As long as humans have shared stories, we’ve told tales about monsters. Beasts hiding in cave shadows just beyond the flickering firelight. Disembodied voices that call from the woods, children disappearing in the night, strange cold folk that live in hollow hills. Many monster stories are cautionary tales: ‘Don’t do this bad thing or the monster will get you.’ But often, when people tell scary stories, it’s because they like being scared. It’s like giving a pumpkin full of meat to a tiger in a zoo. Dark stories let us flex disused evolutionary muscles, giving us a dangerous thrill without actually putting us in danger. It’s enrichment in our enclosures.
Historically, humans are quite good at injecting darkness into just about any story, from mysteries to sci-fi to kids’ cartoons. Dark Fantasy has an especially long and storied history, traceable all the way back to that flickering firelight on cave walls. Let’s briefly look at some examples of old stories that are originally much darker than many people believe.
Grimm’s Fairy Tales
Probably the most famous examples of “dark fairy tales” come from the Brothers Grimm. A pair of academics operating in the 19th century, they catalogued European folk tales for posterity, widely publishing and popularizing a vanishing oral tradition. Though the Grimm versions of the stories are darker than people initially imagine fairy tales to be, it wasn’t because the brothers themselves were particularly dark and twisted—in fact, the Grimms’ stories were usually brightened up from the lurid fireside tales they initially recorded.
Snow White is a classic example of the lengths the Brothers Grimm went to make folktales palatable for children! In the original story, the Queen is Snow White’s biological mother. Her use of the Royal Huntsman specifically to hunt and kill Snow White is significant because the Queen intends on eating her child’s lungs and liver. Even the adult versions the Grimms published featured a content warning at the beginning, encouraging parents to seek age-appropriate stories for their kids.
Japanese Yōkai
Yōkai, supernatural entities and phenomena, are a huge part of the folkloric tradition in Japan, entering pop culture with varying levels of darkness in much the same way fairy tales exist in the West. They stem from what were originally very decentralized individual ideas of animism—basically, that objects, plants, and natural features had their own innate spirits, that could either be beneficial, or harmful. The Japanese largely regarded Yōkai as malevolent forces, mischievous tricksters, though sometimes their behavior could be helpful to humans as well.
Over time, people began to attribute fewer and fewer natural phenomena to animistic spirits. Improved communication and trade exposed people to stories and art from other regions of Japan. Stories of spirits standardized, and Yōkai slowly went from symbolizing different things for different people to becoming a more cohesive bank of well-known stories.
These range from the kappa, a turtle-like creature that holds water in a bowl-shaped divot on its head and drags people into the water to drown them, to nukekubi, women who are unknowingly cursed to have their head detach when they sleep at night, and fly around sucking people’s blood.
In the Edo Period, just like in the Romantic Period in Europe, there was a push by Japanese folklorists to collect and categorize Yōkai stories. A few artists and writers, like Toriyama Sekien and Tsukioka Yoshitoshi, saw their work as a way to preserve the traditional past in a Japan that was quickly becoming modernized. Some of their creations, like Sekien’s original Yōkai the amikiri, are still widely regarded as traditional folklore to this day.
Indian Oral Tradition
India has a rich history of oral storytelling, epic poetry, and grand tales of heroes and terrifying villains. One of the most beloved Hindu epics is Ramayana, featuring the hunter Rama, facing off against the ten-headed demon king Ravana. Ravana was a fierce devotee of the god Shiva. To prove his devotion, he cut off his own head ten times to offer it to the god. Shiva was so impressed by Ravana’s sacrifice that he granted him the boon of being “Dashanan,” the ten-headed one. Indians still burn effigies of Ravana on Vijayadashami (The Victorious Tenth Day) in celebration of Rama’s triumph over Ravana’s evil.
Historically, human existence has overflowed with hazards, terrifying natural phenomena, and dangers that defied our knowledge of the natural order. Folktales, fairy stories, cautionary tales, myths and legends were ways for people to cast a light into that strange darkness, and make sense of what seemed like a senseless world.
To this day, dark fantasy stories explore the more unpleasant parts of our own nature. They serve as everything from a warning to an attempt to explain the parts of ourselves that we don’t like to share, to a tantalizing thrill ride of violence and fear. Humans have always told stories, and there has been darkness in our stories for as long as there has been darkness in the world. We can’t escape it any more than we can escape our own natures, so why not enjoy the ride?
Ollie DeVoid is an author, an illustrator, a produced playwright, and a published photographer. The only way they can find any peace these days is by getting their stories out of their head, and into yours.