Jack Zipes is an American academic who has published and lectured on the subject of fairy tales, their evolution, and their social and political role in civilizing processes. Professor Emeritus of German and comparative literature at the University of Minnesota. Some of his recent publications include: Why Fairy Tales Stick: The Evolution and Relevance of a Genre (2006), The Enchanted Screen: The Unknown History of Fairy-Tale Films (2010), The Irresistible Fairy Tale: The Cultural and Social History of a Genre (2012), and Grimm Legacies: The Magic Power of Fairy Tales (2014). He has also translated the first 1812–1815 edition of the Grimms's tales, The Original Folk and Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm (2014). Most recently he has published The Sorcerer’s Apprentice: An Anthology of Magical Tales, (2017), Tales of Wonder: Retelling Fairy Tales through Picture Postcards(2017), Slap-Bam, The Art of Governing Men: Édouard Laboulaye’s Political Fairy Tales (2018), and The Giant Ohl and Tiny Tim (2019). Zipes will receive a Lifetime Achievement Award at the 2019 World Fantasy Awards.
The Bitterness of Honey: Jack Zipes on The Wolf House
Part animated fairytale, part horror film, Cristóbal León and Joaquin Cociña’s The Wolf House follows a young girl, Maria, as she tries to escape a wolf that’s hunting her down. To offer context, Jack Zipes, a scholar of fairytales, looks at the historical events that inspired the stop-action work: Colonia Dignidad, a cult colony of Germans in Chile in the 1960s, where its celebrated honey production masked a far darker story of pedophilia and abuse.