{Fantastic Fest 2025} Tales from the Woods Horror Anthology Roots Dig Deep.

There’s no better place than Fantastic Fest for a horror anthology to plant its first seeds. Tales from the Woods, the new series from Wayward Entertainment, premiered two of its opening installments at the festival, and it’s clear this isn’t going to be your grandmother’s fairy tale collection—unless your grandmother was Guillermo del Toro in which case, lucky you! Produced by John Hegeman (Holidays, Into the Dark), Tales from the Woods promises to unearth the shadowy origins of fairy tales we think we know. Judging by Mattie Do’s The Sleeping Beauty and Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead’s Jacques the Giant Slayer, the series is set to deliver exactly that: bold, unflinching horror married to myth and morality.

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Jacques the Giant Slayer

Benson and Moorhead are no strangers to Fantastic Fest. Their film Spring premiered here in 2014, and their work on projects like The Endless, Loki, and the OG Resolution has cemented them as voices who thrive in weird, unsettling spaces. Jacques the Giant Slayer feels like a return to that DIY chaos they built their reputations on. It’s messy in the best possible way, textured with grime, shadows, and practical weirdness.

Shot in an expressionistic sepia aesthetic with what looks like the same dessert we say earlier in Sirat, the episode instantly separates itself from the sanitized polish of most streaming anthologies. We open on an early 20th-century archaeological dig, where an alpha-male explorer is more concerned with capturing “the one perfect photo” than engaging with the world around him. In a slyly modern gag, he snaps a proto-selfie as his crew digs—a tongue-in-cheek jab at influencer culture hiding inside the bones of a period piece.

And speaking of bones: the remains of a giant unearthed here are stunning, evoking the biomechanical eeriness of Giger’s Space Jockey from Alien. The slow-burn storytelling lets us sit with this discovery. Nearly ten minutes pass before any dialogue intrudes, a gutsy move that makes the eventual horror hit harder.

The eugenics and phrenology undercurrents feel deliberate, a reminder that scientific exploration often masked grotesque power plays and hubris. This Jacques doesn’t climb a magical green stalk; instead, the “beanstalk” is a gnarly rupture tearing through the landscape—a wound in the earth itself. It’s as if nature refuses to cooperate with man’s need to conquer.

And then there is the creatures Imagine Pan’s Labyrinth‘ creatures’s Faun dragged through a mud bath and you’re close. Disturbing, uncanny, and shot through with del Toro’s influence, the monster design elevates what could have been a simple fairy tale riff into something both terrifying and poignant. The golden gooses fate in particular is one of the most unsettling things I’ve ever seen: a lonely, miserable bird kept captive in a sky cage, radiating despair. It’s grotesque and beautiful, and I couldn’t look away.

What sticks, though, isn’t just the monsters—it’s the quiet horror of a man too obsessed with documenting his conquest to actually live it. By filtering everything through the camera lens, Jacques becomes both explorer and voyeur, unable to connect with the reality unraveling around him. In that sense, the beanstalk isn’t just a ladder to power; it’s a rift between reality and obsession. Their episode brings new meaning to “pics or it didn’t happen.”

The Sleeping Beauty

If Jacques is all grit, Do’s The Sleeping Beauty is sumptuous nightmare. Laos-born Mattie Do, the first female filmmaker in her country’s history, delivers a story soaked in atmosphere and colonial unease. A colonial governor’s son brings home a woman taken from an ancient temple, awakening a curse that seeps into the family’s life like smoke.

Do has said that sharing this film feels like coming home to Fantastic Fest—the festival that first inspired her as a storyteller. That affection shows. This isn’t just a retelling of Sleeping Beauty; it’s a re-centering of power, reframing who has agency and who bears the brunt of greed. Colonization isn’t subtext here; it’s the text. The horror isn’t only in the curse but in the arrogant removal of something sacred, the violation of place and culture. Eventually, even the colonizers can’t escape the fallout.

Visually, the episode is drenched in rich detail. Every set feels like a lived-in labyrinth, the kind of mise en scène you could explore for hours. Like Benson and Moorhead’s piece, Do also uses subtitles to emphasize the authenticity of place and language, grounding the supernatural in specific cultural context.

The gore? Utterly unflinching. At times, it reaches delirious levels of brutality, matching the psychological weight of the story. It’s shocking but never gratuitous, always in service of the fairy tale’s dark moral center.

What makes The Sleeping Beauty fascinating is its inversion of roles. This isn’t the familiar tale of a damsel in distress, but rather a nightmare in which “the villain” holds narrative weight. It reminded me of those retellings like The True Story of the Three Little Pigs, where the so-called monster gets to speak. Do uses that inversion to craft a moral fable closer to The Twilight Zone than other less interesting anthologies. There’s paranoia, creeping dread, and ultimately a moral reckoning waiting for the characters.

Fairy Tales, Fantastic Fest, and What’s Next

Taken together, these two episodes set a thrilling tone for Tales from the Woods. Jacques the Giant Slayer operates like a particularly nasty Tales from the Darkside entry, brimming with surreal imagery and grotesque invention. The Sleeping Beauty, by contrast, feels like a high-minded morality play, closer to a Twilight Zone parable. Both share a refusal to sanitize fairy tales. These aren’t bedtime stories—they’re cautionary tales dragged back out of the shadows from the woods of which they came.

Producer John Hegeman is right: the fairy tales we know were never meant to comfort. They were designed to warn, to terrify, to keep people in line. What makes Tales from the Woods exciting is that it isn’t simply repeating those stories. It’s reimagining them through modern anxieties: colonialism, exploitation, the hunger to consume and conquer.

Fantastic Fest has always been a space for filmmakers to run wild with their weirdest impulses. Seeing Benson, Moorhead, and Do return here felt like watching artists perform in their natural habitat. Each episode is bold, messy, terrifying, and deeply personal—exactly what a fest like this exists to champion.

With Tales from the Woods targeting an early 2026 streaming launch, horror fans have plenty of time to let anticipation fester. If these two episodes are any indication, the series will be essential viewing: an unholy marriage of folklore and fright, pulling fairy tales back into the dark woods where they belong.