In its search for a fail-safe formula, Hollywood has rediscovered the fairy tale and given it a grown-up twist more in keeping with its ancient roots.
No one knows what will happen to you if you go into the woods. Bears wait there, paws and claws ready to maul unwary humans; wolves howl in the night. Perhaps there are worse creatures: the forests of mediaeval Europe sheltered plenty of vagabonds, thieves and murderers, but you will feel less fear if you think of them as ogres, giants or, perhaps, just cursed beasts waiting to be loved.
In stories, the boy heroes will prove brave and cunning enough to defeat these creatures: trap the giant, cut off his head, collect the reward.
Girls are watchful but often dangerously curious. Perhaps the girl who would climb into a bear's bed senses a beast inside herself. Everyone knows that girls run as deep as wells.
Angela Carter, the late gothic novelist, once wrote that the muddling of everyday reality, the fantastic and wish fulfilment in fairy tales made them like "informal dreams dreamed in public".
These tales of monsters and princesses, she said, had more in common with modern popular entertainments such as horror movies and soap operas than literature; all those flamboyant deaths, extremes of rich and poor and wildly dysfunctional families reminded her of Dynasty.
Perhaps this was why, in an age when "we have machines to do our dreaming for us", as she put it in her introduction to the Virago Book of Fairy Tales, they survived. Indeed, they thrive. In an age when we have very little culture, everyone knows what it means to turn into a pumpkin.
Walt Disney understood this. Audiences grappling with a new medium, he reasoned, would find stories easier to follow if they already knew them. His first cartoon, made in 1922, was Little Red Riding Hood.
We are much more cine-literate these days but, if anything, Hollywood is keener than ever to find fail-safe formulas and stick with them: cue a return to fairy tales.
This week, we have Catherine Hard-wicke's spooked-up version of Red Riding Hood in our cinemas.
Meanwhile, there are two live-action versions of Snow White due next year - one with Julia Roberts as the evil queen, and another with Charlize Theron in the queen's role and Twilight's Kristen Stewart as Snow White - along with a grown-up sequel to Hansel and Gretel featuring Jeremy Renner and Gemma Arterton as "witch-hunters", still traumatised by gingerbread overload but out for revenge.
Also next year, X-Men's Bryan Singer will present a version of Jack the Giant Killer, which, although the story is not in the first rank of fairy tales, does feature the delicious verse that begins "Fee, fi, fo, fum!"
On the drawing board for subsequent years, we have Joe Wright, who directed Atonement, doing The Little Mermaid and Guillermo del Toro (Pan's Labyrinth) making Pinocchio.
Finally, although Peter Pan is not a traditional fairy tale, it has the same flavour; news came in this month that Sony has signed for a new version with Channing Tatum in the tights. And these are all live-action films; forthcoming animated features include, most notably, the Shrek spin-off Puss in Boots with Antonio Banderas.
The old stories may be tweaked, of course. Indeed, the fact that we recognise that they have been tweaked is often the point, as it is in Disney's Tangled, which turns the passively hirsute Rapunzel into an action princess with hair so versatile it amounts to a superpower.
It is their familiarity, however, that gives them a headstart, just as old Walt Disney foresaw. Given that his commercial instincts were clearly second to none, perhaps it's just surprising all this hasn't happened sooner.
So why is it happening now? Partly, without a doubt, because the frenzied success of the Twilight saga has made anything that combines romance with the supernatural an immediate contender.
Hardwicke set out in Red Riding Hood explicitly to explore the story's psychosexual underpinnings, as might be expected of the director of the first Twilight film.
According to reports from the set, her constant reference was Bruno Bettelheim's classic Freudian evisceration of the fairy tale canon, The Uses of Enchantment, which interprets Red Riding Hood as a story of Oedipal conflict.
In Bettelheim's psychoanalytic account, the archetypal father figure is split between the marauding wolf and the woodcutter who rescues Red Riding Hood and her grandmother from the animal's stomach.
Granny, in turn, stands in for the mother figure who Red Riding Hood, as a girl on the brink of sexual maturity, needs to reject.
When she tells the wolf in the forest where her grandmother lives, she is subconsciously asking him to kill her competition; at this point she has left the forest path to pick flowers, a triumph of her pleasure-seeking id over her mature ego.
Then, in the cottage, she is consumed by a desire for which she is not yet ready; only a well-timed appearance by the "good" father restores things to psychological rights.
Hardwicke's film does not follow this Freud-by-numbers reading, but it does include the idea of dual male natures. Her wolf becomes a werewolf that murders by night and by day might be any one of them.
Amanda Seyried's Red Riding Hood, meanwhile, is torn between two suitors, both of whom she suspects, at different junctures, of being the wolf.
Perhaps more importantly than any particular story element, it also takes it as read that Red Riding Hood is a dark story about dreadful, hidden things. It becomes no longer a story for children but something closer to its roots: a tale told by "old wives" by the fire at night.
Most of the fairy tales we know well - Red Riding Hood, Sleeping Beauty, Beauty and the Beast, Cinderella, Hansel and Gretel - were passed down in oral versions for centuries before they were recorded.
Writing them down, as Angela Carter observed in her introduction to the Virago Book of Fairy Tales, both preserves stories and changes them.
Charles Perrault published his Les Contes de ma mère l'Oye (Mother Goose's Stories) in 1697, including such well-known stories as Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Bluebeard and Puss in Boots.
Aimed at a well-heeled salon audience, the stories were elegantly sanitised. Each finished with a moral in verse.
"Little girls, this seems to say/Never stop upon your way/Never trust a stranger-friend/No one knows how it will end!" said the verse at the end of Red Riding Hood.
More famous than Perrault, however, were the Grimm brothers, German philologists who, in the early 19th century, collected folkloric stories as part of their research into the German language.
Some of their best-known tales coincide with Perrault's; they tried to find authentically local versions but it was hard to know whether they had actually been passed down from forebears who read them in Mother Goose. The Grimms were aware of this and tried to weed out the more obviously French stories, but it is in the nature of fairy tales that their origins are hazy.
"Who first invented meatballs?" asks Carter, rhetorically. "Is there a definitive recipe for potato soup?" There are no authorised versions of these stories; they have no authors.
At the same time, they don't come out of nothing. The oral tradition holds the traces of places and times that were real, specific and otherwise largely lost to us.
These stories are the one legacy of the illiterate that tells us something of how they thought about their world.
They described feasts because people hardly ever had enough to eat. They were fixated on stepmothers because, in an age when women frequently died giving birth, many children grew up with their father's second, third or fourth wife, who favoured her own children, especially at the dinner table.
Later scholars, able to travel to more remote areas than the Grimms could, found that the oral traditions included versions of their stories that were much bawdier and bloodier and ended badly.
In the oldest and most commonly told version of Red Riding Hood, says the historian Robert Darnton, the child actually eats her grandmother's remains, chopped up and left in the larder for her by the wolf, then burns her clothes piece by piece before getting into bed with him.
"How hairy you are!" says naked Red Riding Hood, before going into the usual routine about big ears and big teeth. Then the wolf eats her; end of story.
Pouring scorn on Bettelheim, Darnton observes that "evidently, the peasants did not need a secret code to talk about taboos".
Nor do we, of course, which may be one reason fairy tales are being rediscovered - or rediscovered again, since the fertility of the stories means that each age pounces on them and interprets them in its own image. Unfortunately for filmmakers, however, this is not quite the same thing as a failsafe formula.
When Red Riding Hood was released in the US two weeks ago, initial reviews were almost universally damning.
"A movie that has little reason to exist," said one critic.
"If, by chance, you've missed Twilight and its sequels, don't worry," wrote another.
"Shiny, moody, moon-faced and dumb, Red Riding Hood pretty much replicates the experience entirely."
Not that anyone in the trade papers gives it a chance of making Twilight-style money either; there are no happy endings there. But why would there be? As Hollywood should know, they only happen in fairy tales.
Red Riding Hood is now screening.
