What would you do if your horrible mother married a dude with a beautiful daughter and made you and your plain sister feel terrible about yourselves? What would you do if your beautiful stepsister became the house servant and went around in ugly clothes with ashes in her hair and no shoes? What if your mother tried to make you pretty and didn't allow you to eat? What if you found out there was a ball in your village and a handsome prince would be choosing a bride from the local young ladies? You'd probably starve yourself by swallowing a tapeworm and allowing your nose to be broken and reshaped, right? We'll be exploring these ideas and discussing the connection between food, fairy tales and horror in the classic story Cinderella and some more recent iterations, including the highly visceral The Ugly Stepsister film as well as others, so please join us!

Winterset Hollow by Jonathan Edward Durham

Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister by Gregory Maguire

Cinderella - 1950 film by @Disney

The Ugly Stepsister - 2025 film by Emilie Blichfeldt

Into the Woods - 2014 film by Rob Marshall

Ashputtle by Peter Straub

What would you do if you were a young lady with hair black as ebony, lips red as rubies, and skin white as snow? You'd probably be called Snow White, right? What if your father married a woman who hated you and she tried to have you killed so she could eat your heart and absorb your beauty? What would you do if you were rescued by dwarves and a wicked witch tried to kill you AGAIN by making you eat a poisoned apple? You'd probably be off apples for awhile after that. We explore these fascinating questions as we analyze the connection between food, horror and fairy tales in the classic tale Snow White and some of its modern iterations, so please join us!

Links to references below:

Snow White: A Tale of Terror Dir. Michael Cohn https://share.google/bXj2R16ezdcSzaW1S
The Grimm Reader: The Classic Tales of the Brothers Grimm
by Maria Tatar: https://archive.org/details/grimmreaderclass0000unse
The Young Slave by Basile, Giovanni Batiste. Il Pentamerone, or The Tale of Tales. Sir Richard Burton, translator. London: Henry and Company, 1893.
https://surlalunefairytales.com/s-z/sleeping-beauty/stories/youngslave.html

This week, we dive into Tale of Tales (dir. Matteo Garrone, 2015) and explore the rich tapestry of fairy tales by Giambattista Basile on which the film is based. Drawing from Basile’s 17th-century collection Lo cunto de li cunti (also known as The Pentamerone), we look at how the film adapts these dark, fantastical stories for a contemporary audience- examining themes, imagery, and the enduring power of early modern fairy-tale tradition.

At the core of our discussion is the deliciously unsettling intersection of food and horror in both Basile’s tales and Garrone’s film: the heart of a sea monster, a mountain of struffoli, and even a royal feast built around a flea. These bizarre, macabre acts of eating reveal just how deeply food shapes the film’s dark fantasy world… and it gets very weird.

Link to Giambattista Basile's fairy tales Stories from Pentamerone: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/2198/2198-h/2198-h.htm

What would you do if you and your sibling kept being kicked out of the house by your mean and starving mother and were left to find food on your own? What if you came across a house made of candy, gingerbread and sugar? You'd start eating it unless you were dumb. What if the house was owned by a witch who wanted to fatten you and your sibling up so she could eat you? Gross, right? What if the breadcrumbs you used to track your way home got eaten by some greedy birds? We are discussing the connection between food, horror and fairy tales this season and we really get into the weeds with Hansel and Gretel, so please join us!

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What would you do if you were a young woman running through the forest in a red cape, taking cake and wine to your dear grandmother, and were surprised by the big bad wolf? What if you found out that your grandmother was actually a wolf herself? What if the wolf turned out to be a man who could shapeshift? What if the wolf ate you and your grandmother for lunch? What if the wolf loved sausages and maggoty cheese? We are discussing these age-old questions and analyzing the connection between food in horror in the classic fairy tale Little Red Riding Hood, and several modern iterations of the story, so please join us!

Works mentioned

Little Red-cap by By Jacob Grimm and Wilhelm Grimm (1812)

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/2591/2591-h/2591-h.htm#link2H_4_0023

The Company of Wolves by Angela Carter (1979)

https://ieas-szeged.hu/downtherabbithole/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/Angela-Carters-The-Company-of-Wolves-Story.pdf

The Company of Wolves dir. Neil Jordan (1984)

Wolfland by Tanith Lee (1983)

https://www.sweetstudy.com/files/wolfland.pdf

Red Riding Hood dir. Catherine Hardwicke (2011)

Wolf Border by Sarah Hall (2015)

https://www.bookscumbria.com/product/cumbrian-books/arts-and-literature/fiction/novels-set-in-cumbria/the-wolf-border/

Mrs Fox  by Sarah Hall (2019)

https://www.faber.co.uk/product/9780571351961-mrs-fox/?srsltid=AfmBOooW-gOyvyCZ_ZjcKcOwlfh13NRYzVtkWb0sRNbrglwOE7Uarit1

We are thrilled to introduce you to Season Five! We'll be analyzing the connections between food and horror in fairy tales, both literature and in film. After all, what is more frightening than being eaten by a wolf, getting lost in the woods because birds ate your breadcrumb trail, eating a poisoned apple, having your coach revert back into a pumpkin, or having a witch take away your pregnant wife's supply of rapunzel salad leaves? We will kick things off with an in-depth analysis of that classic Little Red Riding Hood, some literary retellings by Angela Carter and Tanith Lee, and the recent remake starring Amanda Seyfried, so please join us!

Serve It Forth: A Food History Festival

 18 October 2025 – Online
We’re bringing together writers, historians, podcasters, and curious minds for a day of delicious discovery. Talks, conversations… all from the comfort of your own kitchen.

In this bonus episode, Allie (one dark half of Fear Feasts!) is joined by her friends and fellow food historians Thomas Ntinas, Sam Bilton, and Neil Buttery. Together they share how each of them first got drawn into food history, what continues to inspire them, and some of the surprises they've encountered along the way.

How do people find their way into food history? What myths surround the field? And do they sometimes meet with culinary catastrophes of our own?!

Allie's input will of course be tinged with spookiness and dread in the company of death historian and funerary expert Dr Dan O’Brien!

Their session, entitled: The River Remembers: A Journey Through London’s Lost Larder will take audiences on a dark voyage through food, death, and the forgotten histories of the Thames. From butchered whales washed ashore to bottles dredged from disaster sites, and from the feasting tables of the living to the memento mori traditions that remind us that bodies too become food. Allie and Dan will explore how the river bears witness to centuries of consumption and decay. Following the shifting shoreline, they'll trace fragments of lost lives and meals that once sustained the capital- an unsettling story of what (and who) London has eaten.

Important Links

• Serve It Forth website
  
• Tickets for Serve It Forth
  
• Serve It Forth on social media
  

What would you do if your mother lost her mind, cut off your dad's finger, went into a mental institution, came out and wanted to cook up a feast for Halloween? That's the premise of Guile Branco's darkly hilarious and horrific film A Halloween Feast, and the subject of our bonus episode today! We interviewed Branco on his latest film, the connection between food and horror (something we know a little about!), and what's next for this up-and-coming actor and director, so give it a listen!

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Allie and Vanessa sink their teeth into Salem’s Lot, exploring the hunger that haunts Stephen King’s classic novel, the eerie 1979 miniseries by Tobe Hooper, and Gary Dauberman’s 2024 film. From small-town suppers to vampiric cravings, this episode serves up a feast of unholy appetites…

What would you do if you were a gorgeous blond vampire who loved attention and fame but were constantly seeking new diversions? What if being immortal and unable to enjoy treats such as red wine, chocolate custard, pasta and steak was getting to be too much to bear? What if drinking blood and living perpetually at night had lost its charm? What if a strange man made you an offer of switching bodies so that you could experience the hellish joy of being human again? What if you made the switch, realized you'd been swindled by this body thief, and proceeded to guzzle wine, devour food, have sex with many women and decided you wanted your vampiric body back? We'll discuss these tastily terrifying questions as we analyze the connection between food and horror in Anne Rice's novel The Tale of the Body Thief, so please join us!

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Follow Vanessa's blog at: https://foodinbooks.com

Follow Allie's other podcast at: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/a-is-for-apple-an-encyclopaedia-of-food-drink/id1743840806