Horror elements

I thought each story that we read had different aspects of horror. Overall, I thought that Perrault’s version of Bluebeard was the least scary as the only real aspect of horror it had was the key and the room with the dead girls. The key becomes bloodied and is the evidence that the girl has wondered into the forbidden room, this is the same in the Grimm’s version of the story but with the egg rather than the key. Though in Perrault’s version, after she has dropped the key he simply says “Prepare to die” and he never kills her and you never read about the gruesome deaths of the other two. Yet in the Grimm’s version of “Fitcher’s Bride” the death of the other wives is described rather brutally. This could tie into the fact that Tatar had said that the Grimm’s appeared to like making their stories more violent. In this story it reads, “He threw her down, dragged her in by the hair, chopped her head off the block, and hacked her into pieces so that her blood flowed all over the floor” This is clearly a very graphic passage and a great example of horror reading. Some of the other stories also give in detail the description of hacking up the women victims. For example in Grimm’s “The Robber Bridegroom” the death of the woman is extremely graphic and horrifying. I had to cringe as I read the passage in which the drunken robbers “paid no attention to her screams and sobs” and ripped off her clothes and proceeded to eat her with salt. The image of the finger then being chopped off, which the hiding girl takes as evidence, is also grotesque and could easily be pictured in a horror film. The mutilation of bodies as it compares to startling the audience and providing horrifying images is much more severe in the other stories compared to that of Perrault’s original version of Bluebeard.