I’ve talked at length before about my fascination with “dark” fairy tales.  I absolutely love it when a fantasy tale I was told as a child is reinterpreted and either brought back to its darker origins, or made even darker.  2008’s “Bloody Mary” theme at Universal Studios’ Halloween Horror Nights even in Orlando was a perfect example of this – they had dark versions of many popular children’s stories, including The Wizard of Oz.  Zenescope’s Grimmy Fairy Tales does something similar, taking the original tales of many classic tales, like Cinderella, and turning them into dark, bloody tales.

So I’m pretty damn excited to hear that someone as talented as Leonardo DiCaprio may have similar tastes, as it appears his production company Appian Way has begun development on a Little Red Riding Hood-based gothic movie, to be written by Orphan screenwriter David Leslie Johnson.

From the Variety article,

The best-known version of the story — in which a wolf disguises himself to fool a girl delivering food to her sick grandmother in the forest — was published in the 19th century by the Brothers Grimm. Earlier oral versions of the tale, which date back to the Middle Ages, are far darker and sometimes involve a werewolf rather than a wolf; the first published version, by Charles Perrault, concludes with Red Riding Hood eaten by the wolf, with no happy ending.

I actually wrote a comic book mini series I entitled The Woodsman, that explored the Woodsman’s life years later after the big bad wolf that he thought was dead was hunting people in a local town.  Alas, I’m no artist so the thing just sits catching dust in one of my drawers (or sitting on my hard drive, but you get the metaphor).  I’d be super excited to see a dark version of Red Riding Hood up on the big screen – what say you guys?