriage riding through the woods on a snowy evening. The carriage hits a fallen log, loses a wheel and overturns. As this happens, the driver is beset by wolves and the mother is dying. The father, Frederick Hoffman, must use his knife to save the child before mother and daughter both die.

After the opening, we skip ahead several years. The daughter, Lilli Hoffman, is a precocious child and Frederick, played by Jurassic Park’s Sam Neill, plans to remarry. His wife is to be the Lady Claudia, played by Sigourney Weaver. In this version, we see Claudia attempt to befriend young Lilli, who rejects her future stepmother no matter how kind she tries to be.

After another time jump, Lilli is a teenager and Claudia is pregnant with her own child. We see that Lilli and Claudia’s relationship hasn’t improved. Tragically at a gathering, Claudia miscarries, which drives her to madness. She will do anything to bring her child back and begins speaking to her mirror. There are hints the mirror may be possessed of some spirit, but there are also hints that the mirror’s voice is largely within Claudia’s head. Either way, the mirror convinces Claudia that Lilli must be destroyed or else Lilli will usurp her influence with Frederick.

From here, the story proceeds largely according to the plot of the fairy tale. Claudia sends her brother to take Lilli into the woods and kill her and then bring back her heart as evidence that he’s done the deed. When he fails, he brings back a pig’s heart instead, which fools Claudia for a time. In the meantime, Lilli finds refuge with a group of ne’er-do-wells who are trying to find their fortune in a mine, but have no problem engaging in banditry.

Of course, Claudia soon learns that Lilli escaped her clutches and tries to find other means to dispatch her step-daughter. As in the fairy tale, she makes two attempts on Lilli’s life before she finally seems to succeed by disguising herself as a peddler and convincing Lilli to eat a poisoned apple. The bandits place Lilli in a glass coffin, but we soon learn she may not be as dead as she appeared. As in the fairy tale, it’s not a handsome prince’s kiss that awakens Lilli, it’s the piece of apple being dislodged from her throat.

Once Lilli has been awakened, it’s time for the final confrontation between step-daughter and step-mother. I’ll leave it there to avoid spoilers in case you haven’t read the original fairy tale, but the movie does evoke the story’s version of the ending.

So, how did we make the transition from child-friendly fairy tale to creepy film. Honestly, the original fairy tale did a lot of the heavy lifting by being pretty scary in its own right. Snow White: A Tale of Terror just showed us parts of the story that happened off camera in Disney’s Snow White. It set the tale in a more realistic late Middle Ages and depicted the blood and grime. Disney added happy singing forest creatures and the seven dwarfs were enchanted by Snow White right from the start. In Cohn’s film, the creatures were either following their own natures or possessed by Claudia’s magic and Lilli had to accept her privilege as Frederick Hoffman’s daughter and move past that in order to finally earn the trust and friendship of the bandits. Disney’s wicked queen was cold and cruel. Sigourney Weaver’s Claudia descended fully into madness giving us a almost a flip-side of Anthony Perkins’ Norman Bates.

All of this goes to show that horror stories aren’t always so different from other tales. A lot depends on how you build the suspense, how high the stakes are, and how you explore the dark side a villain’s personality. Are there other horror stories with unexpected settings or origins that you liked? I’d love to hear about them in the comments.