The Better To See You With, My Dear

I saw Red Riding Hood over the weekend.  It is a monster (Werewolf) movie, which is not my favorite genre, but my wife likes it and we were celebrating our Anniversary, sooooo, I decided to let her pick the movie and she chose RRH.

First of all it has NOTHING to do with the fairy tale; it is a straight forward creature feature, much in the tradition of the old B&W Universal Monster Movies.  It does have one tie to the fairy tale, however.  It borrows some lines and passages from the tale and incorporates them in the dialogue and/or scenes.  I like when movies and TV shows do this, especially in this time of re-makes and sequels.  I love the idea of little “in jokes” that are a wink at the audience that knows the source material well enough to “get it.”

On the flip side of that is when a Movie/TV show contradicts a fact or character from the source material.  That bugs the crap out of me.  It is sloppy writing and an affront to the person who created the mythology in the first place.  In RRH case it was ok to stray from the fairy tale story because the movie was NOT about the fairy tale.  The fact that the girl wore a red hood and there was a wolf and a grandma in the story was about as close as it got, but others have blatantly betrayed the original and I really hate that.

Many of these contradictions are made to modernize an old story.  It would not do to have a 50s character dressed in a signature way with a story set in today’s world.  I can understand and deal with that.  What I cannot abide is obvious deviations from known facts.

The biggest example of this in media today comes with the sudden influx of “Vampire” stories.  Everyone knows the lore of the vampire.  Garlic, crucifixes, and holy water…not good!  The grand daddy of all Vampire mythology is the simple fact, “Vampires CANNOT be in sunlight.!”  This is not negotiable, yet today there are so many Vampire stories on screen, in books, and on TV that to make each one stand out from another, “changes” are made.  It drives me CRAZY!  I want to scream at the screen, “You can’t have him chase them; it’s DAYTIME, the sun’s OUT!!”  <sigh> 

There are so many clever and talented writers out there.  You’d think they could come up with logical ways around the mythology instead of plowing right through it.