Abstract

Whether in the forest or in the city, monsters are not found but made, and this applies to their construction in narrative genres as well. In popular culture the villain's cruelty in fairy tales and the serial killer's crimes in realistic fictions become “monstrous” because they are somehow preternatural or inconceivable in a (proper) human being. We read the 2017 “Little Red Riding Hood” crime film Pokot (Spoor) in the key of popular green criminology, underscoring how the film's monsters raise questions of what being human is and of how humans relate to non-human animals. In so doing, we draw on the multivalence of fairy-tale tropes and northern and central European folklore and enable a reconsideration of ecologies beyond the confines of realism.

Keywords: green criminology, fairy-tale film, genre, Pokot, justice, “Little Red Riding Hood”

Whether in the forest or in the city, monsters are not found but made, constructed of deep human fears and desires, super-sized projections of prejudices, and far-out transgressions of socially upheld norms. In popular culture, the villain's cruelty in fairy tales and the serial killer's crimes in realistic fictions become “monstrous” because they are larger than life. Somehow preternatural or inconceivable in a (proper) human being, fairytale monsters’ actions raise questions of what being human is and of how humans relate to non-human animals. Here, we read the 2017 “Little Red Riding Hood” crime film Pokot (Spoor) (Holland and Adamik 2017) in the key of popular green criminology in order to explore its representations of the monstrous as relevant to northern and central European folklore, histories, and ecologies.

Contextualising the Monstrous in Pokot: Questions of Genre, Criminology, and Kinship

Once upon a time, in 1975, Hungarian folklorist Tekla Domotor wrote about the folktale and fairy tale as generic ancestors of the twentieth-century detective story and novel. She noted parallel hero/villain binary oppositions in the two, foregrounding their in-common reliance on magic objects (such as the magic nut or lamp and the telephone, respectively) and magic means of transportation (from the winged horse to James Bond's car).