Why You’re Attracted to Dark Fairytales: A Journey Through Shadow and Story

You are in a forest. The trees close in. The light thins. There is no path behind you and no promise ahead. Still, you walk.

Something about this place feels familiar.

This is the terrain of the dark fairytale. And if you’re reading this, chances are you’ve been here before.

Perhaps you were the child who preferred witches to princesses. Perhaps the image of a spindle dripping blood stayed with you longer than any happy ending. Perhaps you’ve always known, instinctively, that these stories weren’t just stories. That they were maps.

Folktales Were Never Meant to Make You Feel Safe

Long before they were softened into bedtime tales, fairytales lived in the mouths of those who knew fear intimately. Farmers, widows, midwives, children who had seen too much. These tales travelled by firelight, passed down in kitchens and crossroads, shaped by hunger, war, and winter.

They taught you where not to go. Whom not to trust. How to survive the wild night.

In these older versions, the forest is not symbolic. It is real and deadly. The witch is not a cartoon. She is powerful, exiled, feared, and sometimes right. The prince might be a beast, and the maiden might not want saving.

These stories do not coddle. They initiate.

Jung Knew the Forest, Too

Carl Jung, Swiss psychiatrist and reluctant mystic, believed that the human psyche is built on symbols. Beneath the surface of everyday thought lies the collective unconscious—a shared reservoir of imagery older than language.

Within this landscape lives the shadow.

The shadow is not simply your rage, your envy, your fear. It is everything in you that has been exiled: the magic, the instinct, the parts that do not fit the social script. Jung taught that unless we find a way to meet our shadow consciously, it will meet us in projection, in dream, or in story.

This is why dark fairytales matter.

They bring the shadow to the table. They give it teeth, claws, a name. They let it speak.

The Language of the Unconscious is Symbol, Not Explanation

There is a reason you dream in images, not essays. The psyche understands the world in symbols. A red cloak, a locked door, a ring that burns.

A poisoned apple is not about food. It is about temptation, autonomy, punishment. A mirror on the wall does not reflect your face. It reflects your self-image, your rivalry, your fear of aging. Every object in these tales carries more than it seems.

We are not drawn to these images because they are beautiful. We are drawn to them because they are true.

Why the Darkness Pulls

The modern world demands clarity. Productivity. Efficiency. Light. It is loud with advice and linear with goals. There is little room for what is unspoken or unresolved.

But the psyche is not linear. It is cyclical, recursive, lunar. It dreams in forests, not schedules.

Dark fairytales restore the sacred function of descent. They let us grieve. They let us rage. They let us become something else.

There is no transformation without the dark.

This Attraction Is Not a Flaw. It’s a Compass.

When you feel drawn to cursed mirrors, ancient symbols, and sorrow-soaked myths, you are not indulging in aesthetic melancholy. You are remembering something your ancestors knew: that the soul does not grow only in the sun.

Sometimes you need the shadow to see yourself clearly.

Sometimes the story you need is the one that doesn’t end cleanly.

At Scarlet Chalice, We Make Symbols You Can Wear

We create objects for those who dwell in the mythic. For those who walk the in-between spaces. For the ones who find power not in perfection, but in the pattern beneath the chaos.

Each piece is a story fragment, a key, a mirror.

You already know the path. You’ve always known it. The story is waiting.