Brooklyn Horror ’25: Tales from the Woods

These fairy tales often leave the “happily” out of “every after,” but if you read the original Brothers Grimm and Charles Perrault, they often did so too. Not surprisingly, the genre filmmakers participating in this series of fairy tale-based short films had no trouble relating to their chosen stories, even though they often took extensive liberties. Nevertheless, the results still vary amongst the three short films in the Tales from the Woods series that screened at this year’s Brooklyn Horror Film Festival.

By far, the most successful is Mattie Do’s Sleeping Beauty, which turns Princess Aurora into a Fisher King curse. The Laotian filmmaker (The Long Walk, Dearest Sister) transfers the French folk tale to colonial Vietnam, where the governor’s biracial son Philippe falls under the spell of the sleeping beauty and brings her home to meet his parents.

Unfortunately, no amount of kissing will wake her up, but that doesn’t bother Philippe. His mother Dao recognizes the source of his bewitchment from folk legends, but she is too timid to act accordingly, even if it brings ruin to her family and the surrounding community. Obviously, Do incorporates some rather provocative taboo themes, but they deliver a subversive twist to the familiar fairy tale. Sonadala Sihavong is also terrific, in a crushingly human way, as Dao.

Surprisingly, the weakest constituent short film comes from the usually mind-bending filmmaker-tandem of Justin Benson & Aaron Moorhead (Spring, The Endless, Synchronic, Something in the Dirt). Jacques the Giant Slayer opens with an intriguing late 19^th Century expedition vibe, but the creature encounter underwhelms.

Adam Egypt Mortimer’s Cinderella (which premiered at the festival) falls in between and all over the place. Conceived as sort of a dystopian reimagining, Mortimer’s short has a slicker, icier look than his gritty past films, like Archenemy, Daniel Isn’t Real, and Some Kind of Hate. Prince Charming dresses like the Crow, but his cruel streak more readily resembles Eric Draven’s murderers. It delivers the most distinctive and inventive vision, but its stilted and predictable expression of five-year-old social attitudes will inspire a lot of eye-rolling.

As usual, it is just in the nature of anthologies to be uneven. Yet, when viewed together, each offers up nuggets of macabre weirdness. Indeed, it is would be interesting to see more genre filmmakers of this caliber engage with other beloved fairy tales. For now, Sleeping Beauty is highly recommended and Cinderella has its moments. Look for them following the special Tales from the Woods screening at the 2025 Brooklyn Horror Film Fest.