I briefly linked to two animated versions of Bluebeard in my last post, but they’re both so interesting that I wanted to do them justice. The first, “Blue Beard’s Last Wife” (“La Dernière femme de barbe bleue”), blends the Bluebeard legend with ancient Greek mythology in an unexpected (and humorous) way. The second, “A Very Blue Beard” (“Ochen sinyaya boroda”) is a Russian musical short about a detective investigating Bluebeard’s crimes… with a surprising twist! So take a break, put your feet up, and watch a couple of really neat shorts!

One of my readings this week in Marina Warner’s From the Beast to the Blonde focuses on the symbolism and origins of the Bluebeard story. In a chapter titled “The Ogre’s Appetite”, Warner discusses many different iterations of a common theme: the serial murderer. What with Perrault’s fairy tales, medieval legends, devoured Catholic saints, and historical child killers, it’s pretty clear that society has been morbidly obsessed with these stories for centuries.