Kids' Movies Based On Very Adult Stories

To say that today's kids are coddled and sheltered from the realities of the world is a bit of an understatement. As parents, we do tend to gravitate toward kids stories and entertainment that make the world look like a soft and fluffy place, free from corruption and danger. But that's sort of a modern development and c'mon, parents, we're missing out on that golden opportunity of the past, you know, the one where you can control your kids' behavior by telling them the boogeyman likes to eat naughty children. (Just kidding! No one wants to go back to the days when we terrified our children into submission hahaha of course we don't.)

But there was a time not long ago when most children's literature was dark and scary. And adult literature has always included stories of death, horror, and unspeakable evil and sometimes, these very adult stories and these very adult but for-some-reason-written-for-children-anyway stories reach the mainstream, and someone gets the bright idea to make them into movies. And because we know how much you love dark and scary and inappropriate-for-children stories, here's a collection of some of the movies you loved as a kid and/or your kids love today, and the freak shows of literature they came from.

Mermaids are creepy. No matter how sweet and innocent they might look on the big screen, they are still humans from the waist up and fish from the waist down, but whatever. Disney somehow managed to totally erase the creep factor of The Little Mermaid and they did it pretty admirably when you consider how horrific the original version of the story actually is.

As Bustle notes, Disney's The Little Mermaid is based on a Hans Christian Andersen tale, and it's full of all sorts of creepy imagery. For a start, the little mermaid's sisters like to pass the time by luring sailors to their deaths, and also mermaids don't have souls so if they die they just disintegrate into the ocean and are gone forever. And the prince, who is the subject of our heroine's affection, is patronizing and creepy and doesn't actually marry her in the end. And we'd be tempted to say "Well, she's better off without that jerk," but in this version no marriage means death and disintegration. To save herself, the little mermaid could kill the prince, but for some reason she loves the creep so she refuses.

Andersen evidently decided to spare us from having to watch the little mermaid disintegrate, though, so instead he doomed her to flying around the world as some weird fairy thing for hundreds of years because that makes tons of logical sense. Thanks for the warm-fuzzies, Hans.

Frozen doesn't really resemble the story it was based on, and it's a good thing, too, because if it did then there wouldn't be seven million Elsas roaming the suburbs every Halloween and about a dozen renditions of "Let it Go" in every school talent show. Wait, that's a good thing?

Anyway, we're not here to have an existential discussion about whether society is better off with a not-evil ice queen, so we'll just say that Frozen was definitely not the same as The Snow Queen, which was the original Hans Christian Andersen story. According to Odyssey, in the original a troll breaks a magic mirror, which permanently impales a boy named Kai and makes it so he can only see the worst in everything. And then for some nonsensical reason the boy meets up with the Snow Queen, who is not a lovely blonde ballad-singing lady in a frosty blue dress, but a bearskin-clad enchantress who makes him forget his home and his family.

It's not all bad, though. Kai's sister goes after him and eventually finds him nearly frozen in the Snow Queen's castle. When she weeps over him, her love melts his frozen heart and the magic mirror fragments fall out and then they live happily ever after. So hey, against some of the other freak show stories people used to write for kids, this one is not all bad.

Like Snow White, Sleeping Beauty is a beloved children's classic featuring a curse, an antagonist of pure evil, and lots of singing. In the end the princess marries her one true love because princesses can only live happily ever after if they get married and become subservient second-class citizens with a one in three chance of dying in childbirth.

Anyway, "Sun, Moon, and Talia" was written in the 1300s and is basically a tale of some creepy dude taking advantage of an incapacitated young woman. In fact, you could just set this in modern America and have the spindle that sends the princess into her everlasting sleep be a martini with a roofie in it because that's pretty much how the story goes.

A king finds the sleeping princess alone in a house and he "lift[s] her in his arms" and "gather[s] the first fruits of love," which is a pretty sweet and flowery way of saying that he belongs in prison. Later, the princess gives birth to twins, wakes up, and doesn't find it at all weird that she has two babies. And here's where the story becomes spectacularly awful — the king returns and introduces himself as the father of the princess' children and she's totally cool with it.

And then the king's wife tries to eat the princess' babies, which is evidently a thing with evil queens. She's foiled, of course, and marriage and happily-ever-after ensue.

Really, the whole premise of Beauty and the Beast is terribly, horribly, and awfully weird and wrong. People aren't supposed to fall in love with hairy creatures with hooves and horns no matter how dapper they look in a suit. There's a word for that and let's just say it's not something you want to type into a search window, ever.

Yet somehow, Disney managed to turn this gross and disturbing storyline into a children's movie. And according to the Huffington Post, the original versions of the story (there's more than one) are way, way more twisted and weird than the one with all the talking furniture.

La Belle et le Bete was written in 1756 and includes many tired stereotypes — Beauty is beautiful, her sisters are not, and therefore Beauty is also morally superior because everyone knows that ugly people can't ever be beautiful on the inside. The story goes down in much the same way as the Disney movie except that when the Beast lets Beauty go home to visit her family her sisters try to keep her from going back not because they love and miss her but because they're hoping the Beast will become enraged and eat her. In other versions, there are ugly fairies trying to seduce handsome princes, babies getting snatched from their cribs, and troll princesses and pig kings so yeah, our Disney story is pretty tame. Still gross.

So really the only thing that's the same about Puss in Boots from the 2011 movie and Puss in Boots from the original fairy tale is that it's the story of a cat who wears a feathered hat and walks upright in a pair of shiny leather boots. In the modern version of the story, Puss drinks from saucers of milk at the pub, is frenemies with Humpty Dumpty, tries to steal the goose that lays the golden eggs, and gets tangled up with Jack and Jill, who are actually weird thugs who commit crimes while having Tarantino-esque conversations about parenthood.

In the original fairy tale, Puss in Boots' owner is an impoverished young man who decides he's going to have to eat his cat and make a muff out of his skin. The cat, who for some reason can talk and walk upright, would prefer not to be eaten so instead he offers to help his master improve his situation. But instead of going into the entertainment business (because talking, walking cat) he instead goes out and lies, cheats, and steals his way through a series of challenges until lo, his master ends up married to a princess because that's how fairy tales always end, except for the ones where everyone dies.

So the moral of this story, kids, is that lying will get you everywhere and cheating is a totally acceptable way to get what you want. The end.