Reflection:

For this canvas post, we were tasked with watching the movie "Big Bad Wolves" and then saying if it fell into the dark fairy tale genre or not. I found this post to be extremely important as I learned a lot more about what it meant to be a dark fairy tale outside of the traditional book setting. My take was that it wasn't part of the dark fairytale genre as I didn't see any resemblance with fairytales when I was reading. However, once I read through the other responses and through our in-class discussions, I saw how it actually is a dark fairytale. Through this assignment, I would learn what makes something a dark fairytale, better than I did before. This would prove to be useful for my IP as it gave me a better understanding of what to look for when watching movies and that things don't need to have magic or what we normally think fairy tales are to be considered a dark fairytale.

Canvas Post:

I don’t consider Big Bad Wolves as a modern fairytale. I can see how one may be able to view this as a dark fairytale, but it misses a lot of the core values of fairy tales. From the beginning, I didn’t think there was a clear distinction between who was good and who was bad. We get told that the school teacher has rumors against him but throughout most of the movie we see him fighting for his innocence and for the most part had people fooled along with the cop. In the opening scene after we see the girl go missing, we instantly get thrown into this world and it starts off with the teacher being accused. He was getting beat up, his job was at risk along with many other things and he still chose to plea that he was innocent and that they had the wrong guy. While many were convinced that he was the culprit, they lacked evidence to prove that it was true. As a result, many ended up giving him sympathy and sided with him as someone being wrongly accused. The only person who saw through this would be the father of the child that got murdered. He would go to great lengths to investigate who this supposed killer is and went as far as getting a new property just to torture him. However, them fighting for revenge doesn’t mean that he’s good either. The father goes above and beyond with his tactics to get back at the killer. These tactics involve a lot of violence involving torture stalking and using threats. In the end, we still don’t know who was good and who was bad till the very end of the story, and this ending wasn’t a happy one either. While this story does have a lot the dark elements within the dark fairy tale genre such as pedophilia torture and macabre, it lacks the fundamental elements of a fairytale. It’s hard to find the good vs evil idea of the story. There isn’t a major lesson being taught at the end or magic being used. To me, this seems more like horror suspense and mystery movie rather than a fairy tale. As mentioned before, there are many dark elements but that just makes the story dark the basis of the story doesn’t fit within the definition of a fairytale and without that, I don’t think I’m able to call this a modern fairytale.