First introduced in her novel in the form of "some fairytale figure in a red cloak", it is a uniform – as Atwood's heroine Offred explains – designed to be understood in terms of violent oppression and the fertility of the handmaids in a largely infertile world.
The fairytale in storybook form!
Impossible – absurd – enchantments define fairytale as a form of storytelling, but the magic also gives expression to thought-experiments: the wicked fairy turning out to be capable of love, the Frozen princess thawed into humanity by her heroic sister's staunchness and love.
If you don't have the luxury of a sunny plot, the dog's tooth violet Erythronium dens-canis forms a fairytale carpet of glossy purple-spotted leaves with blooms in pale pink and lilac.
Willis has a gift for surreal dialogue – a hospital sonographer at one point announces: "I'd like to have been a Meat Loaf impersonator". But, although it is possible to use fairytales as a form of social criticism, Willis's anger at a world of food banks, faceless bureaucracy and child neglect fits oddly with his madcap imagination.
Fairytales and folklore form the foundations of a staggering number of contemporary monsters – with even internet-age horror meme Slender Man having its origin rooted in the legend of The Pied Piper of Hamelin – and Possum is similarly rooted in horror lore.
That show featured the stories of two children from the Evelina ward – one in the form of a fairytale princess in the Land of the Sick who vomited Scrabble tiles, and another in a sequence involving a small boy in a metaphorical struggle between life and death set to Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody.
Still the last word in American gothic-meets-film noir-meets-surreal fairytale, with Mitchum on magnificent form as the big bad wolf in preacher's clothing, who infiltrates Winters' credulous family to steal her loot, but meets his match in her two plucky kids.
And atop the fungal forms, in a touch of fairytale sorcery, sprouts a forest.
Blonde pin-up Neuner was the darling of German sport in 2008 and although injuries have blighted her fairytale rise, she is coming back into form for Vancouver.
