The Red Shoes

When I was a newborn, my granny bought me two volumes of books entitled "The Worlds Best Fairy Tales". As soon as I was old enough to read, I read them cover to cover. Even my mom and my older sisters read them. I think they appealed to them because they were not the sanitised Disney versions that they grew up with. These were the real deal. In these stories, the ending wasn't always pretty, the girl didn't always get the prince (The Little Mermaid). Sometimes people outright tourtured their stepmothers and mothers-in-law to death (Snow White).

One of the more gruesome tales I remember was The Red Shoes (a great annotated version can be found here). I remember there was this horribly frightning illustration featured in the book of the main girl Karen, dancing out in the wilderness at night, with the red bearded executioner staring menancingly at her behind a rock, holding an ax. If my scanner wasn't broken I would unleash this traumatizing image out into the internets.

Anyway, the story itself is a good read, (and I absolutely love the 1948 Moira Shearer version), but then it devolves into a religious fable about how you should go to church every Sunday, be humble, and sing hymns. Which, there's nothing wrong with that, I guess, but how can you end a story about a girl with an enchanted pair of red shoes that make her dance for so long, that she begs someone to cut her feet off(....and they do!) in such a way? It's a strange horror story full of gore and suffering. I'm sorry, but ending a story like that, with bible-thumping church lecturing is insulting. That's like ending The Texas Chainsaw Massacre with a "hey man, they should've just all gone to church Sunday night and this would never have happened". But then again, isn't that one of the hallmarks of the 80's teen slash flicks? You know, how the first victim in most of those movies is usually a poor, hapless, heathen of a teenage girl who has premarital sex a lot? And the only surviving character is a virgin? Perhaps The Red Shoes was a precurser to all of that?

Another good version of "The Red Shoes" is the music video for Mark Ronson's "Stop Me". In it, a guy is just chillin out at a coffee shop and happens to see an old man leave a pair of white trainers in the street. He becomes curious and decides to go investigate. He follows the shoes all the way to the back alley where he finally captures them. He keeps them in a cage in his appartment. As he doses off in front on the tv, the shoes decide to escape and encase and tie themselves onto his feet. The hijinks start there and it's a pretty good video, one of the better one's I've seen in a while. I have to say it's way better than the animated tears "international" version.