“Little Red Riding Hood” is one of the oldest of the popular folk tales and has been retold, interpreted, used and adapted countless times. I think I was four or five when my grandmother read the Grimm version to me. I was absolutely terrified, although the Brothers Grimm had pretty much tamed the original from the 14th century.

It doesn’t look like writer David Johnson (Orphan, 2009) and director Catherine Hardwicke (Twilight, 2008) have come up with a mere re-telling or interpretation of the original tale, even if most ingredients are correct. According to Warner Bros., the movie is a romantic fantasy thriller, has a big bad wolf out for a lot of blood, a grandmother, a hunter, and a girl who wants to follow her heart but ends up being both suspect and bait in a werewolf hunt.

I liked Hardwicke’s Twilight very much for the rare feminine touch in the way the literary original was translated into its screen version – a quality the later parts of the franchise didn’t quite reach. And the trailer for Red Riding Hood (⇓) looks like the unmistakable Hardwicke style, the more so as she is also executive producer.

Again, her landscapes seem to mirror the vastness and beauty of the story characters but also their eeriness and deep emotional dilemmas, a daunting set for a love story that can touch even the tough anti-rom-com’s and people that are a little beyond their adolescence. A subliminal eroticism and heart-ache, of course, would fire up the imagination of the young and not-so-young-anymore audiences alike.

Amanda Seyfried as Valerie (Red Riding Hood) doesn’t quite look like the naïve girl from the old narratives though, more like the awaking Rosaleen in Neil Jordan’s The Company Of Wolves (1984, based on a short story by Angela Carter). This promises epic suspense, and alongside Gary Oldman as an apparently diabolical hunter, I think we can expect a movie off the folk tale track – even if Valerie makes the rather traditional statement “What big eyes you have”.