How to Survive a Horror Story: Fairy Tale and Film as Instruction

Long before the horror movie, fairy tales and myths were teaching women how to survive a house built to destroy them: the hidden rule, the forbidden room, the women who came before them, and the cost of finally seeing.

Presenter Jade Eby writes, "This talk takes fairy tales, myths, and one contemporary horror film and lays them side by side, beat for beat. Reading backward through scholars like Carol Clover, Laura Hubner, Maria Tatar and Clarissa Pinkola Estés, it argues that horror didn't invent the woman who survives, myth and fairy tale did. More importantly, we’ll talk about why these fairy tales, myths, and films act as survival instructions for women in today’s complicated world."

Jade Eby is a writer, mythologist, and trauma recovery specialist who reads horror and fairy tales as encrypted survival instruction. Author of more than twenty books and creator of Writing Fiction to Heal™, she writes…