You Might Be a Zombie . . . (21 page)

FAIRY
tales weren’t always for kids. Back when these stories were first told in the taverns of medieval vil ages, there were very few kids present. These were racy, violent parables to distract peasants after a hard day’s dirt farming, and some of them made
Hostel
look like, well, kid’s stuff.

5. LITTLE RED RIDING HOOD: INTERSPECIES SEX PLAY, CANNIBALISM

The version you know

On her way to her grandmother’s, Little Red Riding Hood meets the Big Bad Wolf and stupidly tell s him where she’s going. He gets there first, eats Grandma, puts on her dress, and waits for Red.

She gets there, they do the back-and-forth about what big teeth he has, and he eats her. Then, a passing woodsman comes and cuts Red and Grandma out of the wolf, saving the day.

What got changed

Like many fairy tales, the modern version of “Little Red Riding Hood” comes from Frenchman Charles Perrault’s seventeenth-century Mother Goose tales.

While Perrault collected and retold the folktales for children, he wasn’t afraid to straight-up kil some bitches to make a point.

The big thing that changed about this one since Perrault’s version is the ending. That woodsman showing up seemed a little like a third-act movie rewrite due to bad test screening, didn’t it?

In Perrault’s version of the story, Red and her grandmother are dead. The. Goddamn. End.

Perrault’s was the PG version of the tale he’d probably heard as a boy. According to a col ection of oral folktales from the Middle Ages, the earlier versions liked to spice up the sexual undertones, having Red catch on to the wolf and perform a striptease while he’s lying in bed dressed as her grandmother before running away while he’s “distracted” (note to any young girls: If you are ever abducted and menaced by someone,
do not do this!
).

Wait, it gets worse. In some of the early folktales, the Wolf dissects Grandmother, then invites Red in for a meal of her flesh, Hannibal Lecter-style.

Sweet dreams!

4. SNOW WHITE: PRINCE PEDOPHILE, MORE CANNIBALISM

The version you know

Evil stepmom hates that her daughter is prettier than her, so she tell s one of her men to take her out to the woods, kil her, and bring back her heart as proof. He can’t follow through, so he tell s her to run away.

Snow White flees and falls in with seven dwarves. The stepmom finds out and sneaks her a poison apple. Snow goes into a coma until a handsome prince rescues her and they live happily ever after.

What got changed

In the Disney film, the wicked stepmother winds up dead, so that’s already pretty hard-core. It’s got nothing on the German Grimm brothers, who wrote over a hundred years after Perrault and are probably the second most popular source for modern fairy tales. In their version, the stepmother is tortured by being forced to wear red-hot iron shoes and made to dance until she falls down dead.

The issue of Snow’s actual age is a point of contention as wel . The Grimms explicitly refer to her as being seven years old when the story starts, and while there’s no firm indication of how much time has passed, it can’t be more than a couple of years. So unless that’s an eight-year-old prince who comes along and rescues Snow, we’re backing away from this one.

The biggest thing we cut out of the Grimms’ version, and the bloodiest, is the stepmom’s unusual eating habits. Namely, when she asks her guy to bring back the heart of Snow White, she isn’t just after proof that the girl is dead. She wants to eat it. Depending on the version of the story, the stepmother asks for Snow’s liver, lungs, intestines, or pretty much every other major internal organ, up to and including a bottle of Snow’s blood stoppered with her toe.

3. RUMPELSTILTSKIN: DISMEMBERMENT, DEAD TODDLERS

The version you know

The king sentences a beautiful woman to be executed in three days unless she can follow through on her father’s claim that she can spin straw into gold (the legal system back then took a much harsher stance on ridiculous bul shit). Luckily, a gnome shows up and offers to spin gold in exchange for her firstborn child. She accepts, the gnome spins her gold, and the king is so impressed that he decides to marry her.

The king and his new queen have a son, and the little gnome shows up demanding the boy unless the queen can guess his name in three days. She tries everything but comes up short, until a passing woodsman overhears the gnome bragging about how he’s so clever that no one will guess his name is Rumpelstiltskin. The woodsman immediately tell s the queen, who springs it on Rumpelstiltskin, who’s so pissed off that he throws a tantrum and runs away, presumably to ply his poorly thought-out scam in another town.

What got changed

In the Grimm brothers’ version, the little man is so pissed off that he stamps the floor in his little hissy fit and gets stuck. And then he pulls so hard to free himself that he tears himself in half. Now, if our names were Rumpelstiltskin and some pretty girl told the whole damn room, we’d be pissed too, but we don’t think we’d get dismemberment-angry.

In the early folktales on which the Grimm version was based, Rumpelstiltskin launches himself at the girl in a rage and gets stuck, um, in her lady parts.

Like a gynecological “Humpty Dumpty,” the palace guards have to come and pull him out, which must have made for some awkward looks afterward.

Also, in a depressingly large number of the early versions the child is killed anyway, either by Rumpelstiltskin himself or the guards. They weren’t big on happy endings in the Dark Ages.

2. SLEEPING BEAUTY: COMA SEX

The version you know

“Sleeping Beauty” is the story of a young princess who is cursed by an evil witch so that she will prick her finger on a spindle and die on her fifteenth birthday. Fortunately, a non-evil old lady finds out and tempers the curse—the princess won’t die, she’ll just fall asleep for a hundred years.

Of course the king orders all spindles burned, plunging the kingdom into a fashion nightmare, but with the inevitability of fairy-tale logic bearing down on her, the princess manages to find the one working spindle in the kingdom and pricks her finger on her fifteenth birthday. She falls asleep for a hundred years, until a dashing young prince comes along in timely fashion and kisses her, breaking the spell .

What got changed

Seventeenth-century Italian poet and collector of fairy tales Giambattista Basile wrote an early version in which the princess instead gets a piece of flax caught under her fingernail, which puts her to sleep. This might seem like a small difference but stick around.

Basile’s version then has the prince who finds the sleeping princess think she’s so damn beautiful that he just goes ahead and has his way with her right then and there, while she’s still comatose.

If that’s not disturbing enough, the Rohypnol-style coupling leads to a pregnancy, and the princess gives birth to twins, all while asleep. One of the babies, seeking Momma’s milk, sucks on her finger and dislodges the flax, waking her, at which point we imagine she had a few questions.

1. CINDERELLA: MUTILATION, SEX, MORE MUTILATION

The version you know

You all know it: The stepmother and stepsisters hate beautiful Cinderella and make her work all day. One day a fairy godmother shows up and gives Cinderella pretty clothes and a pumpkin coach and sends her to the bal where she falls in love with the prince.

But at the stroke of midnight it all ends, and she runs home, leaving only her glass slipper behind. The prince searches the land, finds Cinderella, the shoe fits, and they live happily ever after.

What got changed

Everyone seemed to have a version of this one. A famous difference in many of the stories is the glass slipper. Authorities on fairy tales (whom you tend not to see at parties) disagree about whether Perrault’s slipper was made of glass or fur, as the words in French (
verre
and
vair
) are pronounced almost identical y. It’s kind of important, because if the prince was wandering the land looking for a lady with the perfect “fur slipper,” well, it doesn’t take Freud to figure that one out. Suddenly the prince doesn’t look so noble.

One thing Perrault left out that the Grimms delighted in putting back was the violence. The sisters, desperate to fit into the slipper, mutilate their own feet, cutting off their toes and heels in exquisite Germanic detail. When the prince eventual y realizes that Cinderella is the one for him, birds peck out the sisters’ and mother’s eyes for their wickedness.

You can probably understand why Disney went with Perrault’s ending for its adaptation.

DECIPHERING
food labels is tricky business. They’re filled with lots of multisyl abic words that border on being impossible to pronounce, chemicals that sound like they could kil you just by touching them, and much, much worse. Read on, unless you’ve eaten recently.

5. SHELLAC

Most everyone is familiar with shel ac as a wood-finishing product. It’s often used to give furniture, guitars, and even AK-47’s that special shine. But did you know that it is also commonly used as a food additive? Yep, that’s why those jel y beans you gorge on every Easter are so shiny.

But what exactly is shellac?

Are you sure you want to know?

Shel ac is derived from the excretions of an insect,
Kerria lacca
, most commonly found in the forests of Thailand.
Kerria lacca
uses the slime as a means to stick to the trees on which it lives. Candy makers then come along and harvest the
Kerria lacca
excretion by scraping it right off the tree.

Unfortunately for you and your future enjoyment of shiny candies, this leaves little room for quality control measures to guarantee that the insects aren’t scooped up as wel .

Once that happens, and it almost always does, the insects simply become part of the shel ac-making process. And the candy-making process. And the candy-eating process.

Don’t eat candy? That’s OK: You’re probably eating bugs too. During the cleaning process, apples lose their natural shine. Care to guess how it’s restored?

If all of this is making you a bit queasy, we understand. It’s not every day that you find out you’ve been celebrating the resurrection of Jesus by consuming handfuls of insect-infused treats your entire life. But before you head to the medicine cabinet, consider this. That pil you want to take to quel your nausea? It didn’t get shiny on its own.

4. BONE CHAR

The sugar you put on your cereal in the morning didn’t start out white. It’s natural y brown—a color the food industry apparently decided was undesirable.

To make their product more acceptable to whitey, sugar companies use a filtering process to strip it of its color. In some cases, the process involves boring sciency words like
ions
and such. But sugar derived from sugarcane (about a quarter of the sugar in the United States) goes through a . . . different process.

Domino, the largest sugar producer in America, uses something called bone char to filter impurities from its sugar. Bone char is produced using the bones of cows from India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan that have died from “natural causes,” as opposed to cows who forget to wear a helmet when riding their motorcycles.

The bones are bleached in the sun and sold to marketers who then sel them to the U.S. sugar industry. Sugar companies then heat the bones until charred, at which point they are used to filter the sugar that keeps you fat and happy.

We don’t know by what alchemy this method purifies the sugar, but since they go out of their way to use ground-up cow bones from India—a country where that animal is often considered sacred—we have to assume Satan is involved.