“Hansel and Gretel” Films: Crimes, Harms, and Children
Abstract
A brutal narrative of child abandonment, murder, and cannibalism may not seem the conventional stuff of fairy tales to those trained for a Disney-eyed view. Yet that is exactly what “Hansel and Gretel” offers. Film versions across genres, including drama, noir, horror, slasher, thriller, comedy, and adventure, deal seriously with crimes against and harms to children. Many practices and behaviours that endanger and damage people of various ages in all kinds of contexts, including environmental degradation, economic exploitation, and many forms of discrimination, are not proscribed in the formal criminal justice system, and/or are beyond the jurisdiction of public institutions. Many actions and inactions that affect and/or pertain to children’s wellbeing are found as recurring themes and ideas in “Hansel and Gretel” films. In this paper, the authors focus on non-supernatural, live-action films available in English for adult viewers that include child main characters, that is, those whose Hansels and Gretels are clearly below the age of puberty. These films, the authors contend, offer distinctive perspectives on harms to children as individuals and as groups, especially with relation to institutions implicating justice.
Keywords
Charles Laughton; Christoph Hochhäusler; crimes; cultural criminology; Curtis Harrington; Danishka Esterhazy; fairy tale films; H & G; Hansel and Gretel; harms; Karel Kachyňa; This Very Moment; Treeless Mountain; The Last Butterfly; So Yong Kim; The Night of the Hunter; Whoever Slew Auntie Roo?
Supporting Agencies
We gratefully acknowledge research support from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for Fairy Tale Films: Exploring Ethnographic Perspectives 410-2011-29 and for Fairy-Tale Cultures and Media Today 890-2014-18.
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University of Winnipeg Canada
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9610-6173
Pauline Greenhill – PhD, Professor in the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies of the Faculty of Arts at the University of Winnipeg (Canada). Her research interests include fairy-tale media and Canadian traditional and popular culture. Contact: p.greenhill@uwinnipeg.ca.
University of Winnipeg Canada
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4650-1180
Steven Kohm – PhD, Professor in the Department of Criminal Justice of the Faculty of Arts at the University of Winnipeg (Canada). His research interests include crime in Canadian film, television, and news media. Contact: s.kohm@uwinnipeg.ca.
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