Marc Webb’s Snow White (2025), a studio reimagining of Disney’s (and indeed America’s) first animated feature Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), may have been garnering a lot of media attention, but it turns out not to have been the only live-action adaptation of the Grimms’ fairy tale to come out this year. For although much more modest in its budget than the quarter of a billion dollars that Disney spent on Webb’s reboot, Jason Brooks’ The Death of Snow White, which he co-wrote with Naomi Mechem-Miller, is just as ambitious albeit on its own smaller scale. It is, though, as perhaps its very title hints, made for a rather different audience.
The story beats – an evil, beauty-obsessed queen, a magic mirror, good-hearted princess, a conflicted huntsman (played by Brooks himself), a ‘charming’ prince, seven dwarfs, a poisoned apple and the power of true love – may all be familiar, and this even has Snow White (Sanae Loutsis) playing with animals and (very briefly) bursting into song. Yet there are innovations too. Here two of the dwarfs are women (Risa Mei, Ali Chapman), and all, unlike in the live-action Disney film, are played by actual little people (including Jeremy Hallam, Dillon Moore, Michael De Santo II and Colin Miller), except for Tiny (Eric Pope), ironically named given his hulking stature. Here the evil queen/witch (Chelsea Edmundson, Meredith Binder) actually murdered Snow White’s parents and, with a story apparently modelled on charges laid against the real-life Hungarian Countess Elizabeth Báthory, preys vampirically upon local young women to extend her own youthful appearance.
This is, perhaps, the greatest difference Brooks’ film and its Disney counterpart: although the original fairy tale, and Disney’s depiction of the witch, both have macabre aspects to them, they are essentially aimed at a child audience, whereas The Death of Snow White leans much harder into the horror. For the blood-bathing queen exposes her handmaidens and subjects to endless mutilations and tortures, while the dwarves revel in head-crushing, gut-spilling, body-splitting, limb-hewing combat, with the gory splatter often shown in slow motion to the accompaniment of their quipping banter.
Accordingly, Brooks’ film belongs to an ever-growing subgenre that converts well-known children’s literature into more adult entertainment, whether Andy Edwards’ Cinderella’s Revenge (2024) and Rumpelstiltskin (2025), the expanded ‘Poohniverse’ emerging from Rhys Frake-Waterfield’s Winnie-the-Pooh: Bloody and Honey (2023) and Scott Chambers’ Peter Pan’s Neverland Nightmare (2025), or the constant flow of freaky fairytales from ChampDog Films, including Louisa Warren’s Cinderella’s Curse (2024). All these mine familiar IP while messing with nostalgia and confronting their grown-up audiences with the question of just how much their tastes have really matured since their formative years.
The biggest problem that all such films face is one of tone. The Death of Snow White starts free from irony and in deadly earnest, and then ever so gradually shifts into more comic, even camp registers, with sweary, drug-taking dwarves, and a pair of out-of-place, utterly effete friends of the Prince (Tristan Nokes) who turn out, in a postmodern touch, to be none other than brothers Wilhelm (Milo Mechem-Miller) and Jacob Grimm (Christopher Burnside), gathering material for a publication that, to them, is less fairy tale collection than real-life reportage. By the time the closing credits are rolling, the film has become so knowingly silly and self-referential that it can include behind-the-scenes footage and blooper reels, undermining any illusion that the live action we have been watching is in any way linked to real life.
And yet. The Death of Snow White is set in a land – and era – of magic, witchcraft and monstrous woodland creatures, but it can also be tied to a more particular terminus post quem in our own world by not only featuring a guillotine near its beginning, but having characters expressly refer to this as a guillotine (named after the Frenchman Joseph-Ignace Guillotin, who proposed its use for more humanitarian executions in 1789). This suggests that the story, though fictive and fanciful, nonetheless has allegorical resonances with our own times. The Grimms’ tale may never have included elements resembling modern experiments in plastic surgery and skin transplants like those found here, but body image and the beauty myth are of course perennial themes, no less suited to a folktale like Snow White (where they have always been key plot points) than to a more contemporary story like Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance (2024). Meanwhile the portrait of a kingdom’s subjects bamboozled by a mendacious, narcissistic leadership and made complicit in its corruption and cruelty, has never seemed more relevant.
strap: Disney-less politics: Jason Brooks’ live-action adaptation finds gory horror and high camp in the Grimms’ fairy tale
© Anton Bitel
Can’t wait to see this movie!!!