I spent a lot of my childhood reading the Pantheon Fairy Tale & Folklore Library, which is highly recommended for the semi-macabre young person in your life. They’re particularly a good reminder of what our fairy tales really are, and how sanitized Disney in particular and Hollywood in general have made them for mass consumption. But I wonder if we’re at a moment when fairy tales might be having not merely a resurgence, but recovering some of their original, horrific power.

First, there was Catherine Hardwicke’s Red Riding Hood. The movie was a huge disappointment, failing to fulfill its promise to do something novel with the identity of the wolf, and full of cheap-looking foam sets and MTV-styled hair. But it at least had the right impulse: Hardwicke wanted to restore the sense that the night is dark and full of terrors, particularly when you’re surrounded by the big woods. And she was wise to suggest that order can bring fear with it, too, though the message gets watered down a bit when it comes in the form of Gary Oldman in doofy facial hair and wielding the power of a Torture Elephant:

A short film called Red (thanks to io9) does a better job of getting at those ideas. It’s bloody and it’s heartbreaking: if you have to cut your way out of the belly of an animal that’s devoured you and drag the broken body of your grandmother out with you, even if you win, you’re likely to end up fairly traumatized. Becoming a warrior is not always a particularly delightful experience. And having to kill to survive is exhausting:

Snow White and the Huntsman, which arrives in theaters in June, appears to be going the same route, albeit with a bigger special effects budget. The Queen’s evil isn’t implied, she’s not killing her victims with anything as quaint as a poisonous apple. She’s sucking the life force out of them, stabbing them in bed, ravening for their hearts. The forest may be more full of wonders than terrors, but said wonders aren’t of the adorably singing woodland creatures variety. And becoming a hero means going to the front lines in a medieval siege, an enterprise that carries as much risk of grisly death as it does potential for glamour:

By contrast, the dreadful-looking Mirror, Mirror looks like an anachronism precisely because it’s so pristine. These aren’t dark woods so much as they’re a Hollywood set, or an incomplete CGI rendering. It’s hard to be terrified of a world where people’s teeth literally sparkle, and curses turn people into adorable simulacra of puppy dogs. These people are plastic: even if you cut them to the quick, there’d be no blood or guts to spill into that snow.

Once Upon a Time has a bit of that shininess problem, though conceptually, it’s gone darker. There’s a girl who turns into a wolf, and an actual heart in a box that’s been identified as belonging to a character we’ve gotten to know. That’s upsetting, even if we don’t see the organ itself. Grimm, which recently got a second-season pickup, and has improved by focusing on the core relationship between the detective and the werewolf, has been horrific from the beginning: we’ve got stolen organs, fights to the death, and incredibly ugly acts of murder all of them. The premise of the show itself is deeply unnerving—that there’s something else hiding under the skin many of us present to the world.

And Once Upon a Time and Grimm are nodding at a question it’ll be important for fairy tale storytellers to consider if this trend is to continue. In the absence of the dark woods, the arbitrary nature of feudal lords, the horror of high infant mortality rates (at least in the developing world), the wolves that steal the sheep, what are our terrors? And which stories are the best matches for telling them? The persistence of crime dramas would suggest that the big city has replaced the big woods, that serial killers are our ravening beasts. But I’m not sure we have myths to embody the new fears generated by a world that’s much larger than the village, or the disembodied terrors of the digital age.

Because I have a particular fondness for fairy tale retellings, and occasionally, a girl’s got to watch television that she doesn’t analyze to death, I’ve been keeping up with both Grimm and Once Upon a Time. Both could be loosely described as fairy tale procedurals. In Grimm, a cop finds out that he’s descended from a long line of fairy-tale creature-fighters, and begins taking out the worst of them with the help of his policing skills and a werewolf who repairs clocks for a living and does pilates in his spare time. In Once Upon a Time, Emma, a bail bondswoman who gave her son up for adoption as an infant, has her life turned upside down when the boy tracks her down and asks her to move to Storybrook. There, Emma becomes the town sheriff, working to solve a number of mysteries caused, unbeknownst to her and the rest of the town’s residents except the mayor, by the fact that all of the citizens are exiled from fairy tales by the Mayor’s — really the Evil Queen’s — curse.

I think there are two reasons Once Upon a Time is working better than Grimm for me. First, the serialization in Once is much stronger than it is in Grimm. In the latter show, Nick is supposed to be part of this long tradition of monster-hunters, enmeshed in a struggle with some sort of monster organization. But the show hasn’t done very much to advance or make meaningful that narrative except to give Nick a van full of evil-vanquishing goodies. Monsters show up, are defeated, and disappear without giving us a sense of the larger world around us.

In Once, by contrast, the episodes are part of a contiguous fairy tale about the rise of a great evil. Every case teaches something about what happened to the characters in the past that contributes to our understanding of where they were when we met them — and our sense of where they’ll go. The interlocking stories feel considered, rather than slapped together. And the fairy tale characters are reconsidered in ways that feel thoughtful and intelligent: Snow White is a forest-dwelling badass after her exile from her cushy castle life; Rumplestiltskin is a grieving father; and Midas is basically a central bank, controlling the economies of entire kingdoms.

Second, I think the re-envisioning of the detective role is more interesting in Once Upon a Time than in Grimm. Nick is basically your standard white-boy detective with a black partner for balance and some extra equipment. It’s true that it’s not totally unusual for blonde white women to be cops either. But Emma’s operating in a world that feels different because it’s largely ruled by women on Once. Women hold the mayor and sheriff’s office. The most notable teacher in town is a woman, as is the proprietor of the local watering hold. There are, of course, men in Storybrook, ranging from the therapist to the newspaper editor. But Rumplestiltskin is the most powerful man in town by a good measure, and he tends to exert power outside the traditional channels rather than holding official office. The show doesn’t hammer it in obsessively, but it is nice to spend time in an environment where the normal assumptions about who controls things are flipped.

I wanted to like Grimm, because I’m a total sucker for fractured fairy tales. And there are some good things in the show, most notably a Big Bad Wolf who’s cranky over the historic misrepresentation of his people, and who seems likely to end up guiding our somewhat bland hero through his new calling. But one thing that really bothered me was the show’s apparently fantastical approach to the basics of police work: Nick spends a lot of time crashing in places without warrants and setting up surveillance on folks without approval.

It’s good to have that part of the job depicted accurately on television both because it’s a good thing that they exist in the real world, and because they make for more compelling storytelling. We don’t live in a Minority Report kind of world — if Nick just keeps storming into suspected child kidnappers’ houses, at some point he’s going to violate the rights of someone innocent and supernatural who will be totally within their rights to be thermonuclearly angry with him. And more importantly, it would be interesting to see Nick try to get warrants based on information he’s getting from supernatural sources a la Beka Cooper, trying to reconcile magic and the rationality of police work. If the show isn’t going to play with that tension at all, why not just make him a private investigator? Creating concepts like cops who can see magic are interesting when they let us play with tropes and our ideas about the real world, not when they let us abandon our sense of the rules entirely.