‘Snow White: A Tale of Terror’ – Revisiting the 1997 Horror Adaptation Starring Sigourney Weaver

Cinderella’s stepsisters mutilating their feet so they can fit into slippers, a heartbroken mermaid taking her own life, Red Riding Hood unknowingly cannibalizing her grandmother — these and other upsetting details tend to be omitted from modernizations of classic fairy tales. This kind of watering-down, often called “Disneyfication” for obvious reasons, may be seen as a problematic practice, but as it happens, the commercial and sterile variants only make their darker counterparts more effective.

One such case is 1997’s Snow White: A Tale of Terror, a most aberrant fairy tale adaptation.

Fairy tales and suchlike are eternal in show business, yet in and after the 1990s they were especially prolific, due in large part to Disney’s enviable success with the model. And it wasn’t just animated adaptations getting the greenlight either; live-action takes were also popular. However, Michael Cohn’s flesh-and-blood treatment of the always-fashionable “Snow White” story was not like anything else coming out at the time. Instead, it veered a ways off the beaten path of safe and palatable. Perhaps that’s why it ended up on Showtime, rather than going to theaters as originally planned.

Snow White: A Tale of Terror could have come as a shock to those viewers who, somehow, had never been made aware of the “real” story of Snow White found in the Brothers Grimm collection. Even still, this cinematic exercise, while far more keen on keeping those specific plot points omitted by Disney and others, isn’t above the use of creative license. After revisions, the film dropped its present-day setting; under the title of “Snow White and the Black Forest,” the production was once set in New York and featured gang members in place of the seven dwarves.

Image: Monica Keena as Lilli and Gil Bellows as Will in Snow White: A Tale of Terror.

After being long seen as a hero in the Alien series, Sigourney Weaver was delighted to be a villain. “The wicked part of her is just delicious to play,” Weaver told the Los Angeles Times, back in 1996. The “her” in question was, of course, the increasingly malicious stepmother to Snow White, who was now christened Lilliana in this reinterpretation. The stepmother herself was also bestowed an actual name as opposed to just a narrative identifier; Weaver’s role was Lady Claudia, the French noblewoman who marries Lilliana’s widowered father, played by Sam Neill, and later lives to torment her fair-skinned stepdaughter.

In adapting fairy tales, adding original and new content can pose a challenge, but in Snow White: A Tale of Terror, the padding is successful, not to mention macabre. If nothing else, the extra narrative attention now paid to Weaver’s Lady Claudia, rather than the story’s supposed protagonist, ends up being the most positive aspect here, after the impressive production values. This film was a vehicle for Weaver, who devoured her role with visible eagerness.

The horrors that befell Lilliana (Monica Keena), or Lilli for short, were not the first or only bad things to happen in this film’s universe. There is no storybook-worthy portrait of happiness before the arrival of Lady Claudia — far from it, seeing as how the outset encompasses the woeful death of Lilli’s pregnant mother (Joanna Roth) and the traumatic birth of Lilli. Fittingly for a film subtitled A Tale of Terror, there is an intentional shortage of upbeat moments. Even the calmer portions shown early on are brimming with melancholy or tension. And naturally, the source of said unease is that always-discordant relationship between Claudia and Lilli.

Image: Sigourney Weaver as Claudia and Sam Neill as Frederick in Snow White: A Tale of Terror.

Two abrupt and sizable transitions of time occur within the film’s first act, leaving the audience to imagine the missing details of Claudia and Lilli’s continuing friction. However, helping fill in the gaps is the persuasive pairing of scenes that begins with the now-teenage stepdaughter rebuffing her stepmother’s gift for the upcoming ball: A dress Claudia herself wore in her youth. Weaver’s pregnant character, the recipient of said ball, then asks why she and Keena’s character must always struggle. That flicker of sympathy for the stepmother would soon be intensified after Lilli’s deliberate act of upstaging; at the party, she instead wears a lavish and show-stopping gown once belonging to her late mother, and Neill’s character is visibly taken by the gesture. As to be expected, outshining and offending Claudia, as well as provoking her miscarriage, has grave consequences for Snow White and anyone she cares about.

There is a divide when it comes to expounding on the origins of villains. While some prefer they just be villainous without clear or overly stated cause, others might welcome an introspective backstory. This film offers a compromise that everyone should be happy with; Claudia’s malevolence has unmistakable motivation, yet the story also doesn’t hammer away at it. That inevitable transformation into fiendish and bitter sorceress is not a slow one, and it most certainly doesn’t come out of nowhere. Upon losing her baby and learning she’s now infertile, Claudia starts to better resemble her literary parallel. The queen demands that her brother (Miroslav Táborský) kill Lilli first, then return with the girl’s removed organs as proof of death. Somewhat like most retellings of the Grimm fairy tale, though, the victim escapes death and is taken in by seven strangers.

From there the film makes substantial changes to its basis. The seven dwarves, for instance, are a far cry from their family-friendly Disney analogs, and Lilli even finds herself preferring the leader of this combative sevensome (Gil Bellows) to the story’s actual prince (David Conrad). And in horror fashion, Weaver’s growingly nefarious character amasses a body count, among other heinous crimes, as she threatens Lilli’s life again and again, and Snow White assumes Final Girl-like determination in the film’s climactic standoff. In the end, the blueprint of the Grimm model is still recognizable beneath A Tale of Terror’s gruesome and, at times, vulgar veneer. Only now, there are these curves in the plot that shove this fairy tale squarely into more bleak and less visited territory, at least as far as contemporary fairy tale films go.

Although this gothic and horror reimagining isn’t the first — and it definitely won’t be the last — to take an indelicate approach to “Snow White,” that evident refusal to avoid risks here, particularly in a past era of inoffensive fairy tales films, makes A Tale of Terror stand out even more so. Admittedly, the pacing and general lack of interesting characters are both issues, however, those shortcomings are offset by Sigourney Weaver’s brilliant turn as the id-driven and monstrous witch. She brings the magic whenever this film’s other parts aren’t quite as charming.

Image: Sigourney Weaver and Monica Keena in Snow White: A Tale of Terror (1997).

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