There’s an excellent entry in Neil Gaiman’s blog about the more sinister implications of the Red Riding Hood story. I love this summation:
“The wolf in the story represents an awful lot of stuff — the danger and truth of stories, for a start, and the way they change; he symbolises — not predation, for some reason — but transformation: the meeting in the wild wood that changes everything forever. Angela Carter’s statement that “some men are hairy on the inside” comes to mind: as an image, in my head, it’s the wolf’s shadow that has ears and a tail, while the man in wolf form stands in his forest (and cities are forests too) and waits for the girl in the red cloak , picking flowers, to come along, or, hungrily, watches her leave…”
A beautifully gothic statement on the nature of faery, the deep abiding mythic truth lying beneath mundane existence.
Brings up an imagine of the Wolf as a Green Man or Horned God or Pan. Imagine, the Big Bad Wolf and The Fisher King one and the same.