Gothic horror used to scare us. Now it’s used to amuse children. Here’s exploring how the malign turned benign.

London:

Gothic spectres started roaming literature, in the midst of the Enlightenment, when rationality ruled and superstition was derided. Film followed print: expressionist masterworks such as The Cabinet of Dr Caligari and Nosferatu translated souls into spectres at home in their new habitat - the cinema of magic and the grotesque. And now, in another surprising development, films in this tradition have become mainstream children’s entertainment.

Terry Gilliam, once the deftest artist-scalpel of the comic macabre, has brilliantly confronted the issues raised by the supernatural in fantasy movies with a series of films as celebrated in some cases for their imaginative verve (Time Bandits, The Fisher King) as for their dramatic failure (his aborted 10-year Don Quixote project). He identified with the Knight of the Rueful Countenance because, like him, Gilliam believes in fantasy — but, like Cervantes and his readers, he also knows this is folly, to be rejected by anyone of good sense and rational judgment.

In his new film, The Brothers Grimm, Gilliam dramatises his own divided self: through the doppelganger brothers he puzzles over the magic illusion and suspension of disbelief that cinema can now create with ever more awesome effects. Scriptwriter Ehren Krueger has patched and pieced a whole scrapbag of Grimm plots, characters and motifs, transforming many of the most famous stories (Hansel and Gretel, Snow White) to create a vivid plot about stolen children, a malignant forest, and animmortal but ageing queen. The result is an exuberant, manic ghost-train ride, part schlock horror, part historical docu-drama, part lyric fairytale, with scars all over it from the cutting room, dozens of loose ends, and a faltering tone between nasty-for-real and blithe, ghoulish satire.

Gilliam’s Jacob Grimm (Heath Ledger) collects the stories and believes in the ancient wisdom of the Volk, but he’s mocked as naive by his overbearing elder brother Wilhelm (Matt Damon), a scoffing rationalist and cynic, who suborns the unwilling Jacob into ghostbusting for money. They travel the country performing exorcisms on poltergeists and generally exploit the people’s terrors with spectacular use of puppets, fireworks and conjuring. None of this, needless to say, bears any resemblance to the historical Grimms, but brings sharply into focus the issue of mass media, charlatanry and commercial exploitation.

But Gilliam, over the course of the film, rejects this identification in order to hold up the truth of story-telling against the truth of reason: after many twists, Wilhelm concedes to Jacob that magic beans can cure, and, as a symbol of fairytale itself, are the only medicine that matters. The dead children come back to life, their village is restored to harmony, now released from its curse.

US critic Victoria Nelson, in The Secret Life of Puppets, argues it is through film and other popular media we now explore the questions that used to be the concern of metaphysics. Film-makers deal with our irrational (and therefore shameful) doubts and fears - bogeymen, spooks, immortality, curses, the living dead. She diagnoses a shift in the 1990s when ghouls, revenants and zombies began to be on our side, even friendly, funny and sane, compared with reality, here and now. Cinema stopped opening the gates of hell, and allowed us entry to an ideal ``republic of dreams’’. Evil scientist enchanters no longer work their gothic will on hapless humans; instead the old domains of terror and dread open a way to new elsewheres, and the possibility of hope and even transcendence.

The supernatural in the movie invites us to believe and to trust in what has been merely imagined, rather than struggle to get back to the world of verifiable reality and objective truth. Gilliam displays such beguiling skill with visuals and animation that he has metamorphosed evil and shrunk the scope of our fears.

The Brothers Grimm will release in the UK on November 4