When I went to see Van Helsing recently, there was a preview for that new M. Night Shyamalan movie, The Village. The preview made it look goddamn amazing. I wager it will be.

To summarize, it’s about this mythical-seeming colonial sort of village which has these monsters which live in the woods. Basically, the people have all these customs and stuff to be able to live side-by-side with these monsters and have nothing bad happen. But then bad things happen.

Anyway, one of the cool things is that they can’t wear or have the color red, because it somehow attracts these monsters.

On an unrelated, yet related note, I’ve been looking up a little bit about Little Red Riding Hood tonight (annotated version, & similar tales). And I got to thinking about the color red in that story, and how it seems to attract the wolf/monster as well.

Also, there’s this thread I’m following which claims that Little Red Riding Hood is a remnant of a goddess tale somehow related to Diana/Artemis and the hunt & wolves and stuff. The trail on this one’s pretty dim, but here’s one of the things I found online about it:

Another story traceable to wolf-clan traditions was “Little Red Riding Hood.” The tale includes all the details of the myth: the red garment, the offering of food to a “grandmother” in the deep woods, a grandmother who wore a wolf skin, and the cannibalistic motif of devouring and resurrection.

The story’s original victim would not have been the red-clad Virgin but the hunter, as Lord of the Hunt.

Like Snow White, Little Red Riding Hood is part of the Goddess trinity, wearing the same red garment that Kali and prophetizing the red moon of a lunar eclipse as a bad omen. Romanian churchmen declared that the eclipsed moon was reddened by her own blood, shed when her wolves attacked her, to “make men repent and turn from evil.”

Also, here’s a page with a bunch of nice Red Riding Hood images. I like the pictures where it looks like her and the wolf are friends. Also found this photo of an old hand puppet, which on one side has Lil Red, and the other has the Wolf, and could be interpreted as a sign pointing to their mythological unity. Also found inadvertently a shitty porn site with a Red Riding Hood photo shoot.

And one more cool image of Red Riding Hood that’s not porn.